If you have driven through downtown Hudsonville in the last year, you have probably noticed the cranes, the fresh sidewalks, and the road that keeps getting torn up on Balsam Drive. What you may not have noticed is what is actually going up behind all that construction fencing. Nearly every unit under construction right now in Hudsonville's core is a rental, not a house you can put an offer on.
That matters if you are comparing Hudsonville to Grandville, Jenison, or Byron Center and trying to figure out where your money goes furthest. The city is spending real dollars, bonding money, and staff time to build a downtown before the private market fully commits to it. That investment is landing as apartments and townhomes near Harvey Street. Meanwhile the actual single-family homes for sale keep marching outward onto what used to be farmland. The gap between those two products, old grid-street homes near a downtown the city is actively building and new construction at the edge of town, is a bigger factor in what you pay than most buyers realize.
The units breaking ground right now aren't for sale
Start with Terra Station, the $32 million mixed-use project a few blocks from Terra Square. Veneklasen Development is building six apartment buildings ranging from 400 to 882 square feet, with 35 units reserved for households earning 80 to 95 percent of the area median income. The project traces back to 2021, when the city bought a four-acre downtown site and put out a call for developers guided by its master plan. Ground-floor retail on School Avenue is being built to hold up to four small businesses.
A few blocks north, LaCati Group is finishing Landings at Rush Creek, an $12.7 million, 84-unit townhome community on Balsam Drive, on land that sat vacant as a former commercial greenhouse for roughly 25 years. Twelve of those units are income-qualified. Ottawa County approved a brownfield tax increment financing plan to help make the project pencil out, and as of last fall the city was still finishing sewer and stormwater work under Balsam Drive, with completion originally targeted for spring or summer of this year. A third project, the 41-unit Prospect Flats, adds to the same pipeline.
Add it up and Hudsonville's downtown is absorbing well over 150 new rental units inside a two-year window, almost entirely apartments and townhomes. Jakob Bigard, the city's Economic and Downtown Development Director, described the pace this way to a local TV crew covering the road work:
"Even in the year that I've been here, we've got a new Mexican restaurant, a Thai restaurant opening soon, and a primary care office downtown. Hudsonville is right between Grand Rapids and Holland, we're ripe for growth, and we want to be proactive in how we build out the city."
The city's next move is the Village Green, a planned central gathering space that has been part of the Imagine Hudsonville 2030 master plan for years. As of spring 2026, city commission records showed Hudsonville still in the process of hiring a consultant to update the Village Green action plan, with a services agreement capped at $105,725 and firms like Veridus Group submitting phased planning and construction proposals. None of that is speculation about the future. It is the city spending real budget on a project that has not broken ground yet, which tells you the downtown investment cycle is still early, not finished.
The actual houses are moving to the edge of town
While that density fills in near downtown, the single-family construction pipeline is doing something different. New-construction listings from builders active in Hudsonville, including Eastbrook, Allen Edwin, and Baumann Building, mostly run from the low $300,000s into the $600,000s, and nearly all of it sits on land that was farmland within recent memory. Hudsonville's nickname, Salad Bowl City, exists for a reason: the surrounding townships still grow celery, onions, and carrots on the acreage that keeps getting rezoned for subdivisions.
The general pattern holds across the city. Homes get newer the farther you travel from the city center. Close to downtown you find early-1900s bungalows and mid-century ranch homes on a traditional street grid, priced closer to what you would find in Cutlerville or Grandville. Head toward the edges and you find higher-end new construction, with price points climbing toward what buyers see in Byron Center or Forest Hills.
That split means two buyers with the same budget in Hudsonville can end up in very different situations depending on which product they choose, and that difference has almost nothing to do with school assignment or subdivision amenities. It has to do with which side of the investment map they land on.
Old grid versus new edge, side by side
| Older home near downtown | New construction at the edge | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical build era | Early 1900s bungalow to mid-century ranch | 1990s to present |
| Entry price point | Generally lower, comparable to Cutlerville or Grandville | Low $300,000s to $600,000s+ |
| Distance to Terra Station, the Village Green site, and Harvey Street | Often walkable | Typically a drive |
| Lot pattern | Traditional grid, smaller lots | Subdivision lots carved from former farm parcels |
| What's actively being invested nearby | Public dollars in progress right now (TIF, brownfield, city-owned land) | Private builder investment, no downtown infrastructure spend |
The point of that table is not that one column is better. It is that the two products are currently priced without much regard for the fact that one of them sits inside an area the city is actively subsidizing and the other does not.
Why the numbers you see online don't agree
If you have searched around for Hudsonville's median home price, you have probably run into wildly different figures. Redfin's own tracked data, covering the three months ending in May 2026, puts the median sale price at $344,000, up 7.2 percent year over year, with homes selling in about 10 days on average and sales volume actually down slightly from the year before. Zillow's July 2026 read shows an average home value of $406,763, up 4.8 percent. At the same time, marketing from at least one other regional team has circulated a citywide median north of $530,000.
None of those numbers is necessarily wrong. They are measuring different things. A median built mostly from new-construction closings on the farmland edge will run much higher than a median that includes the bungalows and ranches near downtown. Redfin also flagged that its own average price jumped over 22 percent year over year in the same window where the median only moved 7.2 percent, which is exactly the kind of gap you would expect if a larger share of expensive new builds closed that month while the middle of the market stayed flatter. The lesson is not to distrust any single source. It is to stop treating a citywide median as a stand-in for what your specific product, an older home near downtown or a new build at the edge, will actually cost.
What this means if you're deciding between the two
If walkability to what Hudsonville is becoming matters to you, the older grid-street homes near downtown are currently being priced against their age and square footage, not against their proximity to a downtown the city is actively building out with public money. That gap has room to close as Terra Station's final units open this fall and the Village Green moves from consultant selection into an actual plan.
If what you want is more house and a newer system for the money, the edge of town is still where that trade happens, and it will keep happening as long as farmland keeps getting rezoned. Just know that the city's own investment dollars right now are not chasing you out there. They are concentrated downtown.
Either choice is reasonable. The mistake is comparing the two using a single median price pulled from a headline, when the two products are being built, financed, and priced by entirely different logic.
Is the Village Green actually funded, or is it still just a plan? As of spring 2026, the city has approved consultant spending, capped at just over $105,000, to update the Village Green action plan and has been reviewing proposals from firms including Veridus Group. Land acquisition and construction have not yet been finalized in public records.
Will the new downtown apartments affect single-family home values nearby? There is no citywide data yet that isolates that effect. What is documented is that the city is treating the downtown apartment and mixed-use buildout, including Terra Station and Landings at Rush Creek, as a deliberate step ahead of the Village Green, which is exactly the kind of public investment that tends to raise demand for nearby existing homes over time.
Why do online median price estimates for Hudsonville vary so much? Different platforms pull from different slices of the market. A median weighted toward new-construction closings on former farmland will read much higher than one that includes the older homes near the city center. Ask for a comparison built from your specific product type rather than relying on a single citywide number.
If you are trying to figure out which side of Hudsonville actually fits your budget and your timeline, that is exactly the kind of comparison Jake Peterson Homes can walk through with you, street by street, before you make an offer.
