The red rectangle is where Prescott Realty began its Lake Highlands Town Center construction.
The city is “glad things are finally moving” at the Lake Highlands Town Center, says Sue Hounsel in the city’s Office of Economic Development.
She’s referring to the apartments with retail at the base, named “Haven Lake Highlands,” that are being constructed with a $23 million HUD loan that the city backed. The city also has pledged to reimburse the Town Center for up to $40 million in Tax Increment Financing (TIF) dollars for public improvements, of which $1.37 million already has been doled out.
However, “we wish the grocer was settled so this thing could take off,” Hounsel says. The section of the project off Skillman between Walnut Hill and Sedgwick “has always been this sort of lynchipin,” Hounsel says. Though the first round of residential mixed with retail is being built south of Sedgwick, “everything else is kind of ‘to be determined,’ ” Hounsel says.
“I know they’ve been talking to any potential grocer,” she says of Town Center developer Prescott Realty and its equity partner, Cypress Real Estate Advisers, but “nothing has been presented to us as far as specific tenants.”
No Town Center retail tenants, grocer or otherwise, have been announced. Our most recent query about any updates from Prescott received a “no.”
Neither will any changes be made to the Town Center plans after the city paid an urban development consulting firm $25,000 to study the Town Center and make recommendations that would help the Town Center succeed. Prescott, as part of being given an increase in TIF reimbursement, was required to hire the firm — Street-Works, LLC — but nothing has come of it, Hounsel says, nor is anything likely to.
Street-Works, in its initial study, had emphasized that the two sections of the Town Center on either side of Walnut Hill should be treated as two distinct neighborhoods, and also “thought if we had to do it over again, Wildcat Way would have been narrower with a wider median,” Hounsel says. These points were reemphasized in discussions after Prescott hired Street-Works, she says.
But the Town Center infrastructure already was in place, Hounsel says, and it “didn’t seem like anything at this time we could go and redo.” The cost was “significant enough that Prescott couldn’t go in and do it, and we didn’t have the additional bond money to go in and pledge,” so it will “most likely be built as-is,” she says.
“I know the focus is still trying to get a retail block going,” Hounsel says. “Now that the economy is turning around, hopefully something will get resolved.”
