Sustainable Community Associates, which took on a brownfield site in Oberlin, hopes to redevelop a former Cleveland creamery building as its second act.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Three young developers who won national attention for remaking a blighted block in Oberlin are ready to tackle their second project, a near-vacant former creamery building in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood.
Once part of a nationwide dairy network, the 100,000-square-foot Fairmont Creamery sits in the slope of the city's industrial valley. Now Sustainable Community Associates, a development company that aims to balance profits and progressive values, sees the 1930s brick building as a link in another chain. By transforming the property with apartments, a gym and offices, the developers hope to attract other investors to an isolated stretch between two vibrant near-west neighborhoods.
"It would be a transformational project for that corner of the neighborhood, no doubt," said Cory Riordan, executive director of Tremont West Development Corp., a nonprofit group. "There's sort of that gap that sits between these real estate markets of Tremont and Ohio City, and this would go a long way toward filling that gap."
Formed in 2002 by a trio of Oberlin College graduates, Sustainable Community Associates encountered a mix of skepticism and grass-roots support with its first project, the East College Street development on the eastern edge of downtown Oberlin.
Ben Ezinga, Josh Rosen and Naomi Sabel, now in their early 30s, spent eight years navigating land acquisition, demolition, financing and new construction. They met with questions about their age, their inexperience, funding and construction delays and the way they handled environmental challenges, including potentially contaminated soil and storm-water runoff, on their site.
They also managed to fill East College Street with local retailers and a mixed-income group of renters and condominium owners during a painful housing collapse and recession. In the end, they met with acclaim.
Once you've been featured in the New York Times and on National Public Radio, there's a lot to live up to.
"Any young company that has success in its first endeavor is going to be worried about a sophomore slump, but I feel really optimistic about the Cleveland residential market and Cleveland in general," Ezinga said.
The trio considered several small properties and talked about moving beyond real estate before stumbling onto the creamery, a formidable second act. Like East College Street, their $13.3 million creamery overhaul will require layered financing, including developer and investor equity, federal New Markets Tax Credits and other tax credits to make the historic building look like it did eighty years ago -- at least from the outside.
"For us, our first project was a real-life education," said Rosen, who lives in Tremont. "To not do a second project and not take what we learned from the first project and apply it to the second, third and fourth project would be a loss."
In September, Sustainable Community Associates secured a two-year purchase option on the creamery at 1720 Willey Ave.
Sabel and Rosen made their first public presentation about the project Wednesday night, during a small community meeting at a Tremont school. Residents greeted the proposal with a handful of questions and no apparent opposition.
The developers won't disclose terms of the deal, but they hope to buy the 1.5-acre property in October, start construction in November and be finished by late 2014.
Tucked into a hillside, the former creamery is flanked by single-family homes, old industrial buildings and neighbors ranging from a metal-coating company to the Cleveland Animal Protective League. The Fairmont Creamery Co., then based in Omaha, Neb., chose the site in 1930 for its location along the Nickel Plate Road, a railroad line that reached from Chicago to Buffalo, N.Y.
Refrigerated train cars ran directly into the plant, where workers loaded trucks for local deliveries of butter, eggs and cheese and milk, according to a March 16, 1930 article from The Plain Dealer.
Diana Wellman, a Cleveland Heights preservation consultant working with the developers, believes the creamery closed in the early 1980s. Fairmont became part of American Financial Corp. of Cincinnati in 1980 and shuttered and sold off its facilities, according to the Nebraska State Historical Society.
Property records show that Donald Dickson bought the five-story building and the surrounding land in 1983 for $300,000. Dickson, who is 75 and anxious to retire, runs a nickel-chrome plating business out of the basement with his wife, Francine.
He has been trying to sell the building for at least seven years, but other buyers backed off when the economy softened.
"It's hard to miss this building, but I guess a lot of people have," said Sabel, who described encountering the property as "intrigue at first sight."
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This rendering of the Fairmont Creamery plant in Cleveland ran with an article in The Plain Dealer in 1930.
Last month, the Cleveland Landmarks Commission nominated the building as a local landmark, a designation that will help Sustainable Community Associates pursue state tax credits for preservation. City Council still needs to sign off, and the project will require a rezoning from heavy industrial to light industrial -- which permits residential uses.
Wellman also is working to add the property, one of few remaining historic creameries in Cleveland, to the National Register of Historic Places.
The roof, where the developers plan to create a patio and, possibly, a platform for yoga classes, offers views of downtown and the West Side Market's clock tower. From five stories up, it's also easy to see Train Avenue, where a bicycle path eventually will run on its way from the Towpath Trail to Edgewater Park.
On the building's upper floors, which could house roughly 30 apartments, cement blocks and glass bricks now fill the window frames. Glazed wall tiles shine through the gloom. Thick layers of cork -- used for insulation -- line the ceilings of the cold-storage rooms.
"Just knowing Ben, Josh and Naomi, they're really going to want to do something creative and non-standard," said Scott Dimit, the Lakewood architect working on the project. "I'm seeing a very creative, loft-type apartment with fantastic views."
Dimit and the developers are still working on floor plans, so the apartment sizes and rates are not set. Rents might be similar to those in downtown Cleveland, where a 1,000-square-foot apartment costs roughly $1,200 a month, on average. Downtown rental occupancy was 96.2 percent in late 2012, and renters are struggling to find apartments in Ohio City and Tremont.
Commercial space, including a fitness center, would stretch along the West 17th Street side of the creamery building, where only two stories are visible from the road. The developers plan to use the lower floors, which run into the hillside and have little natural light, for parking.
"When we were in Oberlin, we were big fish in a small pond," Rosen said of taking on that city's first downtown development in decades. "That had its advantages and, at times, was very difficult. We're looking forward to joining a large community that has many projects, and being one of many.
"We'd like to think that we're going to pull off something as interesting and innovative as we did in Oberlin," he added. "And we welcome the expectations."
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