Why we keep coming back to historic buildings

Most developers won’t touch a hundred-year-old building. The numbers don’t pencil. The historic tax credit timing is a nightmare. The structural surprises are real — you open up a brick wall expecting a plate, and find a hand-poured concrete pocket nobody remembered. The schedule is longer, the contingency is bigger, and the lender wants to know why you’d take on this risk profile when a clean infill lot down the street would pencil more cleanly with less drama.

We’ve heard the argument. We still do these projects.

This is the case for why.

The buildings outlive us

A new building is, almost by definition, replaceable. The economic life of a modern multifamily structure runs maybe 50 to 75 years before substantial renovation or replacement becomes the obvious move. A well-built industrial loft from 1920 is, by contrast, on a different timeline entirely. The structures we’ve adapted — the Firestone Tire and Rubber building in the Grand Rapids Arts District, the old lumberyard at the south end of Michigan Street, the Marywood Motherhouse on the Lakeside Drive bluff — were built by people who assumed their work would still be standing in 2100. And it will be, if we don’t tear it down.

The math that makes a hundred-year-old building hard to redevelop is the same math that, on the other side, gives the city its texture. The first-floor brick storefront on the corner is the reason a neighborhood feels like a neighborhood rather than a clearance for the next surface lot. Once we tear it down, the character of the city thins by a percent that doesn’t come back. Not in our lifetime. Not in the buyer’s lifetime, either.

This is not a sentimental claim. It’s an inventory observation. The supply of intact early-20th-century industrial and institutional buildings in Grand Rapids is finite and declining. Every one that gets demolished is a future that no longer exists. Every one that gets adapted is a future the next generation gets to inherit.

The math is harder, but the outcome is better

The financial argument for ground-up development is straightforward: known site conditions, predictable cost, faster timeline, easier financing. The financial argument for adaptive reuse is more complicated, and it has to be made carefully. But it can be made.

Firestone Lofts is the cleanest version of the argument. Twenty-one units in a 1920s industrial building in downtown Grand Rapids, in the heart of the Arts District. The building has 12-foot ceilings, original maple floors, exposed brick on the interior walls, and tall industrial windows that face downtown. We did not build that. The 1920s did. Our job was to do as little as possible to it while making it work as residential. The unit count is modest by ground-up standards. The rent premium is meaningful. The vacancy is structural — we don’t have a vacancy problem at Firestone, because the units don’t exist anywhere else and people want to live in them.

Lumberyard Lofts is a different version of the same argument. Eight residential units paired with the adjacent 833 Michigan project, occupying a former lumberyard on Michigan Street that, if we hadn’t redeveloped it, would still be a vacant industrial parcel with no path to becoming what it is now: a piece of the urban fabric. The eight units do not, by themselves, justify the work. The eight units plus what happens to Michigan Street as a result of the redevelopment — that justifies the work.

The general principle: the locations adaptive reuse creates wouldn’t exist if you ground-up developed them. Ground-up development on those sites would produce a different building in a different relationship with the street, and the value of this building in this relationship would be lost. Sometimes that trade is right. Often it isn’t. The discipline is in knowing which.

It earns trust

There’s a softer argument that is, in practice, the most consequential. Adaptive reuse projects are watched. By the city. By the neighborhood groups. By the historic preservation board. By future tenants who will rent your other buildings someday because they remember what you did with this one. By public partners who control incentive approvals, zoning variances, and the small daily decisions that determine whether your next project goes well.

Every one of those constituencies is keeping score. Doing a historic building right — meaning, with care, with the time it actually takes, with respect for what was there — compounds across two decades of subsequent projects. Doing it wrong costs the same way, in the opposite direction. We’ve watched both versions play out in the West Michigan market, and the developers we admire most are the ones who treat the older buildings as the trust-building exercise that they are.

This is the part of the case for adaptive reuse that doesn’t fit on a pro forma. The pro forma shows you the project. The relationships earned on the project show up on the next project’s pro forma, in lower friction, faster approvals, better tenant interest, and the willingness of a public partner to take your call when something has gone sideways and you need a thoughtful conversation rather than a bureaucratic one.

A note on the present

Our most recent adaptive reuse is Academy Manor at Marywood — the conversion of the historic Dominican Sisters Motherhouse on Lakeside Drive SE into 109 units of senior multifamily housing. Residents began moving in in October 2024. The building was finished in 1928, designed in a quiet institutional style, set back on a wooded bluff above the Grand River. It would have been entirely possible to scrape the site and start over. Several developers had looked at it. None of them had wanted the work.

We wanted the work. The work was hard. The work was right.

If you’ve been on the Lakeside campus recently and seen the residents in the dining room or out walking the grounds, you have seen the answer to the question this essay is trying to answer. The building, after a century, is still doing what buildings are supposed to do: holding life inside it. Our job was to make it possible for it to keep doing that.

We will keep coming back to historic buildings because the buildings outlive us, and we’d like to leave them a little better than we found them.

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For more on our approach to multifamily — including the adaptive reuse projects above — see our multifamily capability page and the full multifamily portfolio.