As Duck Island fills, Berges goes SOLO

Construction is wrapping up at the West 20th at Smith Court townhomes
in Tremont’s Duck Island enclave and all 14 of the homes have sold out.
This view was taken in March. Developer Berges Home Performance
sees strong demand continuing and is expanding west into Ohio City’s
SOLO district (Noah Belli). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.

Don’t tell Matt Berges that new home construction in the U.S. is in a 15-month-long slump. The owner of Cleveland-based housing development firm Berges Home Performance LLC will tell you that success depends on what you’re building and where. The where in this case is the near-West Side, specifically Duck Island, a neighborhood Berges helped rebuild. But it is running out of space for more new homes, prompting the 23-year-old firm to look elsewhere to satisfy an as-yet insatiable housing demand.

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Six local housing projects win tax credits

Plans by real estate developer Flaherty and Collins to build the Depoton
Detroit got a boost by winning Low-Income Housing Tax Credits from
the state yesterday. The affordable housing development is planned
next to the Greater Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s
West Boulevard-Cudell rapid transit station (City Architecture).
CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM

Six housing developments in Cuyahoga County won federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTCs) yesterday from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA), improving their chances of seeing construction in the near future. Those projects and 23 others elsewhere around the state received conditional LIHTC commitments. Developers will use those awards to leverage additional financing in the creation or rehabilitation of rental housing for low- to moderate-income Ohioans.

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Federal Equipment expands in Cleveland’s Kinsman

Federal Equipment Co. plans to add this office building onto its existing
warehouse on East 79th Street to accommodate its growing business
 (City Architecture). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.

Historically, when a company outgrows its aging facilities in the urban core, they tend to move out to a larger, more modern structure in the suburbs. But not Federal Equipment Co. which is expanding its presence in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood that it’s called home for more than six decades. It’s the latest real estate investment along the Opportunity Corridor and the Blue/Green light-rail transit lines in an area of the city derisively dubbed as the Forgotten Triangle, until now.

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Cleveland is seeing ‘brain gain’ – for a change

Rebuilding regional historic assets like the West Side Market and its
signature clock tower, developing fallow industrial land with urban river-
front housing seen at right, and construction cranes over downtown are
all results from and/or causes of increased net-migration of college-
educated people to Greater Cleveland (Iryna Tkachenko).
CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.

For decades, Greater Cleveland has suffered from the loss of its college-educated citizens primarily to star-studded cities on the East and West Coasts. Now, for a change, this former industrial powerhouse on the North Coast is enjoying a net in-migration of more brain than brawn. And while the region is still seeing net outmigration of those without college degrees, the results are at worst uneven.

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CWRU institute replacing BioEnterprise

 In Cleveland’s booming University Circle, bad news doesn’t hang over a
property for long. The former BioEnterprise building on Cedar Avenue at
the bottom of Fairhill Boulevard, is about to become the new home of the
Human Fusions Institute which was scattered across Case Western Reserve
University’s campus and even across the country. The research institute
will strive to improve human-machine interaction (Google).
CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.

 After announcing last month that it will join others in acquiring BioEnterprise Corp.’s assets, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) has developed plans to remake a portion of the nonprofit business incubator’s University Circle property into a home for a nascent research effort for improving human-machine interaction. Called the Human Fusions Institute (HFI) and founded in 2019, the national effort based in Cleveland at CWRU to advance socially responsible innovations in prosthetics, robotics and even gaming could see renovation work start later this year.

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It’s a big mystery, project

Along Bradley Road in Cleveland’s Old Brooklyn neighborhood, in a section
that resembles a rural area, there are early indications that something big may
be afoot at the former Wabash Alloys plant site. What that something is
remains a mystery (Google). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.

Mystery guest: will you enter and sign in, please? In borrowing that phrase from the long-running television show What’s My Line, NEOtrans has learned who the guest is and where they want to be. But we haven’t yet learned the “what” in terms of what they intend to bring. But according to permit applications filed last week with the city of Cleveland’s Building Department, it appears to be a very large project.

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The Standard hits the market

Rising to 21 floors, The Standard is one of downtown Cleveland’s many success
stories that resulted from converting  a commercial building to primarily resi-
dential uses. It’s now on the market and may help its current owner, the Weston
Group, free up some capital to move forward with other real estate deals (IPA).
CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM

Not all high-rise office and other commercial buildings in downtown Cleveland convert well to residential uses. And then there’s the historic Standard Building, 99 W. St. Clair Ave., which seemed a natural to become home to hundreds of people in the heart of the city. And now the timing is right for the company which bought and redeveloped The Standard to offer it for sale.

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