Fort Washington homebuilder Toll Brothers is building 280 luxury townhomes in Malvern after acquiring 159 acres of undeveloped land.
The three parcels, at 272 Lapp Road, 278 Lapp Road and 367 Old Morehall Road, are just north of Route 202. Vanguard’s Quarry Ridge office building and Knickerbocker Driving Range are east of the property. Toll Brothers bought the Chester County land from Knickerbocker Lands LLC for $33 million.
The sale did not include the driving range.
Toll Brothers (NYSE: TOL) is naming the master-planned development Anfield at Malvern and plans to open it for sale in spring 2024. Site improvements on the property are underway. The townhomes will range from 1,825 square feet to 2,995 square feet and include basements. Prices have not been disclosed….The development is expected to include a clubhouse, fitness center, gathering room, outdoor pool, pickleball courts, walking trails and a dog park. The site is located within the Great Valley School District….In the second quarter of this year, Toll Brothers built 2,492 homes at an average price of $1 million. The company’s townhome developments in the region include West Chester Crossing, Doylestown Walk and Overlook at Town Center in King of Prussia.
OK they’re always Trendy Wendy so they are enticing people to live on top of an old landfill with pickleball. That makes me laugh because in Tredyffrin Township they were Pickleball courts that had open on Valley Forge Military Academy, and College land that I’ve just been shut down for noise and other zoning things according to Savvy Main Line:
So pickleball is not a slam dunk. I also think that I remember the plans done by Jason Dempsey/DP Partners, the last developer on that site, that the plans they had approved were slab on grade no basements? Or am I incorrect?
Just so we are clear information wise, this is the former Knickerbocker landfill owned for quite a long time by the Rubino family.
Next a reader of mine chimed in when I initially posted online and shared the article:
I’ve assisted in the redevelopment of many former hazardous waste sites of different kinds, but never for building homes on a full-blown landfill that received hazardous wastes — and this one also has an 8-inch oil pipeline through the middle of it. It’s common to install a cap (permeable geotextile topped with 2 ft of clean soil) over historical fill and then build on it, I’ve helped with that all over Philly, Camden, and Wilmington — but that fill was emplaced when the cities were built, not in our lifetimes. And it wasn’t hazardous waste, either.
This screenshot is from the 2021 plan, and at that time they still needed an environmental investigation via soil borings throughout the area to be developed. I’m curious whether that was done and what they found.
I also wonder what the geophysics are like on an old landfill like that and how thick the trash is where they’re going to build. There’s a clay cap over the entire surface, so they’re going to have to bring in soil to put over top of that (probably over geotexile), but I wouldn’t feel good about pouring concrete slabs for houses on top of a landfill and hoping they don’t eventually sink and/or crack. Ugh.
Some Knickerbocker history Re: East Whiteland meeting.
Well…sigh…
Apparently this new Toll Brothers project represents the entire project that Jason Dempsey/ DP Partners was developing .. .The early plans did include an additional 102 building units on the driving range but the entire supervisors board voted that plan down, didn’t they?
So we shall see.
I found stuff on East Whiteland’s website about Knickerbocker:
