photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

New home construction is shown in Eudora's Shadow Ridge subdivision in this 2022 file photo.

While Lawrence is struggling to build new homes, a few hundred of them may soon emerge just a few miles east of the city.

On Monday, the 6,500-person community of Eudora — about five miles east of the Lawrence city limits — annexed 134-acres of property along Kansas Highway 10, and expects much of the property will be used for residential development.

The property currently is pasture land on the north side of K-10 and is just west of Winchester Road. For those of you unfamiliar with Eudora geography, that is the first Eudora bridge that you come to when traveling east on K-10. Alternatively, you might also recognize it as the piece of property across the highway from the Methodist church that has the large flame sign along the highway.

photo by: Douglas County GIS/Journal-World

The blue star shows a 134-acre tract of land that recently has been annexed into the Eudora city limits for future home construction. Lawrence’s K-10 interchange is shown to the left.

Development plans haven’t been filed yet for the property, but it has an owner who definitely knows how to develop homes, and lots of them. The land is owned by a limited liability company headed by Clay Blair, who is a longtime Johnson County home developer.

Blair founded Johnson County-based Prime Development in 1966, and has developed thousands of home sites, primarily in Overland Park, Lenexa and Olathe. As we’ve reported, Blair has owned the property since 2020, and what foresight he had with that purchase.

Two years later, Panasonic would announce that it had chosen nearby De Soto — less than a 10-minute drive from Eudora — as the site of a 4,000-job, $4 billion battery plant for electric vehicles.

It is easy to envision that 134-acre property being the site of future homes for some of those employees and employees of other businesses that spin off from the battery plant venture.

But it also is easy enough to see the site providing supply to ordinary residents who want to buy a home in Lawrence but are struggling to find one. As we’ve reported, Lawrence is on pace to set a record-low for single family home construction for the second year in a row. The Eudora site is less than a 15-minute drive from downtown Lawrence, and is less than a 10-minute drive to the shopping and dining areas on the east edge of Lawrence.

Lawrence is working to open up large new areas for residential development, primarily the area west of the South Lawrence Trafficway near the Bob Billings interchange. However, extending infrastructure — water and sewer lines — west of the SLT is expected to take time and a few million dollars in city investments.

It seems possible that this large chunk of land in Eudora will be ready for development before the west Lawrence property becomes available for development. Now, the question seems to be how fast Blair wants to move.

While development plans for the property haven’t been filed, Eudora Mayor Tim Reazin said on Monday that previous discussions have included ideas for a mix of home types on the site. He said those options have included maintenance-free senior living housing, estate-style homes and more traditional single family homes.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Eudora is a town of about 6,500 people in eastern Douglas County, near the former Sunflower Army Ammunition plant where Panasonic plans to build a $4 billion battery plant for electric vehicles.

There are other signs the Eudora housing market is heating up beyond this 134-acre tract, and they were on display at Monday’s Eudora City Commission meeting. The commission gave preliminary approval to a use permit for a new apartment complex near the K-10 and Church Street interchange in Eudora.

We reported in June that Lawrence developer Doug Compton was proposing a 72-unit apartment complex on vacant ground near the community’s Dairy Queen, Family Dollar store, and next to an apartment complex that Compton had developed about 20 years earlier. That project took a little while to get out of the gates, but is now moving through Eudora’s planning process.

A more recent happening is the idea of a mixed-use project that basically would be across the street from that apartment development. The Eudora City Commission on Monday approved a letter of intent to sell property near the Church Street and K-10 interchange to an area development group that plans to build approximately 140 apartment units built above retail and office space. The entire project would be built around a “village green” area that Eudora previously constructed and currently uses for farmers markets, outdoor concerts and other such events.

The development would occur on a portion of the former Nottingham Elementary site that the City of Eudora bought last decade and has been seeking to redevelop ever since. The project already has attracted a mix of fast-food, convenience store and banking uses to the site, but several of the largest lots have remained undeveloped.

Now Borchardt Development is interested in purchasing the remaining lots in the development for its proposed mixed-use project. Borchardt has been in the development business since 1985, and has been doing a significant amount of work in Johnson County for 10-plus years. Today, the company’s principal lives in Eudora, and became interested in building in the community after seeing that demand would increase with the Panasonic plant and other area growth.

In addition to the apartments, the development would include a mix of retail and office uses on the ground floor of the apartment buildings. A development plan hasn’t been filed, so the type of uses that would end up in the project haven’t been finalized. But a concept plan mentions a “corner cafe” and a mercantile building that could house a variety of retail options. Eudora officials also have mentioned the possibility of some medical offices — such as an orthodontist — and other such uses that routinely require Eudora residents to travel to Lawrence to access. The concept plan also shows several other amenities, including a swimming pool for the residents of the apartment complex, pickle ball courts near the village green, and a new snack bar and restroom area to serve the village green area.

The mixed-use development, however, has a long way to go before it would become a reality. The project has to go through the entire planning approval process, and the development group also could still back out of purchasing the property. The letter of intent agreed to by the parties allows the development group several months to conduct further due diligence on the feasibility of the project.

What the development group and the city did agree to on Monday is a purchase price for the vacant lots. The parties agreed to a sale price of about $1.6 million, or approximately $4.80 per square foot for the commercial sites, if the deal is completed.