Downtown Digs
When planning the renovation of the historic Central Dairy building on Broadway, the owners of Downtown Appliance had to decide what to do with the space above their store.
The second floor contained dilapidated offices with 1960s interior design, smoke-stained ceilings and minimal storage space. Replacing them with apartments was a no-brainer, co-owner Don Helmreich said.
“There’s office space downtown going un-rented right now, and I don’t think there’s any apartment going un-rented,” he said.
Helmreich is at the forefront of a surge in downtown apartment construction directed by building owners and developers happing into the pent-up demand.
Mary Russell, a retiree who moved into one of the apartments above Downtown Appliance with her husband in February, pointed out that nearly all of their shopping, dining and recreation needs can be met within a few blocks. They walk to the Root Cellar for groceries and to Jesse Hall, Stephens College and Ragtag Cinemacafé for entertainment. When Russell saw some pillows she liked at Kent’s Floral Gallery & Gifts, the shopkeeper let her take them home to see how they looked in her apartment.
“Why would you want to be anywhere else?’” Russell said.
A few blocks down Broadway, developer Glenn Strothmann plans to build apartments above the former Puckett’s for Women store after raising the roofline to match adjacent buildings.
On 10th Street, across from CC’s City Broiler, developer Rob Wolverton plans to raze three of his houses to make space for a building that would house mixed commercial and residential space.
In November, the Columbia City Council approved a rezoning request that allows property owner Jon “T.K” Livingston to erect a mixed-use building after he razes his three rental properties at 1109 Locust St. The lot falls within the area targeted for redevelopment by Sasaki and Associates, a consulting company the city, MU and Stephens College commissioned in 2006 to help plan downtown development. Livingston said he plans to provide first-floor business space and second-floor residences on the now-C-2-zoned property.
This month Marti and Alexander Waigandt, new owners of the building at 808 Cherry St., have asked tenant Joy Castillo and her Latin dance bar Club Tropicana (formerly Spanish Fly) to move out and make way for a quieter business because the Waigandts plan to build luxury apartments on the second floor.
Gradually The District is becoming a neighborhood more and more Columbians can call home.
“It’s not a huge surge,” Special Business District Director Carrie Gartner said. “It’s certainly significant because what is means is people are starting to use every piece of their buildings. That’s how you make sure rents are low enough to create a balance in a downtown between locally owned unique shops and the chains.”
But with only 200 housing units downtown and the city’s population approaching 100,000 people, Gartner said she believes the supply is still way too low. She said she thinks there is enough demand to fill five times as many housing units, particularly among retired people, empty-nesters and young professionals. Based on surveys, discussions with developers and comparisons to other cities, Gartner estimates that 1 to 2 percent of Columbia residents, or 1,000 to 2,000 people, want centrally located apartments.
There are several projects in the works on a larger scale than the traditional two-to-three-unit clusters above downtown stores.
On 10th Street, between Locust and Elm streets, dentist Lynn Miller is moving ahead with plans to build a multi-story building with office, retail and residential space. Meanwhile, downtown property owner John Ott and architect Brian Pape are converting two warehouses on the northern edge of downtown and in the North Central neighborhood into mixed-use buildings, a trend encouraged by the Sasaki plan.
Ott has completed basic structural renovations on the Berry Building, at the corner of Walnut and Orr streets, and he plans to start working on the interior in the next few weeks. The building was constructed in 1915, serving first as a wholesale grocery center that supplied several supermarkets in Columbia and later as a storage facility. Though he hasn’t settled on the exact number, Ott said he expects the second floor of the renovated building to hold 12 to 15 apartments.
For Ott, there’s no question; the demand for residential units is on the rise.
“I can put out signs for commercial, and I’ll still get calls for residential,” Ott said.
This month Pape listed eight loft-style apartments available in a renovated brick warehouse in North-Central Columbia. Rent on the units ranges from $900 to $2,250 per month. He plans to start construction on commercial space in the building this month. The Warehouse Studios, a locally based non-profit group that will provide private and open studio space for artists, already has committed to renting 5,000 square feet of the building’s commercial space.
The project started in late 2005 when Dale Diggs, whose packing plant previously occupied the warehouse, called Pape for a consultation on the building’s structural integrity. Part of the building, a former mule barn, had suffered a collapse, and Diggs needed to see whether it was sound before selling it. Pape asked longtime clients whether they wanted to buy it, but no one was interested.
“It’s falling down, and something’s got to happen in order to save it,” he said. “I talked to my wife, and we decided to take it on.”
The combination of high warehouse ceilings and an open structural plan make conversion into a mixed-use building feasible. But Columbia lacks a downtown warehouse district, and Pape said his building is a rarity.
“Columbia was never an industrial town,” Pape said. “It was a farming community first, then a trade community, then a higher-education community. Even the old brick industrial buildings that we did have in the central part of town have been long gone. They were destroyed or demolished. We didn’t start with much, and we’re down to only a few buildings of that type.”
Both Ott and Pape said they couldn’t have begun the developments without historic preservation tax credits, which finance a quarter of the renovation costs. Receiving the credits requires an arduous application process that includes getting a building listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Helmreich also used historic preservation tax credits to help finance the renovation of his appliance showroom and construction of four luxury apartments on the second floor of his building.
The catch with the tax credits is that they’re a lot of work.
“To do those tax credits you’ve really go to have somebody that knows what they’re doing,” Helmreich said.
Wolverton said his project is too early in the planning process for him to discuss details but that he won’t be limited by whether the city finds ways to provide tax credits to developers.
“It’s always nice to have tax incentives,” Wolverton said. “That’s one piece of the equation, but we’re not going to sit around and wait for it.”
Miller is set to close Jan. 8 on a deal to buy a city parking lot at 10th and Elm streets for $285,000. In documents filed with the city, Miller indicated the parking lot currently on the site would be replaced by part of a multi-story building with office, retail and residential space. Miller did not return phone calls about the project. A receptionist at his office this week said he wasn’t ready to speak publicly about it.