The City of Milwaukee’s effort to demolish the vacant Northridge Mall is held up in court, but two recent fires damaged the structure.

The first fire occurred Saturday, July 16, with smoke spotted coming from the top of the building.

The second fire caused “extensive damage” to the area around the former food court said the Milwaukee Fire Department. The fire was a two-alarm event that occurred Tuesday, July 19.

The cause of both fires is under investigation.

The mall, owned by China-based U.S. Black Spruce Enterprise Group, closed in 2003. The ownership group, which acquired the shuttered mall in 2008, announced plans for an Asian marketplace, but the proposal has never formally moved forward, city officials contend. The sprawling complex is located near the intersection of W. Brown Deer Rd. and N. 76th St.

Social media posts in recent months indicate the mall has been a popular target for urban explorers. Images were posted to Instagram in June showing comedian and Kia Boyz documentarian Tom Gerszewski and others standing inside the derelict mall. A number of other posts appear on Facebook.

In April 2019, city officials gathered outside the mall to announce a plan to issue a raze order on the property, a potential precursor to acquiring the property. Then-area Alderwoman Chantia Lewis said a legally-filmed, 2017 video inspired a wave of vandalism and trespassing.

Security at the mall was improved after a maintenance worker was killed by a high-voltage transformer in an electrical box at the mall in July 2019. The electrical box was previously damaged by scrappers said the Milwaukee Police Department. A civil case is still open from that incident.

The city’s lawsuit is also still ongoing.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge William Pocan ruled in the city’s favor in a 2020 trial, but Black Spruce appealed the ruling.

In March, the Wisconsin Appeals Court sent the case back down to the circuit court. In a written decision, it said Pocan improperly ruled that the cost to repair the buildings should be based on what was needed to open them to the public, instead of more limited repairs to maintain the buildings as vacant.

The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Aug. 15. Black Spruce is now represented by attorney Christopher M. Kloth, a partner at McDonald & Kloth.

State law allows a raze order to be issued when repair costs exceed 50% of the building’s value. The Department of Neighborhood Services estimates repairs would cost $6 million and the attached buildings are only assessed for $81,000. The underlying 46.5 acres of land are assessed at more than $2 million.

Black Spruce acquired the approximately 900,000-square-foot building complex for $6 million

Should the city acquire the mall, it could merge the land from the mall with land freed up from demolishing the attached former Boston Store building.

Bill Penzey, owner of Penzey’s Spices, bought the former Boston Store building in 2013 and attempted to acquire the rest of the mall, with the support of the city, for a corporate headquarters and warehouse for his company. He wasn’t able to reach a deal on acquiring the mall and donated the Boston Store property to the city in 2018. The city also acquired the ring road that surrounds the mall.

The mall opened in 1972. Northridge failed for a number of reasons, including a lack of direct freeway access, chain bankruptcies, the cyclical nature of malls and negative perception created following Jesse Anderson‘s murder of his wife in a mall parking lot and the subsequent false claim that the couple was attacked by two Black males. The mall’s competitors, including Mayfair, Brookfield Square, Southridge and Bayshore, have all received substantial public subsidies to help finance updates in the years since Northridge closed.

Menards and Pick ‘n Save were brought in as new retail anchors after the mall closed, but Pick ‘n Save closed in 2015. Those buildings are not included in the Black Spruce property, nor are the outlet buildings. Menards is now pursuing redevelopment of the Pick ‘n Save property, but the Board of Zoning Appeals rejected its initial proposal.

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Weekly Recap

Street Car Flats Take Shape

An oft-overlooked, aging downtown office building is being redeveloped into an apartment complex.

The nine-story building will contain 75 market-rate apartments.

Developer Paul Dincin is renaming the Underwriters Exchange Building after what he thinks will be one of several things drawing tenants in: the streetcar. The Street Car Flats building is located just north of E. Wells St. and the City Hall southbound stop on The Hop.

“It’s close to everything,” said Dincin in a 2020 interview, ticking off a list that included Cathedral Square Park, the Milwaukee School of Engineering campus, Milwaukee City Hall and BMO Tower.

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Charter School Reveals New $20 Million High School

The Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy (HFCA), a charter high school, is working to raise $25 million to construct a new building in Bronzeville and also renovate its existing building near N. 29th St. and W. Capitol Dr. into a middle school.

The new high school would have the capacity for up to 500 students, with the middle school designed as a feeder school for 325 students. The high school, according to a public database, had 312 students in the 2020-2021 school year.

“A new middle school would enable HCFA staff to reach students earlier and remediate proficiency deficits in the sixth grade instead of the ninth grade,” said Howard Fuller, former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, in a press release announcing the fundraising campaign. “The goal is for students to be better prepared for higher level courses and dual enrollment in college. Expanding STEM education, including business, technology, and health care career preparation, will help achieve the high school’s vision.”

The school, chartered by the City of Milwaukee, reports raising $16 million. It expects the new building to cost $20 million and the renovation of the existing building to cost $5 million.

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World’s Tallest Timber Tower Opens

Milwaukee can add a new feather to its cap. It’s now home to the tallest mass timber building in the world.

The 25-story, 284-feet-tall Ascent apartment tower is open and more than 100 of its 259 apartments are already leased.

The top 19 floors of the $128.2 million building are framed from an engineered product made by combining layers of lumber into a stronger material.

The European-grown white spruce columns, beams and deck are exposed at many spots throughout the building, a design aesthetic development firm New Land Enterprises hopes will make the building stand out.

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State’s Largest HIV Clinic Relocating, Expanding

Vivent Health announced Tuesday that it is relocating its HIV clinic to 1311 N. 6th St., expanding its capacity by more than 20%.

“The need for HIV services is at an all-time high,” said Michael J. Gifford, Vivient president and CEO, in a statement. “This new facility will launch us forward to meet that need and begin to end the HIV epidemic in Wisconsin through expanded and effective HIV prevention, care and treatment services.”

Vivent, formerly known as the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, expects to be able to serve an additional 1,000 patients in the new facility. That would be a 21% increase from the 4,753 patients served in 2021.

The nonprofit organization is leasing 46,277 square feet of space from The Druml Company. It will take over a building most recently leased by Milwaukee Area Technical College. The building is across the street from the Deer District and the planned new home for the Milwaukee Public Museum.

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Rite-Hite Will Open New HQ In City

Warehouse equipment company Rite-Hite will welcome the first employees into its new headquarters later this month.

The company is developing a three-building complex in the Reed Street Yards business park, just south of Downtown, as part of a strategy to relocate from its suburban Brown Deer headquarters and consolidate other area offices. When completed in early 2023, it will be a home for 300 employees.

Just the first building, HQ South, is opening now. In a statement, the company said it will begin with 80 employees. The initial employees are coming from three facilities: the Brown Deer headquarters, the Brown Deer location of service division Arbon Equipment and an engineering office at 8397 N. 87th St. near the former Northridge Mall in Milwaukee.

The research and development building is a two-story, 108,552-square-foot office building, on the south side of W. Freshwater Way. It is the location for Rite-Hite’s highly-specialized technical training center for sales personnel and customers. The center includes a series of loading docks allowing the company to showcase its array of warehouse products, including 12 different loading dock levelers and dock restraints and 20 different industrial doors.

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Midtown Walmart Bought By Self Storage Company

An Iowa-based self-storage company purchased the former Walmart department store at the Midtown Center retail complex.

Affordable Family Storage paid $3.28 million for the 15.24-acre property and approximately 160,000-square-foot building according to state real estate transfer records posted July 13.

The property, vacant since 2016, was listed with auction service Ten-X in June. It had a starting bid of $825,000.

Conversion to a self-storage use would require a zoning change, and receiving such approval is not guaranteed. The Board of Zoning Appeals recently rejected a request by Menard’s to expand a self-storage operation next to its Northridge store.

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Evers Helps Finance 10 Affordable Housing Proposals

The ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have effectively halted a number of proposed affordable housing developments. But a new program from Governor Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority (WHEDA) aims to get things moving again.

Twenty-two projects statewide, including 10 in Milwaukee, will benefit. The awards could have a ripple effect throughout Milwaukee, adding affordable housing to the expensive Lower East Side, repurposing a vacant school on the North Side, advancing the replacement of the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, redeveloping a vacant theater and kickstarting the reinvigoration of the Garden Homes neighborhood.

WHEDA annually awards developers federal low-income housing tax credits as the primary funding source for new affordable housing, but the credits are issued at a fixed amount and do not keep pace with rising construction costs. As a result, a number of developers who secured credits in the 2020 and 2021 award cycles saw supply chain issues, inflation and rising interest rates chip away at the viability of their projects.

In April 2022, Evers announced a $20 million discretionary program that would use American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to close financing gaps. WHEDA announced Monday it received more than $38 million in requests. Using an additional $5 million in ARPA funding and $7.4 million in federal National Housing Trust funds, Evers and WHEDA expanded the available funding pool and are providing $32.4 million to help plug funding gaps.

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New Public Museum Design Unveiled

The design for the new natural history museum downtown, to replace the Milwaukee Public Museum, was unveiled Monday.

“This building will stand proudly as a new gateway into downtown Milwaukee,” said Ellen Censky, president and CEO of MPM Inc., the non-profit that operates the public museum, “and as an iconic landmark for the Haymarket neighborhood.”

The new $240 million museum at the corner of N. 6th St. and W. McKinley Ave. will be five stories and 200,000 square feet, with a design inspired by the natural history and geography of Wisconsin and Milwaukee. Specifically, it was inspired by Mill Bluff in Mill Bluff State Park.

“You can make an iconic building by throwing something shocking on 6th and McKinley, but that wouldn’t be good enough for what we were hearing,” said Todd Schliemann, of Ennead Architects, “We need to bring meaning to the icon, it needed to be of this place.”

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