Marshall County

Water Street Townhomes – Lease-up

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The Water Street Townhomes project is starting to lease up. Two of the new tenants have personalized the front patios with furniture, flowers and in one case, lights. Very nice! I want to go down there some Friday evening and see how they fare with the Mayor’s Summer of Music in River Park Square. The Water Street Townhomes patios should be prime listening spots!

I spent a little time there before a meeting pulling some weeds in the beds. The cooler wet Spring has allowed the landscaping to become established. I’m hoping it didn’t suffer too much through the heat we’ve been having. Things are looking good and I am hopeful that the Creeping Thyme will fill the tree lawns and put on a vibrant display next Spring. What i can’t figure out is how to stop the birds from dive-bombing and pooping on the back wall! What’s up with that!?

View of Water Street Townhomes from the roof of The Heartland Art Center shows the solar panels on the roof

We haven’t gotten the final software connections made on the solar panels yet, so I’m eagerly waiting to see the effects on the electric bills. Things are set up for tenants to pay the difference. If things work like they were sold, tenants should mostly be without electric costs in the shoulder months… unless they are big bakers… Ha! The units are all electric, so that should be a plus for them. All of the residential units have supplemental solar. The solar panels are mostly invisible from the ground, but Brent Martin from SRKM Architecture took the picture to the right from the roof of The Heartland Arts Center. He is the Architect for that renovation project as well as the Architect for Water Street Townhomes.

There was supposed to be a sister project, Spirit Townhomes in Culver, but the Town Council withdrew support, instead pursuing other projects.

Other than some subcontractor/supplier delays, this was a good project. I’m happy to see some progress towards the project leasing up and supporting itself.

Water Street Townhomes Ribbon Cutting

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We had the ribbon cutting for Water Street Town homes (WST) last Friday, May 15th. Julie Heise and Heather Martis did a great job with balloons, snacks and drinks for the event. There was a good turnout with members of the City Council, Redevelopment Commission and other officials there. The Mayor manned the big scissors to cut the ribbon and said a few words. Everything was positive! (Press Release here.)

All projects present challenges, but ones like these with multiple funding sources and their associated requirements are each unique. This one also involved multiple property owners, both public and private.

Above and beyond the general goals of providing work for our employees and not losing money, there are a myriad of other goals for a project like this. A few of these include: Downtown Revitalization, Work Force Housing, fulfilling comp plan goals and generally contributing to the health of downtown Plymouth. We participated in the two Marshall County housing studies, the Plymouth Comprehensive Plan committee and the Plymouth Zoning Review committee as we worked up to this. We’re still helping with the Zoning Review and have also joined the board of the Marshall County Community Development Corporation. All this to say we understand the issues.

We are pleased when we are able to do a project like this and also provide jobs for local subcontractors. A few of the local subcontractors for this project were: Langfeldt Excavating, Hundt Concrete, Banner Electric, MLE Roofing, Artizan Flooring, ARC Security, Rogers Landscaping and Quality Drywall. Scheduling has become the biggest issue with projects such as these, and having local access to local offices makes this easier. (Easier, not easy…)

Almost all municipalities are welcoming to developers at the elected official level during initial conversations, but it’s the follow-through that makes a difference. Nearly across the board, the various City of Plymouth departments understood the goals and attempted to make things easier to achieve them. This is not always the case. Water Street Townhomes had a sister project in Culver, Spirit Townhomes, that was also included in the Regional READI application, but after initial municipal interest, support evaporated. (A missed opportunity…) I would recommend talking to the City of Plymouth and Mayor Listenberger, if you’re considering a new development in Marshall County.

Water Street Townhomes is an example of urban renew at it’s best. It took two older homes and an underutilized parking lot on the back side of the main downtown street and created new commercial space (already filled), new housing that’s walkable to downtown merchants, entertainment, restaurants and the park, and took a poorly laid out parking lot which paid no taxes and turned it into a tax-paying development… while still adding 18 parking spaces and better stormwater control to the space. The parking lot was paved before returning it to the city. The adjacent alley was improved and new street lights were installed. Hopefully the project is an example of what can be done with public/private cooperation.

The internet trolls have been out in force, complaining that WST is not affordable housing (it was never advertised to be in an affordable housing program), it’s built in a flood plain (it’s not), it takes away public parking (it does not), it displaced existing residents (the existing houses were purchased privately at the seller’s asking prices), it’s ugly (Sorry… there’s no accounting for taste), it’s gentrification (okay, but maybe that’s the point?) and my favorite, for which I don’t even have a pithy retort, “We don’t want no new people”. It’s clear they know more than we do <sarcasm>, so there’s no point in addressing them. It’s still disheartening, when you’re trying to do something positive.

We’re still having some website issues. There were some pictures to include here, but they won’t upload. They may get added in a future update.

Personal Property Rights

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Land ownership has always been seen as a sign of permanence and investment in the community and in the political structures from municipality to county to state and all of the way up to the country as a whole. Article 1 of the Constitution pushed voting determination back to the States, and in the early elections, many States made land ownership a prerequisite to voting. Even now, investment in property is considered a goal. Individually, the dream of home ownership is a goal for most people. Municipalities tend to favor homeowners over renters, understanding that investing in a property in their jurisdiction brings community involvement, pride and often other types of investment.

That said, it’s disheartening to see the erosion of personal property rights. Zoning Ordinances by nature apply some of these restrictions for what’s perceived to be the greater good, but they attempt to guide by best practices, and are required by law to have public review, public input and an appeals process. This has been long established, but in the past, has been fairly lenient unless someone is being harmed. That process is becoming more intrusive and is coming after property owners in other ways, imposing taxes, fines and moratoriums.

Case #1 – Locally, there was discussion at a Culver Redevelopment Commission meeting and at the Downtown Strategies meeting about imposing fines on property owners in the commercial districts that do not have operating commercial businesses. (I mentioned this in a previous post, here.) Part of the argument given was, storage is not allowed in the commercial districts and a building just housing boxes without some from of retail offering was a violation of the Zoning Ordinance. I would have to assume, even if the building was purchased on a speculative basis, the owner would be happy to have an income producing business in there if they had that opportunity. The buildings in question are not being rented out as storage, but have the building owner’s own material there.

Case #2 – At the County level, there is an election flier floating around with a couple of lines that seems to be pretty contradictory:

  • Fought to Protect 12,000 Acres of Farm Ground from Industrial Solar.
  • Defended Property Owners from Gov’t Over-reach!

How is telling a farmer/landowner that they can only use their land to harvest corn & beans, in lieu of harvesting solar energy, not government over-reach?

Case #3 – And then there’s the current news headline from New York City, where the Mayor has decided to charge additional tax, gussied up as a pied-a-terre tax, on second homes worth over $5MM. This one and the Culver one seem awfully similar, since in both cases the building is zoned correctly, but the powers-that-be, don’t like the use or lack of use the current owner is pursuing. In NYC, what is that going to do to property values? I would have to assume every property currently valued at $5MM just dropped in value to $4.9MM. But wait, I forgot, the property owner has no control over what value is assessed. They’ll just lose money when the property sells…

In all of these cases, the stated goals are to promote the greater good. And as mentioned above, there is usually a required appeals process. In the cases above, there are no clear paths toward appeal. (What is the appeal process when a moratorium has been declared?) So the harmed individuals would be forced to pursue some form of civil remedy, which will undoubtedly be costly to the landowner and the governing body… but of course, the governing body is making demands and backing them up with other people’s money. The rule makers have no skin in the game…

On a grander scale, this is why our Founding Fathers set up the United States as a Republic and not a Democracy. Despite that, in the local trenches, government tends to lean more towards democracy, where politicians make decisions with their finger in the wind. Democracy tends to allow the majority to run over the minority. The individual property owner is always in the minority when it comes to how they want to use their property. That is very personal. It seems the individual property owner is falling victim to the vocal “majority” more and more.

Connecting Dots…

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110 North Main Street

A couple of weeks ago I posted about going to the initial Collaborate Culver meeting, where there was a discussion about missing businesses. I suggested the possibility of some incubator space for potential new businesses to try out Culver rather than going all in on a new store front. Geno Nannini made a stab at this years ago, by renovating the Masonic Lodge (Henry H. Culver Lodge No. 617 F. & A. M.) building at 110 North Main Street, subdividing the second floor lodge space into apartments and subdividing the first floor into individual offices/shops. A mix of small businesses, Churches and Not-for-Profits have occupied the spaces over time.

Last year I spoke to the owner of the former trailer park site at 515 West Jefferson Street in Culver about his idea of putting up small, temporary shop facilities. He indicated that he had spoke to town officials about making that happen, but he didn’t get much traction with them. I think at this time he’s in talks about a hotel on that site.

Bringing this full circle, Bremen has been talking about a project called Bremen Village Shops, which sounds very similar to what was suggested for the trailer park property. That project should be coming to fruition this summer. It is being done in conjunction with the Town of Bremen. They are working through logistics, since the property is currently owned by the Bremen Redevelopment Commission and there are legal issues with having them serve as a landlord.

If the Bremen Village Shops are successful, maybe the Town of Culver will warm to the idea and consider something similar for Culver, whether at 515 West Jefferson, or on another site. It’s an interesting concept and it seems like an creative way to get some new businesses to give Culver a chance. Meanwhile, if anyone is interested, I don’t think 100 North Main Street is completely full…