Officials with the Portsmouth Housing Authority in New Hampshire are now planning to redevelop the city-owned former Sherburne School into a major workforce housing project in two phases, sources confirmed to the Portsmouth Herald.
Corey Colwell, a principal of TFMoran Inc., an engineering firm located in Bedford and Portsmouth, recently told members of the city's Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) that the first phase of the project to develop workforce housing on the site is to build a new four-story 90-unit building toward the rear of the property.
The project is being developed as part of a partnership with the City of Portsmouth, which owns the roughly 5.3-acre parcel at 35 Sherburne Rd.
Colwell said that "since this portion of the property is about 10 feet lower than the front" and is behind the old school, the proposed building is largely hidden from view to drivers traveling along Sherburne Road
"About 70 percent of this back building would be masked by the school," he said.
The project's second phase involves demolishing the back of the existing Sherburne School and redeveloping the front two-thirds of the building into eight apartments.
In addition, Phase 2 will include the construction of "a middle building," Colwell said, which would bring the total number of workforce housing units on site to 127.
Finance Behind Plan to Develop in Phases
The Portsmouth Housing Authority (PHA) plans to keep the old Sherburne School building in place when it develops below-market-rate housing on the site.
Creating desperately needed below-market-rate housing in Portsmouth has been the city council's top goal during the current term.
PHA Executive Director Craig Welch told Portsmouth TAC members during the first week of July 2025, that his agency decided to split the project into two phases for financing purposes.
"The reason for the phasing is not necessarily the site itself, but it's just the availability of funding sources and the sequence of how those particular things work," he said during the City Hall meeting.
When asked by TAC members if construction would start on phase two with people living in the phase one building, Welch said, "That would be the goal, but it's still kind of hard to say."
"The funding sources for this kind of thing are very, very scarce and growing more scarce," he admitted. "And so, it just depends on the bottleneck of these federal tax credits and the associated capital subsidy that has since disappeared [from] when we started this project.
"Ideally, we're moving it along, one right after the other," Welch said.
After Welch's presentation, TAC voted unanimously to recommend the major redevelopment project be approved by the city's planning board.
Portsmouth's Deputy City Attorney Trevor McCourt emphasized that the redevelopment will now be split into a pair of consecutive two-year phases.
And, in an unusual move, McCourt advised TAC members on how they could approach the phasing of the project before the vote, according to the Portsmouth Herald.
"The way that I would recommend pursuing this project would really be to divide; to treat this like two projects," he said, adding that "the phasing that you're looking at here for purposes of financing … is on municipal property."
Breaking a project on one site into two separate efforts would not typically be allowed, according to McCourt, but the Sherburne School redevelopment is taking place on a city-owned lot.
He warned that if the PHA tried to "treat it all as one project, you're going to have to bond and secure a site plan review agreement," which he said would have to include "all the site improvements for both phases." If that were done, McCourt predicted it would "present problems."
The recommended approval given by TAC included a condition that the site improvements be clearly listed for each phase of the project.
Splitting the redevelopment into two projects will need to be approved by both the Portsmouth planning board and City Manager Karen Conard, due to the existing development agreement between the city officials and PHA, McCourt said.
Balancing Act Between Housing, Green Space
Colwell told the Portsmouth newspaper that the redevelopment of the property into workforce housing is proposed to include:
• converting existing classroom space in the former Sherburne School into eight one-bedroom apartments;
• building the new four-story structure to accommodate 54 one-bedroom units, as well as 24 with two bedrooms and another 12 with three bedrooms, bringing the total to 90;
• a three-story middle building that will feature six one-bedroom units, 11 two-bedroom units and a dozen apartments with three bedrooms for a total of 29 living spaces;
• an outdoor courtyard and community garden in what had been the school's former gymnasium;
• a large parking lot with 166 spaces; and
• three fire hydrants strategically placed across the site.
The Portsmouth Housing Authority's Welch also told TAC that "we're the sponsors of this really exciting project that we've been working on with the city for a few years now."
"We'd like to get going on [actually] getting shovels in the ground here and getting the financing set up after we're through this planning board process," he said. "We've been very intentional about the decisions we've made in trying to accomplish some competing public policy goals that the city has laid out, including having a lot of green space, but maximizing the number of units that we've put on the site and also [preserving] the 1940s-era school."
