It takes passion to breathe new life into a shopping center that has seen nothing but an exodus of both customers and merchants over the past decade, and that’s precisely what a new developer has in store for the Chesterbrook Village Shopping Center in Wayne.

“I’m really passionate about this project,” said Robert F. Whalen Jr. of RW Capital Partners Inc. about his firm’s plan to invest $85 million into a transformation of the 122,216-square-foot property by adding 124 townhouses and an additional 13,000 square feet of business space for a Rite Aid and Citizens Bank, according to a Philadelphia Business Journal article.

Before settling on that particular vision, other proposals had been brainstormed and subsequently scratched because they weren’t the right fit for the neighborhood, he said.

If the township signs off on this latest version, the project is hoped to be finalized this fall; the townhouses would eventually be sold to Media-based Cornell Homes.

Read more about the decline of Chesterbrook Village and the plans for its revival in the Philadelphia Business Journal here.