If Bloomington-Normal is ever going to steer itself out of this housing shortage, developers like Rathnakumar Ramachandran and Rajkumar Thirupparkadal are going to be behind the wheel.
Ramachandran and Thirupparkadal, both longtime Bloomington residents originally from India, have been family friends for decades. They’re teaming up professionally for the first time on a 58-unit townhome development in southwest Bloomington that recently won city council approval.
Ramachandran has experience with past housing projects in Bloomington-Normal. Thirupparkadal is the details guy, and also the ideas guy who initially conceived the project along Fox Creek Road.
“We are trying to bring things together on that,” Ramachandran said with a smile.
The stakes are high for their partnership. The Bloomington-Normal area needs more housing – about 4,500 units more, by one estimate. While public discourse is fixated on taxpayer-funded incentives, private-sector developers like Ramachandran and Thirupparkadal are an inescapable piece of the puzzle if we ever want to stabilize home prices and rents.
Their motivations are complex. In an interview with WGLT, Ramachandran said yes, real estate is always a good investment – a way to make money. He’s managing partner at the BNIG Capital investment group.
It’s also more than that. Ramachandran, who has lived in Bloomington-Normal for 18 years, has a full-time day job at a local financial-services company. He spends his free time on projects like the one in southwest Bloomington and the other homes he’s already built here.
“Today, when I go to bed, I feel 100% satisfied because there are about 15 families who have found their best homes in what I developed, in what we created, and I am thankful they found their house in our developments,” Ramachandran said. “It’s a passion.”
It was Thirupparkadal who came up with the idea for the project in southwest Bloomington. He’s the managing partner for it.
“I always dreamed about building various homes. When I see homes in India, back in India, (I thought) maybe at some point of time we may be able to do it, you know? And I think, like, here we got an opportunity,” Thirupparkadal said. “It is also both ways, right? Helping the community, and then at the same time, we are also having some good investments for our kids and future generations.”
The townhome project in southwest Bloomington doesn’t have a name yet. And there’s no guarantee it will make it to the start of construction. Surely, Bloomington-Normal has seen plenty of housing developments get announced and then evaporate, victims to high interest rates and high construction costs that keep projects from “penciling out.”
WGLT asked Ramachandran and Thirupparkadal what they’re doing to avoid a similar outcome.
“We’re taking it step by step. We are not in a hurry in this project,” Ramachandran said. “Normally at this stage, even in previous projects, we used to go early to the bankers to secure our banking funds. But in this case, till now, we have not gone. We wanted to first complete the land purchase. We wanted to then take it to the city. We wanted to complete the city process.”
That’s happened. After the favorable city council vote on Jan. 13, they’re now doing engineering infrastructure work, and then will work on securing a lender. Given the modest number of units and a “very high” equity component, Ramachandran said they’re confident they’ll secure the money they’ll need.
A few other developers tried unsuccessfully to build on the same property along Fox Creek Road across from St. Ivans Circle before Ramachandran and Thirupparkadal got to it. They said the economies of scale on the smaller site (about 6.5 acres) were a challenge – one they tried to solve by doing higher-density townhomes instead of detached single-family homes.
“We are kind of fingers crossed,” said Ramachandran.
They hope to break ground on the infrastructure work this summer, followed by groundbreaking on the first townhomes in summer 2026. Those would likely be priced between $300,000 and $350,000 – a price point and style of home that they think the market will respond to.
