On Thursday Towne Properties partner Arn Bortz led the media on a tour of U Square @ The Loop, the $80 million mixed-use project stretching several blocks adjacent to the University of Cincinnati campus.
The project broke ground in January 2012 and a move-in date of August 1 is scheduled for apartments.
According to Bortz, the project’s street-level retail and upper floor apartments are each 85% leased. The project’s office space has been leased to the University of Cincinnati and talks are ongoing to attract a hotel to remaining space along McMillan Street.
The planned hotel for the site will be competing against a flurry of new hotel developments throughout Cincinnati’s urban core that are adding hundreds of new rooms to the market, including a proposed rehabilitation of Old St. George into a 60-70 bed hotel just blocks away.
Once completed, Bortz anticipates that the hotel at U Square @ The Loop to be approximately as tall as the apartment building on the project’s western block.
The developers also announced that the project achieved Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, which qualifies the project for a 15-year city tax abatement, due to its proximity to public transportation and a variety of design decisions including choice of windows and use of Energy Star appliances in apartment units.
Bortz also explained that the project’s two city-built parking garages will not be subject to any lease of the city’s parking facilities.
More than 20 retailers have been named as tenants of the 80,000 square feet of retail, including: Altar’d States, bd’s Mongolian Grill, Body Central, Chase Bank, Elephant Walk, Euro Wax, Firehouse Subs, Great Clips, Highway 55, Keystone Bar & Grill, Lime Fresh, Moksha Yoga, Mr. Sushi, Orange Leaf, Rally House, Rue 21, Starbucks, The Brass Tap and Waffle House.
The money will not only fully fund the project, but it will allow it to be operational in time for the 2015 All-Star Game to be hosted at the nearby Great American Ball Park.
According to park officials, the new carousel will be built at the foot of Vine Street on a tree-lined plaza filled with water features similar to those found near Walnut Street in phase one of Smale Riverfront Park.
The plaza will include a lower-level with a banquet center and park offices, and the upper-level will become the home of the glass-enclosed carousel.
“This carousel is a gift to the Cincinnati Parks Foundation honoring the life and philanthropy of Carol Ann Haile,” Tim Maloney, President/CEO of the Haile Foundation, stated in a prepared release. “The sparkle, whimsy and pure fun this carousel will provide is a direct reflection of Carol’s sparkling personality.”
In honor of Carol Ann Haile, the facility will be named the Carol Ann Carousel, and become an iconic feature of what will eventually be a 45-acre riverfront park.
Cincinnati’s 44-seat carousel, with folding glass door walls, will be open year-round starting in May 2015. Riders will be required to pay a small cost to ride, but the cost has not yet been determined.
So far park officials have completed a significant amount of work on the first two phases of Smale Riverfront Park, and will begin future phases as funding is made available.
Over the past decade Cincinnati has actively been working to dismantle the once extensive elevated skywalk system in its downtown. Other cities throughout the country such as Baltimore have followed Cincinnati’s lead however a recent report coming out of Cleveland spotlights the recent debate over two projects that would add more skywalks in their downtown. Read more at the Atlantic Cities:
For the most part, it didn’t work, and now cities such as Baltimore and Cincinnati are tearing down the skywalks they once built with such fanfare, in an effort to return pedestrian life and vitality to the street. Meanwhile, in Cleveland, the owners of the year-old Horseshoe Casino downtown are planning to build a brand-new skywalk, and the county government is looking to refurbish another one just a few blocks away. For many of the young people moving to Cleveland in search of a 21st-century urban experience – pedestrian-friendly, with lots of people out and about – it seems like a step backward in time.
It’s hard to ignore the ongoing transformation of Over-the-Rhine these days. It seems almost every day a new restaurant, business or development project is announced to open in the once struggling neighborhood. Of course, the key player leading the neighborhoods redevelopment efforts is the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation, better known as 3CDC.
3cDC’s latest phase includes tackling one of its largest redevelopment projects in the neighborhood, Mercer Commons, which includes almost two blocks worth of buildings between Vine Street and Walnut Street.
The $60 million project is divided into three phases. Phase one, which is currently underway, includes the construction of a new four-story condo building along Vine Street, five town houses, the redevelopment of a couple historic buildings and a 340-space parking garage that opened to the public last week.
According to 3CDC spokesperson Anastasia Mileham, preparations for phase two are already underway and construction is officially slated to kick off at the end of the month.
“The groundbreaking event for Mercer Phase 2 is scheduled for 1pm on May 31, but we haven’t closed on Phase 2 yet ,” Mileham explained, “We are starting construction already to try to keep up with demand and stay on schedule.”
The second phase of the project will include rehabilitation of 15 historic buildings into mixed income apartments. The development team says that 30 out of the 67 apartments will for people who make 50-60% of the average median income.
To help provide the affordable housing units, 3CDC relied on a $4.6 million Low Income Housing Tax Credit from the federal government, and marks the non-profits first foray into mixed income housing.
Mileham told UrbanCincy that receiving the tax credit was the most rewarding aspect of the project to date, ” There is a need for this type of mixed income development.”
Since the newly opened Mercer Commons Garage is large enough to serve the entire development, and then some, the developers were able to preserve space in the development plan behind newly built structures in phases two and three. This space, 3CDC says, will be preserved for interior courtyards similar to the one found at Parvis Lofts across the street.
Once fully built out, Mercer Commons will add 156 residential units, in both apartments and condos, and 17,600 square feet of street-level commercial space.
While no tenants have been signed, Mileham says that there has been “substantial” interest in the 3,900 square feet of retail space in phase one.
Last month the American Planning Association (APA) held its annual conference for planning professionals. The 2013 conference was held in Chicago and organizers made efforts to showcase planning efforts of The Second City.
The educational sessions at the conference are made up of presentations by planning officials across the country. A few of the sessions were hosted by Cincinnati Planning officials who highlighted some of Cincinnati’s recent planning successes.
Of the three sessions that featured Cincinnati city planners, one actually focused on the recently adopted PLAN Cincinnati comprehensive plan.
Cincinnati and Hamilton County received a national award from the APA for the implementation of the Central Riverfront Master Plan and The Banks. Photograph by Randy Simes for UrbanCincy.
The plan was approved by the city in October 2012 and is the first long-term comprehensive planning vision of the city since 1980. The seminar also highlighted Cincinnati’s rich planning heritage as the city carries the noteworthy distinction of drafting the first ever city-wide comprehensive plan in the 1925 Master Plan. That plan, along with the 1907 Kessler Parks Plan, envisioned a walkable cityscape with an extensive parks system.
However, after World War II, the city drafted the 1948 Comprehensive Plan which proposed several highways and urban renewal projects. The 1948 plan was successfully implemented but instead of the promised revitalization of the city, the highway system and slum clearance policies supported by the plan drove the city’s population to the suburbs.
“The highway was unfortunately a successful implementation,” explained Gregory Dale from McBride Dale Clarion Associates, “Sixty years later we’re still trying to repair the damage.”
Presenters also highlighted how the Cincinnati’s Planning Department overcame the problems of being dissolved in 2002 and reconstituted in 2007.
“In some ways I think maybe if we had not been eliminated as a departments, maybe there would not be that strength today, maybe it wouldn’t have woken people up to see the importance of planning,” recalled Cincinnati Senior Planner Katherine Keough-Jurs.
She went on to say that she noticed the involvement and passion of participants in the new comprehensive plan was a positive sign that citizens were concerned about the future direction of the city. The citizen participation in the new plan highlighted residents desire for creating and reinvigorating walkable neighborhoods and commercial centers.
“The plan is unapologetically urban,” Keough-Jurs told session attendees,”In many ways our new comprehensive plan returns to the vision of the 1925 plan.”
At the conference the City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County received an Excellence in Planning award from the APA for the implementation of the Central Riverfront Master Plan. That plan, which was first developed in the late 1990’s when the stadiums and Fort Washington Way were proposed for reconstruction envisioned a new mixed-use riverfront neighborhood called The Banks.
In 2011 the first phase of the mixed-use neighborhood opened to the public and the second phase is slated to begin construction this year.
The planning department’s most recent project, the adoption of the final draft of the form-based code is on City Council’s Livable Communities Committee Agenda today for their 1pm meeting.
The code was approved by the city’s Planning Commission on March 7. Once the code wins approval from the committee it will go on to the full council for a vote. The city’s planning department is looking to meet with the four demonstration neighborhoods – Walnut Hills, Westwood, Madisonville, College Hill – in the coming months to move forward with changes in the zoning map to implement the form-based code.
