Preliminary grading also has been done for a 13-acre park between Acorn Drive and West Avenue. A new road connecting Acorn Drive with Wiles Drive is being built.
The public-private effort will include more than two dozen attached and detached single-family homes.
The housing development will be the first begun in the city since Madison's Grant west of I-675, where the last of more than 100 single homes was completed in late 2012, and Kettering Pointe, on and near the former Van Buren Shopping Center, where some lots are still available.
Acorn Walk is south of the Kettering Business Park and was part of the U.S. Air Force’s 165-acre Defense Electronic Supply Center complex, which closed in 1996.
The Franklin Foundation, which has built three other reasonably priced senior apartment complexes in Kettering, is building the new one with a $2.6 million federal grant.
The Oberer Thompson Co. will develop the single homes, which city officials said would be in the $140,000 range.
"We're happy to see things getting started. We've wanted to do this project for several years," city planning and development director Tom Robillard said.
Mary Beth Thaman, Kettering's parks, recreation and cultural arts director, said interviews with consultants for the park plan will begin in the next few weeks.
“We look at that park as having a role in accentuating the property. It’s going to serve three different neighborhoods and we want it to serve both active and passive recreational uses.”
“A monument to Maj. Gentile will be part of the walk. We want to utilize the existing topography and preserve the history.”
East of Acorn Walk, efforts to encourage revitalization of the Wiles Creek neighborhood continue. The area was dotted with abandoned and deteriorating homes when the city acquired several lots, tore down the structures and began selling the lots for new construction.
New homes are being built on two of those lots on Winton Drive.
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