ESCANABA –Since Super One Foods closed its doors in 2017, there have been different ideas of how to best redevelop the site, but the most-current plan for the former grocery store is the construction of a large apartment complex.

“What they mentioned to me was they wanted to do 100 apartments, probably three stories –or whatever it may be — and 100 apartments,” said Escanaba City Manager Patrick Jordan, who has been in regular contact with the property owner, Dial Properties, over the past few months.

Few details are available about the proposal, as Dial has not yet submitted a site plan to the city, but a few facts are certain if the project moves forward. Firstly, the apartments would be rented at market rate, meaning they would not be subsidized for low-income or elderly tenants. Second, the site would not be rezoned from commercial to accommodate the proposal.

Prior to a complete overhaul of the city’s zoning ordinance earlier this year, the property would not have been eligible for residential development without being rezoned or a variance being issued. For multiple reasons, both avenues to redevelopment could have been problematic or failed entirely.

With the apartment complex plan in mind, the city went a different route: adjusting the zoning ordinance to allow multifamily dwellings as a special use in commercial zones. The change stops short of allowing developers to put multi-family housing on any commercially-zoned parcel, but creates a process by which developers can work with the city’s planning commission for special permission to do so on a case-by-case basis.

The change is not inconsistent with the city’s treatment of other zoning designations. According to Jordan, multifamily dwellings were already an accepted special use for properties zoned light industrial.

Dial has also expressed interest in using the property commercially, at least in part. However, how that would happen remains to be seen. An apartment complex isn’t the first idea Dial has had for the property. Dial had planned to construct a 55,000-square-foot hotel with 80 rooms on the site, plus two restaurants on the outlots of the property. As of March 2020, Dial was in talks with Hampton Inn for the operation of the hotel.

The plans to redevelop the site into a hotel were not without controversy, however. Some in the community balked when Dial permanently capped the sewer on the property so it would meet the legal definition of “blight” under Public Act 381, the Brownfield Redevelopment Act of 1996. Being blighted allowed the developers to seek brownfield status for the property, opening up a variety of tax incentives and grants.

Despite some on the city’s Brownfield Redevelopment Authority Board expressing hesitation or moral objections to allowing a developer to blight their own property for tax benefits, the authority went forward with granting the designation in 2019. The primary benefit of brownfield status is the ability to access tax incremental financing (TIF) reimbursements. In the case of brownfield sites, this means the difference between a property’s taxable amount at the time it was designated a brownfield and the value of the property once it has been developed can be captured by the authority for a set period of time and returned to the developer to pay for specific eligible expenses that are included in a plan approved by the authority and the city council. The council approved a plan tailored to the hotel project in March of 2020.

“It’s perfectly legal. It doesn’t matter if an earthquake did it or a burglar did it or the owner did it. They’re a brownfield. Now is that a good law? I don’t know, but is it legal? Absolutely. Is it immoral? I don’t know, but we’re not here for morality, we’re here for law,” said Then-Council Member Ralph Blasier of Dial’s blighting the property.

The plan specified that, over the course of 15 years, a maximum of $477,650 would have been collected from taxes and reimbursed for costs including demolition, hazardous materials abatement, site plan preparation, and engineering. The Super One property remains a brownfield site, but because plans expire after two years if no work begins on a project, Dial would need to submit a new plan and have it approved by the council for any TIF reimbursements to be granted for the apartment complex proposal or any other proposed redevelopment at the site.