Norfolk’s City Council approved the sale of a long-empty Greyhound station at the edge of downtown to a developer to build 220 apartments.
The site originally hosted an art deco bus station from the 1940s, which was replaced by the current building in 1961 when Brambleton Avenue was widened.
Greyhound ended operations there in 2019, but the city of Norfolk already owned the property and had been trying to get a development plan lined up before the bus line was through.
Since then, a few uses for the property have come and gone.
In 2018, Tidewater Community College announced it would build a soaring new arts building on the property, but that effort collapsed after the college couldn’t get funding behind the project.
Norfolk then used the building and back lot to house the homeless for several months at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. The city put out a call that year for proposals to transform the former bus station.
Three years later, Norfolk has agreed to sell the Greyhound building and the rest of that city block between Monticello Avenue and Granby Street to Virginia Beach developer Breeden for $750,000.
That’s a steep discount on the assessed value of the property. Norfolk’s property database shows a 2024 assessed value for the land of all eight parcels at more than $3 million, plus about $500,000 worth of improvements on the lots.
Breeden will build a $35 million, 220-unit apartment complex called Houndstooth on the site at the edge of Norfolk’s NEON arts district.
Breeden’s Christine Gustafson said the project still needs to go through the full design, but initial plans include apartments geared toward artists and creatives, with what she called “home-work apartments” with studio space.
The land deal does not include any stipulation to reserve a portion of the complex for affordable housing, a standard Norfolk has previously said it would require from developers as they request approvals for multifamily developments.
Gustafson said the company plans to include affordable units but the details will be worked out as Breeden moves through the design process with the city, which she said will take around two years.
Gustafson said the city requested Breeden retain and incorporate as much of the Greyhound station as possible in the new development, but said not everything there is salvageable.
Renderings of the Houndstooth proposal by Work Program Architects show the current station’s outer walls along Monticello and Brambleton preserved as part of the building’s first floor, with the distinctive curving wall where they meet on the corner still intact.
