A rendering for an early phase in the multi-building Hub 27 development at the north end of Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood. This section, between Interstate 90 and the Red Line, is the BVQ enclave, named after the streets Barber-Vega-Queen in that area (BDCL). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Half-dozen apartment buildings planned in BVQ
There’s an underutilized 50-acre area on Cleveland’s near-West Side dubbed the BVQ District. It is surrounded by Ohio City, Tremont and the La Villa Hispana section of Clark-Fulton. All of those neighborhoods have seen, and continue to see a lot of investment. BVQ has been walled off from that activity by Interstate 90 and the Red Line tracks. But like water overtopping a dam, soon that dam is going to break.
That may be ready to happen, with up to 400 mostly affordable housing units among a half-dozen apartment buildings already in the planning pipeline, and more likely to follow. Not bad for a triangular-shaped district that few people have ever heard of, and has largely been neglected until the waning days of the 2010s.
Even fewer people know why it’s called the BVQ District. That’s an acronym for three avenues in this enclave — Barber, Vega and Queen. Cleveland developer Ben Beckman called his 2019 remake of the J. Spang Bakery, 2801 Barber Ave., into 69 market-rate, middle-income apartments as the BVQ Lofts. The acronym has endured.
Shortly after BVQ Lofts opened, it leased out. And another development followed for a lower-end of the market, income-wise — St. Joseph Commons, 2554 W. 25th St. That 68-unit transitional housing property was opened in 2020 by Front Steps Housing and Services to get out of the way of the now-under construction Irishtown Bend Park.
The largest single development in this district is Hub 27 — a multi-building vision in which each building is a development phase. The nearly 6-acre site at 2500 W. 27th St. is owned by Opportune Development LLC, an affiliate of ARPI LLC which has partnered with others on developments in Greater Cleveland, primarily in the Hough neighborhood.
Originally, Hub 27 was to be a market-rate development with ground-floor retail including a potential grocery store. But after the city reduced its tax abatement incentives in hot neighborhoods to try to redirect investor interest to less fortunate ones, the site’s market-rate developers dropped the project. Instead, low-income and affordable housing developers stepped in.
So far, three phases of Hub 27 offering 200 apartments total have been disclosed but more are in the works, said Pete Schwiegeraht, senior vice president of development-Midwest Region, for Pivotal Development LLC, of West Chester, OH, near Cincinnati. Developing the site with Pivotal is the Metro West Community Development Organization. Ground-floor retail is no longer proposed in Hub 27.
Pivotal and Metro West announced a $22 million building this past week via its application for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA). It will be a five-story building for general occupation including families. Of the 67 apartments, 10 will be three-bed suites and 15 are to be two-bedroom units. The rest will be one-bedroom apartments.
Another phase, a 69-unit workforce apartment building with a $23.15 million price tag, was first submitted to OHFA for LIHTC funding last year as a 53-unit building. Its unit count was expanded and received a preliminary LIHTC award. Planned are 35 one-bedroom units, 25 two-bedroom units and nine three-bedroom suites.
A third building, a $20.7 million senior affordable apartment building sought in partnership with St. Mary Development Corp. of Dayton, was also first proposed as a 53-unit project. It was bumped up to a 64-unit property for residents ages 55 years and older. It is still seeking a LIHTC award from OHFA.
Crews cleaned up the Hub 27 development site in 2022. For a century until about 1980, the site was home to the Walworth Run Foundry Co., an iron-making industry at the north end of West 27th Street. Many manhole covers still visible in Cleveland streets were made here (KJP).
No site plan for Hub 27 has been released publicly. Schwiegeraht said the workforce building will go through the city’s design-review process this spring. BDCL Architects of West Chester will design Hub 27, Ruscilli Construction Co. of Dublin, OH will build it and Pivotal will manage the properties when finished.
“We hope to close (on financing for the first building) and start construction in summer of 2025,” he said. “Units will be available by fall of 2026. We will apply for additional funding in 2025 to complete the other phases.”
A surprising change to the proposed land uses in BVQ District appeared in OHFA filings this past week. Wallick Development, LLC of New Albany, OH revealed that it is seeking LIHTC funding for a $19.65 million, 60-apartment refugee housing development called Depot Lofts at 30th. It is proposed to be located at 3119 Train Ave.
That’s the same address where Sixth City Glazing of North Royalton proposed to replace an abandoned junkyard with a $3 million, 23,000-square-foot window manufacturing facility. As Rase Properties LLC, Sixth City co-owners Alex Euse and Rob Strickland bought the 1.9-acre property in 2022 for $250,000, property records show.
“We were moving forward and things were looking wonderful for us there,” Euse said. “It wasn’t anything bad that happened. Just the opposite. We’re growing and, in looking at the (proposed) floorplan, we realized it wasn’t enough.”
A conceptual rendering for the Depot Lofts at 30th. This refugee resettlement housing is proposed by a Central Ohio developer to rise at the southwest corner of West 30th Street and Train Avenue in the BVQ District (RDL).
Instead, Sixth City Glazing is moving in July into an existing building at 6600 Clement Ave. in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood. At about 49,000 square feet, their new home will be more than double the size of what they had sought on Train Avenue. It comes with the price of minor interior renovations to the building’s offices.
Euse said neither he nor Strickland tried to find a buyer for the Train Avenue site. Instead, potential buyers found them. The owners didn’t even list the site for sale. It shows why the BVQ District is suddenly so popular — but apparently not with local developers.
“I think for that area that’s a very good sign,” Euse said of the unsolicited interest. “There was a lot of out-of-state interest. This (buyer Wallick) was the only one in Ohio who reached out to us. We threw feelers out to local developers but didn’t get much of a response.”
“The project design will offer one three-story congregate building,” wrote Jimmy McCune, vice president of development at Wallick in a Feb. 26 letter to Cleveland City Council. In the OHFA filing, he noted that “Wallick will be partnering with The May Dugan Center, a qualified Refugee Resettlement Agency, in an effort to provide needed affordable housing to working refugees and their families.”
But there is at least one local developer interested in the BVQ District — the one who started the renaissance here. Beckman, president of Seaton Woods Ventures LLC, has plans to do more than just sit on his success of developing the BVQ Lofts.
At left, private homes were demolished on Barber Avenue in Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton for Seaton Woods’ Joy Court development. This is just west of the BVQ Lofts seen in the distance that was delivered by the same developer in 2019 and started the redevelopment of the BVQ District (Google).
The largest of these plans is Beckman’s Joy Court development, along and north of Barber, west of West 30th Street. Here, he has acquired land, including the former Joy Court alley, and demolished structures for a new 100- to 120-unit apartment building plus for-sale townhomes. He also envisions a future multifamily building on Vega south of the BVQ Lofts.
“Over the next year, the Joy Court project will move into some preliminary designs and a neighborhood charrette,” Beckman said in December. But in an e-mail yesterday, he said he had no updates to share on that project yet.
Beckman said he wants to invest here because of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s (GCRTA) pending $50 million MetroHealth Line project. GCRTA officials said they plan to finish design work in 2025 and, pending the availability of federal funding, start construction in 2026 on the 4-mile bus rapid transit project along West 25th from Detroit Avenue in Ohio City to downtown Old Brooklyn.
Another potential redevelopment site, this one at the west end of the BVQ District, is back on the market. The former Leisy Brewery property, 3400 Vega Ave., is a 5-acre parcel just east of Fulton Road and includes some historic structures left over from the 19th century brewery.
A source familiar with the real estate scene in that part of town told NEOtrans that internal disagreements over owner Sanctus Capital’s vision resulted in the Leisy site being put back on the market only 18 months after Sanctus purchased it for $750,000. Sanctus reportedly is asking $6.11 million for the property as part of a five-property portfolio among multiple communities.
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