jrosen

Mendo, stay tuned and stay hopeful for that corner :)

about 8 weeks into construction on Mueller Lofts -- thought you'd like to see. We are way on track to open June 1.

And thanks for the comments on Wagner. We are thrilled with how it came out. The residential is all full. Next step is to find office tenants for the downstairs

Yes! The game plan is once asiatown is underway(may-ish), to start planning a phase 2 on the lord across the street. It needs a good deal of studying to understand where our rents need to be in order to do new construction rentals without the typical subsidies we usually use (nmtc, htc). We also might explore doing some affordable housing on one of the two lots. We are not sure yet except that we are going to be digging in.

demo

we've looked at 3146 a whole bunch. maybe one of these days. they wanted way too much for a building which seems at best like a labor of love. totally amazing endeavor but much more a public-private partnership then a developer going out on his own with something market rate.

i dont know but can find out. stay tuned

breaking news!: 2 months away from the opening of the Wagner Awning building.follow https://www.facebook.com/wagnerawningbuilding/ for updated pictures

the building on the corner of payne and 31st is going to be office and warehouse space for a non-profit. The Mueller team is collectively planning w/ them. Should be an awesome 1-2 punch of jobs/housing/activity.

Thank you! We are really excited. The OHPTC program is really important and we are excited to deploy these resources on a speedy timetable and get this project going

Thanks! We are super excited about this. This building lays out in really interesting ways. So long as we get the tax credits in June (we tied for them last time and didnt get them because we weren't a previous applicant) we can move forward quickly and close in September/October.

Ok we need to keep Tremont in the news yeah: http://www.freshwatercleveland.com/devnews/Wagner052516.aspx

That's wild news. Too funny/interesting how this little area has taken off. Originally we were thinking town homes for across from Wagner Awning but the site seems large enough to possibly do something more vertically significant and mixed-use.

Lincoln looks awesome. BTW, Ohio Awning starts construction next week. And yeah those two lots across from Awning are on our 2016 plan 2017 build agenda. As time goes on, we are thinking about something denser then town-homes for these lots. We'll see. Not only are all these prospective developments positive steps but we have a great group of existing neighbors all of whom care about the area and want to see planned growth and improvements.

Curious: What do people think of this location?

If folks are interested...Wagner Awning got Landmarks approval for our plans yesterday. You can follow the progress here for now: https://www.facebook.com/wagnerawningbuilding?ref=hl We hope to start construction by late July or August.

the empty lots came with the Awning building. Our goal is to develop a plan which incorporates the lots across the street

The beauty of the HTC program is that it is objective and transparent. It doesn't matter how connected you are, how big a developer you are etc. We have 3 employees and got 2 big awards in 2 years. This Catalytic thing unintentionally violated those principles in many respects. It introduced a subjective analysis into an objective program. This came about because one developer lobbied a state rep to stick it at the end of an unrelated House bill. I wouldn't assume this is how the people at OHPO or ODSA thought extra resources should be distributed. I am fine for giving any of these projects more resources but it seems like the way they enacted this was off-base. The program needs more money to meet big demand for stimulative projects. it is well run and not wasteful and therefore needs more resources. Not a random every other year one time award that is more subjective then objective. This is not a knock on any of the projects. I hope they all happen. But the process for how we got here was driven by the May Company lobbyists and it was not all that great of a process. I get why lobbying for something, getting it stuck in a bill, and then not getting the award is very frustrating. But, if you are going to go that route, you can't be surprised when it doesn't go your way.

In general the whole NMTC system is insane. A CDE wants to be shovel ready so the CDE can deploy the credits ASAP and apply again having used their credits. Of course, if your project is shovel ready, it means it might be able to go without the NMTC (defeating the purpose of this being a "but for" subsidy). Getting credits is really hard, takes a ton of luck and is really tough to make work as a business plan if you're relying on them. of course, for some projects, they have no choice.

No single allocatee usually puts 20 m of credits into one project from one allocated. Typically the larger projects use 2-3 CDE's for their NMTCs. A local paired with a national (typically a commercial bank doing the primarily lending). If say Intesa's main lender was PNC or Chase, they still might be able to do something since they got credits. The other option is to do a lot more residential, bc if you are no longer using NMTC you don't have to have 20% of your income be commercial income. Cleveland has typically done really well as far as local CDE's getting credits. It probably was a case of spreading the wealth.

here's an article about one of our tenants at the Creamery: http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20140511/SUB1/305119994/tremont-gym-an-exercise-in-reinvention?template=printart

i added some new videos of construction progress @ the Creamery in case anyone is interested: https://vimeo.com/89020054,

rocknroller, the article made it sound like they were working and someone went in there with a torch, it caught fire and people ran out. that isn't what happened. the fire started before people began work that day.

the damage was minimal. We are well insured. We'll have some logistical issues but everyone is optimistic we will make it through this ok. It appears to be localized to about a 3,000 square foot area and the ceiling above it.

This is true. They are based out of NYC. this group has made investments in a lot of locations like New Orleans, Detroit etc from right out of offices in NYC. They have no brick and mortar location in Cleveland. But I guess it is also worth noting that we got rejected out of PNC, Key Huntington and others very local offices when we looked for their support. That's their prerogative, of course. Hopefully we can work with them in the future.