Reprinted from www.citylab.com

New “makers spaces” in a struggling neighborhood could bolster the local economy with small-scale manufacturing opportunities.

It was some tough timing for urban planner Andy Cook as he lined up a tour of vacant industrial properties in Southwest Baltimore late last month, trying to drum up interest among businesses and real estate developers.

The nation had been glued to news of the riots that followed the the death of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody. People were beginning to understand the despair present in Baltimore neighborhoods that residents themselves declared dead.

The Southwest Baltimore Industrial Opportunity Tour wound through similar landscapes of abandonment, in Mill Hill, Shipley Hill, and as far north as Rosemont, where big companies—and the smaller businesses of butchers, bakeries, and brewers—had long since left. It was audacious to suggest that a collection of 35 dilapidated buildings could somehow begin to fix what had been broken for so long.

Read the full article at http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/06/can-makers-spaces-revitalize-baltimore/396185/

Reprinted from www.cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Central and Fairfax neighborhoods lost an estimated 100 jobs in 2012 when T&B Foundry closed a storied metal casting plant in a foreclosure process that left the eight-acre property vacant, shuttered and saddled with nearly $2 million in liens.

Now Cleveland Heights entrepreneur J. Duncan Shorey has a proposal to transform the plant at 2469 East 71st St. at Platt Avenue with an unusual mix of overlapping uses including a fish farm, an orchard, a studio center for artists, a farmers market, a cooking school and a computer server farm.

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Reprinted from Detroit Free Press

A new, five-year program to pair up entrepreneurs and property owners looking to repopulate Detroit with small businesses kicked off today with pledges of $2 million a year in grants to encourage redevelopment of vacant commercial space across the city.

The Motor City Match program will award $500,000 in grants quarterly to building owners and small-business startups, a key part of Mayor Mike Duggan’s 2013 campaign pledge to foster growth and jobs in neighborhood storefronts long vacant amid years of business flight from Detroit.

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Reprinted from www.globest.com

CHICAGO—As bid-up pricing results in lower returns, especially in prime office markets, investors are turning to a new strategy, according to Transwestern’s Gary Nussbaum. That is, they’re becoming more opportunistic, buying buildings with substantial or total vacancies.

It’s not only the lower returns on stabilized assets that have motivated investors to accept more risk—and, often, pay higher prices on vacant, nearly vacant or soon to be vacant office properties, writes Nussbaum, Chicago-based managing director, investment services. They’re also finding more debt sources willing to lend on opportunistic deals.

“In order to increase their returns, some lenders have been willing to finance the acquisition of vacant buildings, offering interest-only, debt fund financing at 65% loan-to-value” as well as providing 100% of the cap-ex funding, Nussbaum writes in a special report. Interest rates, meanwhile, have been as aggressive as sub-6%. “Terms are improving because more debt sources are loaning on these non-core assets.”

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Reprinted from www.opportunityspace.org

beautiful Cranston Street Armory in Providence, RI.

Armories in the United States were built in the 19th and 20th centuries by local and state militias to store weapons and to train volunteer soldiers. Armories typically have a large interior space that was used for drills and rooms used for weapons storage and administrative offices. With the reorganization of many local and state militia groups under the federal National Guard, today armories in their original form are typically vacant or underutilized.

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