CINCINNATI — A new luxury hotel is set to open in downtown Cincinnati.
The $174 million project will redevelop the former Fourth & Walnut Centre into a 280-room hotel.
Today, the vacant office building is about 491,000 square feet. On the first floor, you can see the scaffolding surrounding the building. There are also a few reminders of the past: Once a pizza parlor, the building has a message posted on its door thanking customers for 30 years of business, there are boarded-up windows, and graffiti can be seen on the walls.
“This is an old building, and old buildings come with very specific circumstances that require great attention to detail from the architect,” Cincinnati City Councilman Seth Walsh said.
On Wednesday, the Cincinnati City Council approved a 15-year tax abatement for the developer, Supreme Bright Cincinnati LLC, which will reduce the developer’s property taxes by 52 percent.
“The reason we’re doing that is to ensure the transaction is successful in terms of closing the loan, which will ultimately create a lot of jobs,” Walsh said.
The city projects the new hotel and construction will create 381 new full-time jobs and 498 construction-related jobs. The city does not plan to fund the project.
According to city documents for the project, the developer has put up $40,300,081 of its own funds and secured $88,431,256 in private financing. The renovations alone are expected to cost about $102 million.
The city also believes the project will “alleviate” “Cincinnati’s existing and worsening hotel demand issues.”
City of Cincinnati
“We need more hotel rooms. It just makes sense. So I think this deal finally makes sense from an economic standpoint. And Cincinnati is finally rising to the challenge. That’s why it makes so much sense for this deal to happen today,” Walsh said.
City of Cincinnati
The project began in 2018 after the developer applied for tax abatements, according to city documents. The city documents explain the project was put on hold due to “escalating construction costs, the COVID-19 pandemic and financing issues.” It’s unclear when the developer will break ground, but Walsh expects construction to begin within the next 18 months.
“At the end of the day, this comes down to job creation — not just construction jobs to be used to redevelop buildings, but permanent jobs,” said Karl Gertemoeller, executive director of the University of Cincinnati Real Estate Center at the Lindner School of Business. “These projects are capital intensive, and virtually all of them require some sort of tax abatement support to make the numbers add up.”
Gertemoeller said he viewed the city’s deal with the developer as a necessary price to pay for doing business, but he also pointed to the potential for future investment returns from the hotel.
“My view is that these hotel rooms will be needed to fully utilize the soon-to-be-redeveloped convention center,” Gertemoeller said.
“They’re going to come here for the Reds, they’re going to come here for the Bengals, they’re going to come here for FC Cincinnati, they’re going to come here for Aronoff, and they’re going to stay downtown,” Walsh said. “This is a really, really big thing for the city of Cincinnati.”
This building at Fourth & Walnut has seen better days, but today we’re one day closer to seeing a brand new 280-room luxury hotel. @WCPO 11pm Hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars will be pumped into the project. pic.twitter.com/gcbMNDFsfi
— Brett Buganski (@Bret_Buganski) September 12, 2024
