Friedrich Lofts

The Friedrich lofts are located just across the tracks from downtown San Antonio. The building was originally used to manufacture HVAC systems for the residential and commercial market. They didn't follow a cohesive plan when they where designing the plant resulting in some strange space configurations. The original owners built adhoc buildings onto the site as they needed it, including extending the roof across some alleyways to utilize that space as well.

We met Patrick Sheer, the broker for the property, who furnished us with some detailed and interesting information about the history of the property, how the area declined with the construction of highway 281, cutting it off from downtown, the original use and current developers plans and sale price. He is asking for an ambitious $8m for this project. The current income does not support this value.

The site is well developed in certain areas into office space. There is 10000 square feet of office space at the moment. We where fortunate to tour one of the offices, which is occupied by an architecture firm. See pictures below for the specifics, but the space was well used by and large.

One issue that this project has is large industrial rooms with few walls. When the spaces are broken up into smaller sections, it becomes hard to get natural light into the majority of the useable areas.

This is one reason that the project has not continued in other areas. There was some talk about creating residential and retail in the other areas, but overcoming the lighting issues is complex, especially for the residential units.

It is in a serious state of disrepair in some places, with a portion of the roof collapsed in one room. It is not safe for public use at the moment as there are nails sticking up from the floor in one room, massive pits in the floor in another and inadequate ventilation in other areas. In short, the developed portion of the site is very clean and well designed and redeveloped with about 2 thirds of the site still needing major repair work.

The site is in a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) zone, is eligible for new market tax credits, historic tax credits and is also in a Planned Unit Development (PUD) zone. An interesting artifact of the organic way that the buildings grew around each other is that the site is quite flexible in terms of Historic tax credits, a major boon over other historic sites.

If a developer could build housing on the site, and employ those same people in another part of the site, he could claim some tax credits from the federal government under another plan aimed at minority groups.

The city asked them to park in another space as the parking area that they where using did not have sufficient ventilation. The cost of renovating this space is therefore wasted until a new usage can be found.

A final note is that this site is a brown field site with some PCB, asbestos and lead based paint that would need to be remediation.

Historical industrial elements in enterance