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| Reporting and rendering, this link. |
The 30-story tower also would include 50 street-level spaces for grocery shoppers and eight full levels of parking, according to Jim Crossin, vice president of Indianapolis-based Flaherty & Collins. The first floor would be two stories high, and the remaining 20 stories would contain 300 luxury apartments.
“We think there’s a very strong demand for a development of this type in downtown Cincinnati,” Crossin said.
And there's a Catch 22, after all, it's Flaherty. All that parking. How do you suppose Flaherty proposes to pay for it - have it financed? The report continues:
The timetable hasn’t been set, he said, because the project hinges on City Council agreeing to sell the city’s parking operations. City Manager Milton Dohoney has proposed using $12 million from the $92 million sale proceeds to fund the apartment tower, proposed at the former Pogue’s Garage site on Fourth Street.
The last Flaherty tower I can recall was the splat-to-Chap. 7 in North Carolina where the prepayment folks thinking they were reserving housing were left holding the bag.
Let us hope the Apartment Guys get this one better.
Can they get it worse?
Hard to picture that? Perhaps.
Reporting continues, re parking, and the mystery grocer:
Proceeds also would help finance the conversion of neighboring Tower Place into mostly parking with 20,000 square feet of retail. The city just bought the two properties for $8.5 million. The city Planning Commission will hold a preliminary vote related to the parking plan March 1.
The tower would have one- and two-bedroom apartments, averaging about 900 square feet, Crossin said. It also would include a rooftop deck, fitness room, swimming pool and club room.
Flaherty & Collins, a 20-year-old company that builds and manages mostly high-end apartments, broke ground earlier this month on a mixed-use project in downtown Indianapolis, the Axis @ Block 400. That development will include a Marsh grocery, but Crossin said the Cincinnati project will not involve Marsh, even though the interior grocery renderings presented by Cincinnati officials are the same as the grocery renderings for the Axis.
The 15,000-square-foot grocery space at the former Pogue’s Garage site, which stretches from Race to Elm along Fourth Street, is too small for a traditional grocer, Crossin said.
[...] The plan is for a high-end store with a focus on fresh produce, Crossin said: “We committed to the city that it will be a true grocery store. We’ve worked with the operator to be able to assure everyone it won’t be a glorified convenience store.”
Could it be Coborns of Cincy? Grocer to river towns? Just speculation, of course.
Finally, despite this new thing being a tower, and despite that big-time tower failure in North Carolina, this is, trust me, a totally unrelated bonus YouTube video link, for interested readers.