A house at 215 South Broad Street in Lansdale, just south of Rani’s Indian Deli, could be redeveloped into a complex of five townhouses, as seen on Wednesday night, Dec. 3 2025. Photo by Dan Sokil | The Reporter.
Boarding house near deli could be redeveloped
Plans are advancing for a new complex of five townhouses off of Broad Street in Lansdale.
Council’s code committee saw a preview of a plan for new homes on the 200 block of South Broad Street.
“Essentially, it looks like townhomes, and we have five of them,” said engineer Jason Smeland.
Up for discussion is the parcel at 215 South Broad, which county property records indicate was sold in February; the property is described as “C-rooming house” and is “currently used as a rooming house” with 10 rooms within, according to county property records and an online sale listing.
“It’s in a pretty bad state of disrepair, and we’re looking to clean that whole place up by redeveloping it,” Smeland said.
During the Code committee meeting on Dec. 3, Smeland showed a sketch plan for a new use there, depicting a line of five townhomes, each 36 feet long by 22 feet wide, and oriented parallel to Broad with frontages facing a private driveway at the south side of the site. That driveway was created by the development of the Lansdale Luxor apartment building just east of the site, Smeland told the code committee, and each of the five townhouses would have a two-car driveway fronting off of the private drive, and a one car garage in each unit.
“Since there’s not really much opportunity for on-street parking, we wanted to make sure we that had at least three parking spaces per unit,” Smeland said.
The site is located in the C-commercial district but residential development is allowed in that area, the engineer told the committee. During talks on the project at the town planning commission, that group voiced concerns over what the site would look like from Broad Street.
“Right now, that building that’s there, in its heyday, would have been a really cool building and a nice façade there. How do you preserve that?” Smeland said.
Final plans are still being developed, but the builder has proposed that the westernmost unit closest to Broad Street contain a side porch façade facing Broad that could be considered a decorative front porch under borough codes.
“So the four units will be pretty much the same, standard townhomes, three stories, but unit one’s going to be a little bit different. We’re still working on the architecture, but it’ll have a front porch so if you look at it from the street, it’ll look like the front of a house, that’s the idea,” Smeland said.
Plans also call for a buffering wall, roughly four feet tall and 20 feet long, meant to buffer the parking spaces from view from Broad Street. Three trees currently on the site would be removed, and replaced with smaller vegetation on the north side of the site, between the new units and Rani’s Indian Deli just north, and the new owner is looking into ways to repurpose a “really cool iron fence” along the site as part of the buffer.
What would the sale price of each unit be? “Unfortunately, I couldn’t even guess. There was a time when I might be able to, but it’s crazy these days,” Smeland said.
The code committee then unanimously voted to recommend the plans for preliminary and final land development approval, and full council could consider both later this month.
Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 7 p.m. on Dec. 17 at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine Street. For more information visit www.Lansdale.org.
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