Cincinnati PR

The Good news about Uptown Commons: Arn Bortz is in charge. And he’ll be talking about it at the Nov. 10 CREW GC luncheon.

The Bad: No new Lighthouse Ltd. Say goodbye …. certainly not forever, but for a long time, to The Gap Band, and Something Dropping a Bomb On You. Baby.

The Ugly: nothing’s going to happen for at least a year.

“Uptown Commons will occupy what is now an open sore in the middle of a very important neighborhood of the City,” sez Arn Bortz, managing partner with Towne Properties and a former Cincinnati Mayor. Bortz will be the guest and featured speaker for Commercial Real Estate Women of Greater Cincinnati’s Nov. 10 luncheon at Maketewah.

“This is going to be contemporary in personality, and fresh. Uptown Commons will be the equal of any university-linked project anywhere in the United States.”

Located less than a long Tony Pike TD from the University of Cincinnati, Uptown Commons will stretch westward from Vine & Calhoun to Clifton Avenue.

The Shell Station and many of the older buildings will stay. En route: two hotels, one an extended stay and the second a more conventional product; a large, sprawing public park/greenspace component; 150 market-rate apartments; 75,000 square feet of retail, and an office building upon hallowed ground: the site of the former Lighthouse Ltd.

“This is a classic Urbanist mixed-use program. Everything that will be torn down has already been torn down,” Bortz added. “We hope that, within the next year or so, we will be ready to break ground. But it’s a very challenging environment with the capital markets to finance anything, much less something this complicated.

“We are confident, however, as the sun begins to rise again on our economy, that we will be ready to go and produce something of great value to the City of Cincinnati as a whole, for uptown and the University.”

For info re CREW GC, please visit http://www.CREWCincinnati.org.