With a dozen houses nearly completed in St. Paul’s biggest single-family housing project in decades, developers are gearing up to build one of its main attractions — the city’s first major community solar farm — come fall.

The Rivoli Bluff housing project, on an East Side bluff overlooking downtown, always included plans for the 2-acre, half a megawatt solar farm. The plan is to power 120 homes, primarily those that qualify for energy assistance, in the surrounding Railroad Island neighborhood.

On Tuesday, the Ramsey County Board voted to sell those two acres to St. Paul’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority for roughly $50,000.

The plan is to then resell it to the non-profit developer in charge of the project, Dayton’s Bluff Neighborhood Housing Services, for the same amount.

What remains unclear is whether Xcel Energy — which will own and run the solar farm — will then own the land, or whether the developer will retain it.

“Whether they lease or purchase it, in terms of the land, we’ll work that out with them,” said Jim Erchul, the Dayton’s Bluff developer’s executive director.

The land has a catch: It used to be a dump, literally. The city’s street cleaners used to deposit all their debris there; it was cleaned up years ago with the help of $2 million in federal grants.

“You can’t build anything else on it anyway. What else you gonna do with it?” Erchul said.

The solar farm proposal already has been approved by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.

As for the city of St. Paul, they’re now working on an ordinance that would regulate community solar and wind farms. A draft ordinance already passed through the city planning commission in December, though there is currently no council meeting slated to address it.

The draft ordinance would allow such gardens only with a conditional use permit granted by the planning commission. They also must be hooked up to the grid of the local public utility.

Xcel officials believe homes in the Railroad Island neighborhood are littered with expensive, low-efficiency baseboard or electric heating.

So they — along with Erchul and a third group, the Energy CENTS Coalition — hope to pair the solar farm with a massive outreach program to the neighborhood, trying to convince people to sign up for programs that offer funds to low-income residents wanting to make efficiency upgrades.

In the midst of those conversations, they’ll make another offer: signing up for the solar farm on the hill.

The savings from the Rivoli farm wouldn’t be huge, Erchul and Xcel admit: $3 to $6 a month. But it would be clean energy, and there would be no credit check, no upfront fees and no long-term commitment — typically the big barriers for low-income residents who want to get involved with solar.

The adjacent Rivoli Bluff housing project — which Railroad Island residents have been pushing for nearly four decades — is now in full swing, with sewers constructed, seven single-family houses built and another five to be finished in April.

The homes are geared toward low-income buyers — and thus come with heavy subsidies from local government sources. The seven homes that are already built, each 1,500 square feet with an additional 1,300 square feet of unfinished basement and upper garage space, sold for between $211,000 and $240,000 each.

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Frogtown Community Center unveils new artificial turf field, playground and outdoor fun They cost about $290,000 to build, not including the price of the standard city lot of land, Erchul said. The difference is made up with funding from the city of St. Paul, and the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency.

Plans are — assuming no big interest rate hikes or recessions — to put an additional 26 single-family homes on the street below the 12 homes that have been built, and in a later phase, another two-dozen homes on the bluff to the north of them.

Government subsidies have already been secured for four of the homes on the lower end of the bluff.