Downtown's Next Renovation?

Bigger Developers Come In

If condo sales are a measure, the neighborhood’s appeal is real, if not yet door busting.

In 2001, construction began on the Grant Park, a remarkably ambitious condominium project in Elliot Park. Urban Condos, LLC, a development partnership primarily comprising locally based Apex Asset Management and Opus construction, built the 327 units, which include brownstone-style townhomes and a 27-story central tower.

Despite the project’s size and its unit prices of $170,000 to $800,000, EPNI was eager to see it built, Braun says. Grant Park would bring increased home ownership to the neighborhood and “start to escalate the economic level and diversity.”

It wasn’t an easy sell. Goodman recalls bringing the developers to the site at Grant and Portland avenues in 1999, where they saw not only the old industrial structure that occupied it, but also several locals shooting up IV drugs in the open air.

Tom Dillon, an Urban Condos partner, says the development team needed about a year to “get comfortable with the site” and its surroundings. But Goodman kept pushing the location, and EPNI kicked in $300,000 of Neighborhood Revitalization Program money. Urban Condos was also reassured when it was able to presell about 160 units before construction began. The project was sold out in May 2005.

Then last June, the 27-story Skyscape condo project opened at 10th and Portland. With lower price points than Grant Park (most units fall in the $200,000 to $300,000 range), it’s designed to appeal to a younger crowd. Skyscape was Chicago-based condo developer Tandem’s first project in Minneapolis, and after 10 years of smaller infill developments, its first high-rise.

“It seemed like the right product for the right spot,” says Paul Dincin, a Tandem principal. “We felt that there was a market for reasonably priced urban homes for downtown workers.”

Dincin says the 252 units are now 70 percent occupied, not bad in a flattened market. Unlike Grant Park, Skyscape has retail space on its first floor, partly occupied by Otho, a “pan-Asian” restaurant. Another restaurant is expected to open this fall.