GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – City of Green Bay officials say they’re concerned about what was supposed to be a $21 million project in the city’s Rail Yard district.
The construction site for the five-story housing project looked promising a year ago, but it has turned into an eyesore, according to neighbors.
After concrete elevator and stairway shafts went up last year, neighbors say not a lot has happened.
“There’s growing of the weeds,” said Jennifer Nowicki, owner of Cultivate Taste Tea Salon.
Nowicki opened Cultivate Taste Tea Salon in June, right next door to what is supposed to be The Fort, 225 market rate apartments with first level retail. The construction site has prevented her from setting up an outdoor patio area.
“It would be nice to eventually have that and decorate how you want to have it outside,” said Nowicki.
Nowicki isn’t sure what’s going on with The Fort and city leaders say they don’t either.
“The site is actually in pretty poor condition,” said Neil Stechschulte, Green Bay’s Economic Development Director.
“We’ve actually had to call over there a couple times. There’s weeds, there’s other things, it’s really an unkept kind of situation at this point.”
“I’m keeping the scrap metal people off the site as much as I can, but it’s just one woman just trying to fight it off. It’s a little hard,” Brighid Riordan told her fellow Redevelopment Authority board members during a Tuesday meeting.
The city wants to set up a meeting with the Indiana-based developer, TWG Development, but there’s been one problem.
“They’ve been a little tough to get a hold of,” said Stechschulte.
FOX 11’s attempts to reach TWG have been unsuccessful.
City officials say opportunity zone funding for the project has fallen through and they believe TWG is trying to replace it with WHEDA tax credits, likely changing the apartments from market rate to affordable.
TWG has been successful with at least one project in the area. The Broadway Lofts, 107 units of affordable housing, came online last year.
City officials want to make sure The Fort project, one block away, doesn’t end up targeting the same tenants.
“In terms of mix of units for the area, it was a good combination,” said Stechschulte of the original agreement for market rate units. “We think as long as they adjust to other, different kind of income levels, we think that might be ok.”
And if the developer doesn’t have a plan, the city says it’s ready to tell it to put the site back to how it was and it will find a new developer.
“We’re actually looking at, worst case scenario, what happens if we’re probably at a point where if they’re in violation of their agreement, in which I think they are at this point, they’re beyond their timing on their development agreement, we may have to require them to actually have to remove site and return it back to its predevelopment stage, which really nobody wants to see,” said Stechschulte.
