Lumberyard Lofts

Lumberyard Lofts is a redevelopment on the Michigan Street NE corridor that paired 16,000 square feet of residential space — eight loft-style units — with the adjacent 833 Michigan Street commercial redevelopment. Together the two buildings made up a $5.6 million mixed-use project that brought a long-overlooked block back into productive use.

Since opening in 2013, Lumberyard Lofts has remained fully leased — a quiet but telling result for a building of this scale in a transitional location. The project earned a Best Re-Use of a Building award and was supported by Tax Increment Financing from the City of Grand Rapids and a Community Revitalization Program award from the State of Michigan, layered together to bridge the gap between what a small adaptive reuse can pay for itself and what it actually costs to build.

The Lumberyard / 833 Michigan pairing is one of the earlier examples of Third Coast Development’s preferred approach to the Michigan Street corridor: take two adjacent properties, fix them together, and use the combined scale to justify the level of architectural and operational care that neither building could support alone.