âThey re like, âOh, thereâs a farm in there?ââ Kreider said.
A proposal to build a new 1,200-bed county prison on the sprawling property, next to Greenwood Cemetery and just south of the city, is the latest attempt to develop this well-situated land where others, at least over the past 50 years, failed.
It remains an open question why builders never got to this land just a seven-minute drive from Penn Square and zoned for residential use. That the land is tucked away behind a cemetery, out of sight and out of mind, may have played a role. But interviews with Kreider, local officials and real estate professionals suggest a number of factors, including limited road access, the prohibitive cost of building infrastructure like sewers, the quality of the soil for large-scale construction and, at least for the past 15 years, a family reluctant to sell.