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Former North Towne Square site approved for redevelopment by Toledo plan commission

The Toledo City Plan Commission Thursday approved a major site plan to redevelop the former North Towne Square location for industrial use.

The proposal is being designed by Mannik & Smith Group of Maumee and would include three industrial buildings totaling approximately 852,000 square-feet, according to the plan commission staff report.

NorthPoint Development with an office in Cincinnati is being tapped to develop the site, which is near the intersection of Alexis Road and Telegraph Road. The North Toledo site, which was briefly known as Lakeside Centre before it closed in 2005, opened in 1980. It was demolished in 2013. The vacant plot of land is now owned by the city of Toledo.

“Pretty excited to bring NorthPoint to Toledo with the former site of the North Towne Mall, as everybody knows it’s a brownfield site. NorthPoint is proposing to build three speculative buildings that are 284,000 square feet,” Mannik & Smith representative Jeff Myers said.

Mr. Myers also noted that the final tenants are to be determined, but that the primary target will be warehousing.

“We’re very excited to finally come to the Toledo market,” NorthPoint Development representative David Weinbrecht said. “We recognize that it’s an underserved market when it comes to modern industrial space, and we hope this is just the beginning.”

The company brings experience to its Toledo development. Mr. Weinbrecht said that NorthPoint has done “over 85 million square feet of speculative industrial buildings throughout the country.”

Mr. Myers said that the development is taking on a “build it and they will come” mentality, similar to when the Overland Industrial Park was developed following the demolition of the former Jeep plant.

The site will join other recent redevelopment projects that have taken place in recent years, including the Southwyck Shopping Center, the Textileather site in North Toledo, the Triad Business Park in Monclova Township, and The Marina District along the East Toledo waterfront.

“It adds to the ‘bragability’ of the economic development people upstairs to say that we’re repurposing another mall property,” city Plan Commission Chairman Ken Fallows said.

Although warehousing is the targeted use, the building design will provide opportunities for flexibility and open the door for light industrial and manufacturing use.

“We build these specifically to be flexible for general use and for a variety of tenants that could potentially use that,” Mr. Weinbrecht said. “We can divide them anywhere from one to five different units to satisfy the tenants need.”

The plan staff recommended that the proposal be subject to 37 different conditions, several related to providing sufficient parking. The area surrounding the site at 301 New Towne Square Dr. in North Toledo is a mix of apartments, commercial businesses, vacant lots, and some already existing manufacturing sites.

“This has been a long time coming in terms of getting the site, acquiring it, going through multiple iterations of what it might be, and then being a part of this commission to be a part of rezoning the site,” said Tom Gibbons, director of the Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commission.

The development officially was announced in October with NorthPoint expecting to spend $70 million on the project with the intention of breaking ground on the first building some time this spring. An updated timeframe has not been announced.

Posted By: The Toledo Blade on May 12, 2022.  For more information, please click here to read the source article.

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