29 Sep 2014

L & D 15 Opening Up in Downtown Davenport

By T. Brecht

Since moving from Brooklyn to Davenport a little more than a year, David Balluff and Lopeti Etu have searched long and hard to find the perfect space for their eclectic hand-made clothing and hat (and other stuff) store.

A brief residency in cramped quarters at Bucktown came to an end awhile ago, and the pair have been busy fulfilling mail order requests in their apartment since. But they finally found what they were looking for in The Market building on W. 2nd Street.

"It's a great location for us, with gigantic windows and close to the Farmers' Market, the Figge, the bike trail and other things going on down here," said Balluff, who manufactures organic cotton and bamboo silkscreen shirts, dresses, sarongs, onsies, tank tops and other fine products under the name General Assembly.

His partner, Lopeti Etu, creates hand-blocked hats of all sorts, under the brand Lopeti Etu Millinery.

Both of their complete lines of products, as well as those of other local and far-flung original designers, will be housed at the new L&D 15 limited edition clothing, accessories and housewares shop.

Balluff said the fact the building was known as the New York Hat Company in the 1910s, made it seem like the perfect home for he and Lopeti's vision.

"We're bringing back not only hat manufacturing, but we were recently in New York ourselves," he said.

Etu and Balluff plan to reach out to artists and designers both locally and internationally, including open calls for artists/makers and other creatives to present new products. That will happen closer to the studio's opening.

"We're trying to build something that gives back to the community," Balluff said. "Our target market isn't young or old, rich or poor. It's people who appreciate things made by hand."

He calls this "retail 2.0" - meaning L&D 15 won't be just a place to shop, but a living workshop and community gathering space.

Part of their interior work that includes renovating floors and painting. They are using lumber from Davenport Public Works' urban wood utilization program. They plan to open sometime in November.

14 Aug 2014

Downtown SCC Campus and Kahl Renovation

By T. Brecht

Total Investment: $50 Million (estimated)
Total Public Investment: TBD
Private Funds Leveraged: TBD
Jobs Created: 200-plus (estimated, construction & full-time)

The vacant First Midwest Bank building will be converted into one of the core campus buildings for Scott CC downtown

The pace of development in downtown Davenport is accelerating even faster with the announcement of a major public-private partnership between Eastern Iowa Community Colleges and developer Restoration St. Louis that will renovate three major buildings over the next two years.

Under the terms of the proposed agreement, around $50 million will be invested to create a brand new downtown urban campus for Scott Community College and renovation of the Kahl Building (the current home of Scott classrooms) into market rate housing, first floor retail, and the long-awaited restoration of the Capitol Theater.

Two vacant and deteriorating buildings - the former First Midwest Bank and former First Federal Bank/Social Security Administration building on 3rd Street - will be renovated and make up the core of the new campus building. The 80,000 square-foot campus will feature classrooms, computer labs, a science lab, student commons, outdoor plaza, meeting place and administrative offices. The college's current classrooms and offices in both the Kahl Building and the Ground Transportation Center will be consolidated on the new campus.

The Kahl will then be taken over by Restoration St. Louis and renovated into an 80-90 unit apartment building featuring first-floor retail and the new and improved Capitol Theatre. The theatre will be a big screen, first-run movie house that likely will serve food and alcoholic beverages, according to Restoration St. Louis.

Project costs are calculated at approximately $50 million. Financing will come from a variety of sources, including Historic Preservation Tax Credits, traditional lending, bond issuance proceeds and a capital campaign by Eastern Iowa Community College. EICC Chancellor Don Doucette vowed that no property taxes or tuition increases will be part of the funding. Sam Estep, senior VP of development for Restoration, said the company does plan to submit an economic development agreement to the City of Davenport at some point. This likely will involve economic incentives, but what exactly those will entail is still being worked out.

The timeline is to finalize feasibility studies and cost estimates by late fall of this year and begin construction in 2015, Estep said. College officials would like to move into classrooms in 2016.

"This is a really exciting opportunity to meet not only the growing needs of a local educational resource, but to do so while creating a major economic development project," said Estep. "We remain very excited about the future of downtown Davenport."

25 Jul 2014

Old HoJo Site Moving Closer to Re-Development

By T. Brecht

Downtown's eyesore days are numbered: The former Howard Johnson will be demolished.

A wrecking ball will soon swing into the dilapidated walls of one of downtown Davenport's worst eyesores, making way for what the Downtown Davenport Partnership anticipates will go from long-time nuisance to "iconic structure".

Several developers are already anxious to pitch their ideas for the soon-to-open prime real estate at downtown's eastern gateway, said Kyle Carter, Executive Director of the Downtown Davenport Partnership. The partnership, which used its resources to purchase the property for $210,000 and turn it over to local non-profit Demolition Davenport, is putting the final touches on a Request for Proposals geared to find the best use possible for the high-visibility parcel.

The empty Howard Johnson hotel on the site has sat empty since 2009, earning it the dubious distinction of being one of downtown's most notorious blighted properties.

While multiple local developers have already expressed early interest, Carter said the RFPs will be distributed nationally, hopefully giving the Partnership a wide range of attractive options when picking a developer.

Downtown Partnership and City staff have a hiearchy of uses they'd like to see.  Number one is corporate office or Class A office space. The second choice is a mixed-use development with some Class A office combined with residential or commercial uses. The third and fourth choices are a business class hotel and market rate residential - either rental or owner occupied.

Carter said the push for office development is driven by a few factors. For one, most of the downtown building stock is older, historic businesses which are often difficult and expensive to convert into modern office use. Secondly, while the massive increase in new downtown market rate apartments has been good for business, office space drives up demand for daytime retail and commercial uses even more.

"For one, much of the downtown office space is historic with narrow column spacing, making it functionally obsolete for certain styles of corporate office design," Carter said. "New construction offers developers  a blank slate;  we have a real opportunity to add more variety to our commercial offerings downtown to suit users that are seeking more open space."

The key is finding the righta balance of uses downtown, Carter added.

"We'll never be able to compete completely with greenfield office development because of cost. But we think we can find those companies that are the right fit; especially those that need young professionals who want to be in that urban environment."

Bruce Berger, Director of Community Planning & Economic Development in Davenport, said having the Partnership and a non-profit like demolition Davenport help assemble the property and prepare it is incredibly helpful. It takes out the fear of the unknown, especially unknown expenses, that can make developers uneasy and risk-averse, he said. Without spending any City of Davenport taxpayer money, the two entities have:

  • Completed environmental risk assessment reports
  • Solicited bids for demolition (the cost of which will borne by the developers)
  • Below-ground environmental and flood reports
  • Debris removal
  • Environmental mitigation (which will be underway this September)

The proposals that are received will be reviewed by the Downtown Davenport Partnership taskforce and ultimately voted upon by the Partnership's Board of Directors. The following criteria will be used to determine the best developer:

  • Experience, Qualifications and Expertise
  • Preferred Use Factors
  • Proposed Costs/Thoughtfulness of Bidg
  • Financial and Environmental Sustainability
  • Design Quality, Scale & Aesthetics (meets or exceeds City downtown design guidelines)
  • Thoroughness, and Responsiveness of Proposal

Carter expects the RFP to be issued this week with proposals due back Aug. 25. Interviews with finalists and the selection by the board would occur by the end of September.

03 Jul 2014

Despite Flooding, Davenport is Open for Business

By T. Brecht

Front Street Brewery's signature beer is called Raging River Ale.

The name is hitting a little close to home for the long-time Davenport business, which boasts two riverfront locations - one between Pershing and Perry streets on River Drive and the other in the riverfront Freight House building.

The muddy Mississippi may be knocking at the front door, but manager Jenny Ash says both locations are open and serving.

"It was a little slow at lunch today, probably because parking is hard to find," she said. "But this flood is typical and manageable."

Ash has worked at Front Street for 22 years and has been through seven major floods. Improvements in the city's flood protection plan over the years have made them much easier to deal with than the deluge in 1993 that knocked the brewery out of business for an extended period.

"When we see the Hesco barriers going in, it's very reassuring to us," she said, as several patrons stepped in to order lunch and gawk at the rising waters just outside the large picture window out front.

Downstream a bit, Ed Kraklio Jr. of Nostalgia Farms Deli said the lunch rush today was more like a trickle. Too many people don't realize that despite River Drive being closed, you can still access businesses south of the road. Still, he's pleased with the flood protection measures in place.

"We're still prepping and getting ready for the weekend," he said. "Although we will be closed on the 4th because they cancelled Red, White and Boom."

Michelle Magyar, one of the co-owners of Mid-American Glass on River Drive, said they are coping with this flood much better than the last major flood in 2011.

A recent $5 million expansion, with a new building on their site, allows them to ship out a new dock to the north, meaning they no longer need access from River Drive.

"We are an island, but it's business as usual although it's hectic," she said. "The city helped us put this new building in and we can now get in without going through the water."

Any business owner that needs assistance with flood fighting should contact Public Works at (563) 326-7923.

03 Jun 2014

Davenport site search options Zooming forward

By T. Brecht

The City of Davenport has partnered with ZoomProspector in the creation of a super-helpful, super-thorough new site selection and economic analysis tool to help attract new businesses and assist those already calling Davenport home.

Check out DavenportSiteSearch.com to take this immersive new tool for a test drive, and be sure to share it with anyone you know who might be looking for a new place to open a business, anyone who needs demographic information on Davenport or the entire Quad-Cities area, or local businesses who might want to create reports on employement and consumer spending data.

DavenportSiteSearch by ZoomProspector

Davenport's ZoomProspector site allows people to find available commercial properites along with discovering why that location makes sense. Some of its features include :

  • Simple search options that make it easy to find properties
  • Extensive demographic and employement data for every property
  • Business search to build industry clusters visually
  • Community comparison and demographic tools
  • Demographic mapping of more than 700 variables to visualize demographic, employment and consumer spending data
06 May 2014

Houses on the Move: Unique Urban Infill Project Solves Two Problems

By T. Brecht

The section of Davenport's 6th Street that winds behind the Republic Companies and Harborview buildings just west of Tremont Avenue is peppered with vacant lots, the result of a rash of foreclosures and "demolition-by-neglect" that ravaged the once-thriving neighborhood in the 1970s and 1980s.

The future may be brightening for this corner of the city, however, thanks to a unique public-private partnership between Genesis Medical Center and the City of Davenport.

The solution to one neighborhood's problem started with uncertainty a little further to the north. Last winter, Genesis announced a massive $138.5 million building expansion at its East Rusholme campus. But construction of the new six-story building was expected to require the demolition of 8 to 10 older homes along College and Elm streets in the project's footprint.

"Genesis officials came down to our office to talk about what they needed for re-zoning, and we had the idea to ask them about the city-owned lots we had down on 6th Street," said Bruce Berger, Davenport's interim Community Planning & Economic Development Director.

Earlier in the year, the city's planning department sent out a request for proposals for a designer interested in those lots, preferably one with a unique single-family home project in mind. Unfortunately, Berger said, only one developer responded, and they wanted to build multi-family.

Then a bit of inspiration hit.

"One of the planners said, 'what if we move the Genesis houses down to 6th Street?'" recalled Berger.

It's an ambitious plan. Moving entire houses is neither easy nor inexpensive. The city, however, has more than $1 million in federal Community Development Block Grant and HOME funds that need to be allocated by the end of June or lost.

"It's a use-it, or lose-it situation," Berger said. "Our thought is to apply that to the moving, site preparation and rehab cost once we get the houses on 6th Street."

Originally, the idea was to put the transplanted homes on the city-owned lots on the north side of the street. But a moving consultant said the topography was too steep and the approach too narrow. Instead, the city has secured purchase agreements for several lots on the south side, which the City Council is expected to approve Wednesday.

The initial plan is to start with two houses - 2119 College Avenue and 1312 Elm - that Genesis purchased with the intent to demolish. Genesis is donating the homes to the city and also pitching in on moving expenses.

Work is expected to begin in June,  after the city secures an expert moving firm.

Ken Croken, Vice President for Corporate Communications & Business Development for Genesis, said he's excited to see the homes spared the wrecking ball and used to reinvigorate another neighborhood.

"These homes have housed many generations of Davenport residents," he said. "We are delighted that this project will help see them offer shelter and house even more generations of Davenporters as we move forward with our plans to better serve the community."

3rd Ward Alderman Bill Boom lauded the project for its environmental responsibility, noting that millions of pounds of construction waste would have gone to area landfills. Transplanting the homes - several of which date back to the first half of the 20th Century - will not only re-use existing home stock, but will help retain some of the character and craftsmanship of a traditional neighborhood. Boom hopes this inspires a "green-thinking" developer to take a closer look at the lots on the north side of 6th Street and design an eco-friendly, owner-occupied project.

Berger said the long-term goal is to see the neighborhood bounce back and be a prime target for re-development. The pieces are in place, he said, noting that the Scott County Family Y is planning a large new development on the WG Block property to the west and the popularity and number of apartments in the nearby Warehouse District continues to grow.

"We think this area will appeal to a wide variety of people," Berger said. "Whether that is first-time home buyers, empty nesters looking to downsize or young professionals who want to be near downtown but want to own their own home."

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