The Downtown, Intown, Uptown Housing Boom Is Here. At Last. Really.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, DALLAS WAS BUSY MOVING OUT- out to the growing suburbs of Richardson and Piano, out to neighborhoods in shiny North Dallas. Flash forward 20 years and the exodus is starting to flow the other way- “intown,” a useful it somewhat slippery term that includes the traditional downtown area (the Central Business District inside the freeway loop) and the neighborhoods within a mile or so of downtown.

Sure, a hardy band of urban pioneers has long beat the drum for intown housing, but for years it was more rhetoric and prediction than reality. Next year, next year-well, next year is here. Residential neighborhoods are mushrooming along McKinney and Cole avenues, in the State-Thomas historic area just north of downtown, in Deep Ellum, in the Cedars south of downtown, and even inside the Central Business Districts freeway loop.

The count changes every day, but according to the city of Dallas, the Central Dallas Association, and our own windshield survey, more than 5,000 intown units are completed, under construction, or planned to be under construction in 1995. Prospective intown tenants can choose from a smorgasbord of housing for rent and for sale that includes historic rehabs, new construction, high-rise, low-rise, and everything in between- even some housing units deemed “affordable” by HUD standards. And there’s much more to come. Virtually every developer who’s currently busy with one of these projects has another project or two on the drawing board.

In this dispatch from intown, you’ll read about the people who call intown home and the developers who do all but fluff their pillows at night to keep them happy. We bring you the major players-at the city of Dallas and in the private sector-who have put together special incentives and creative financing to make housing in the traditional CBD possible. And we preview the four projects that won the “beauty contest” to get that financing.

With apartments and condos filling up as soon as they are finished, it looks like intown housing will be a part of Dallas life for decades to come. So meet the trendsetters.



The city dwellers

“We’ve lived in Dallas for 13 years and did the normal suburban stuff while we were raising our kids,” says Karen MacCloskey. “But finally, we came to the point in our lives where living in the suburbs wasn’t convenient, wasn’t fun, and wasn’t necessary.”

Varying as they do in age, race, sex, and sexual preference, about the only demographic trait that virtually all of the folks living intown have in common right now is an empty nest. Karen and Michael MacCloskey are two of the many empty nesters in their early 40s who have moved intown from the suburbs. Karen’s a buyer for Lights Fantastic who recently took a leave of absence, and Michael works downtown as a first vice president with Prudential Securities, Their kids are 23 and 19, and, says Karen, are always in various stages of moving in and out. This summer, their son is home from college and living with them at their new townhouse in the State-Thomas neighborhood, roughly bounded by McKinney Avenue and Woodall Rodgers Freeway on the north and south and Central Expressway and Maple Street on the east and west. State-Thomas, of course, is named tor its two major arteries that both tun parallel to McKinney Avenue-State and Thomas streets.

With their options wide open, the MacCloskeys looked at high-tise living and various intown neighborhoods before deciding upon State-Thomas and the Grenadier Homes development called The Homes of Thomas Court. Seven of the townhouses are now either finished or are currently under construction. The project’s first phase will total 28 houses averaging 2,500 square feet and selling in the $300,000 range. With hardwood floors, wooden windows, and quality construction, the project has a solid, built-to-stay feeling.

The MacCloskeys bought one of the first two units, which Grenadier sold as soon as they were ready to show, and quickly took to the intown lifestyle. They live right around the comer from Dallas philanthropist Patricia Meadows, a State-Thomas dweller since the mid-’80s.

“We are both sports fanatics-basketball and hockey- and we love being only five minutes away from those activities,” Karen says enthusiastically. “We walk to dinner probably four nights a week. 1 tell my husband, ’Look at all the space we could have had if I hadn’t put in a kitchen.’ We go to the movies in the West End, go to the Farmers Market every weekend and to Deep Ellum on occasion. We do everything at the last minute, and here it’s only a few minutes away.”

The area’s convenience to restaurants and entertainment was also a major draw for Thorn Dance. Formerly one of those delivery guys in the brown shorts deemedsexy by The Wall Street Journal, Dance is now a 37-year-old in management with United Parcel Service and one of the first owners to move into the 222C Canton Loft Condominiums. His 712-square-foot unit near the Farmers Market boasts hardwood floors, gallery-style expanses to complement his art collection, and picture-postcard views of the downtown skyline up close and personal. A devoted soccer fan, Dance loves being close to Reunion Arena and, flashing back to the three years he spent driving a UPS truck, he lists his neighborhoods proximity to “all arteries of the freeway system” as another major selling point.

Of the 48 units at 2220 Canton, about half of them had been sold by early summer. Units range from 700 feet to 2,500 feet and sell for $60,000 to $400,000.

“I am definitely a condo person. I don’t like single family living,” Dance says. “Between Reunion, the West End, Deep Ellum, and what’s going on along McKinney Avenue, this building is near the city’s heartbeat of activity.”

Dance’s office is at Abrams Road and LBJ Freeway, so the reverse commute was another selling point for him. Underground parking, a pool, Jacuzzi, running track on the roof, and a concierge on duty 24 hours a day complete what Dance likes to call home.

About 20 percent of the 232 units of the Villas at Cityplace, on Cole Avenue between Lemmon Avenue East and Blackburn Street, lease to young professionals like Thorn Dance. Neal Sleeper, president of Cityplace Company, says these reverse commuters were a surprise Around 60 percent of the people signing leases for the project, which he predicts will be 100 percent leased by the time it s finished this month, work in and around downtown.

“That was the expected market,” Sleeper says. “But a good 20 percent of the people we are leasing to work in Las Colinas or in far North Dallas. They like living here for the reverse commute. And they like living downtown for the amenities-the restaurants, retail, the Arts District, the Dallas Theater Center. They like being in the middle of things.”

Perhaps surprisingly, only a tiny number of Villas tenants have moved to Dallas from places where intown living is a tradition-cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The Villas rent to tenants, primarily white-collar workers, who can pay $695 a month for a one-bedroom apartment and up to $2,200 a month tor a three-bedroom unit. Major selling points, says Sleeper, include the drive-up appearance-front doors with steps down to the street-and individual underground garages connected directly to the units. These design elements give the Villas an urban flavor vastly different from the cookie-cutter garden-style apartment complexes that have dominated the rental market in Dallas.

People searching for that urban flavor often end up at the Intown Living Center, a marketing center for 150 neighborhoods inside Loop 12. A nonprofit organization, the center is not beholden to any single development company and offers those interested in looking for the intown living experience a wealth of information without the hard sell.

In its first month of existence this past April, the center welcomed some 400 visitors, helping, among other things, to dispel some of the fears that people may have about intown living. On the issue of safety, for example, savvy intown developers trumpet amenities like attached or underground parking garages. Some of their designs allow projects to “self-police” by eliminating dark expanses and making sure neighbors’ windows face common areas.

For years the intown living debate revolved around this philosophical question: Which would come first-the chicken (intown housing) or the egg (the support amenities like restaurants, dry cleaners, grocery and drug stores, and more)? After all, what was so great about living intown if you had to drive 10 miles to drop off a shirt?

As developers had long predicted they would, the chickens and eggs seem to be arriving simultaneously. As housing units have slowly increased, so have support amenities. Restaurants abound along McKinney Avenue and in Deep Ellum. The new Albertson’s grocery store on McKinney and the Target store in Cityplace Market across Central Expressway are busy night and day. There’s a 10-screen movie theater in the West End and a 14-screen, 4,000-seat Sony Theatre complex coming to Cityplace soon. At lunch time and all evening, golfers practice their game at Cityplace’s Hank Haney Golf Center. Smaller retail support services like dry cleaners are also within walking distance tor most intown residents. Another large grocery store is expected to announce a Deep Ellum location soon.

With the growth of these amenities, the Intown Living Centers Catherine Horsey is beginning to see some interest from families with children, a sign that the empty-nest demographic of intown residents may not hold true tor long.

“We figured most of the interest would come from young professionals with no children, hut we are getting lots of middle-aged people and people with children and who moved to the suburbs to be in a good school district but never warmed to suburban life,” she says.

Lewis E. Wood is one of those middle-aged people who plans to move intown with his wife, Sunny, and their daughters Lauren, 16, and Leslie, 8. Wood, a principal with John W. Miller in Pan American Capital Corporation, is developing the Deep Ellum Lofts, a 140-unit project in Deep Ellum in the 3300 and 3400 blocksof Elm, Main, and Commerce streets. The Woods plan to occupy a unit as soon as the dust stops flying.

“My oldest daughter is a student at the Arts Magnet,” Wood says. “She thinks it will be really cool to live in a loft in Deep Ellum.”



Voices in the wilderness

For years city boosters have talked about intown HOUS-ing as a way to keep the Dallas core vital. Urban planners have promised that people living in the core would attract retail, restaurants, and entertainment-and increase tax revenue. It was almost as if building intown housing was a civic duty. We must build. We must build. You first.

And so it sat. While so-called “world class” cities like New York and Toronto could point to thriving mixed-use neighborhoods in their city centers, Dallas had little beyond hope, dreams, and Bryan Place, the 440 zero-lot-line houses and condominiums created in 1979 by Dave Fox while he was head of Fox and Jacobs. Bryan Place and the 248 units at the aging Manor House high-rise, 1222 Commerce, were for a long time the city’s only examples of intown housing. Ten years ago, the State-Thomas neighborhood could count 75 to 80 housing units, Deep Ellum half that, and the Cedars only a few shining examples of inner-city rehabs.

All along, though, there have been believers. One of them is M. Thomas Lardner. Seventeen years ago Lardner, then president and CEO of The Lehndorf Group, now president and CEO of The L&B Group, bought the first parcel of what eventually would total 25 acres of property in the State-Thomas area for his European and American investors. Though many observers had their doubts, Lardner always had faith, he says, that the area held promise for intown housing. Proximity to the Central Business District, Highland Park, and Love Field were just three characteristics that attracted Lardner and a slew of other land speculators to State-Thomas.

But like many other developers, Lardner believed that wide-scale development would not take place until the city stepped up to the plate and took some risk, too. In 1988, Lardner chaired the Central Dallas Association housing committee that spearheaded a study to determine the demand for intown housing and made recommendations for public-private partnerships that would work toward the intown housing goal. Impatient, Lardner convinced his associates at The Lehndorf Group to toot the bill for the study conducted by HSM/Grubb & Ellis Advisors, Inc.

When the verdict was in, 15,602 employees in the Central Business District said they were attracted to the idea of living intown-but only 453 of those people said they could pay the $1.15 a foot rent needed to cover a developer’s costs. The conclusion: The risk was still too high to expect private developers to take the plunge for the greater good of a vital downtown unless the city was there to provide a lifejacket.



TIFS, PIDS, and progress

SO DEVELOPMENT LIMPED ALONG, WITH SMALL PROJECTS IN DEEP Ellum and the Cedars coming on line a few units at a time while major property holders like Lardner kept prodding the city to provide more incentive.

In 1989, the city took the first step toward reducing that risk for developers with the creation of the State-Thomas Tax Increment Finance District to pay for public improvements in the area from the incremental taxes generated by any new development. The city also provided the TIF with an initial $2.1 million seed loan for basic public improvements in the area.

The TIF-along with another late ’80s study that indicated demand for housing in the area had grown to as many as 20,000 units- was just what Robert Shaw needed to get started on the first of many projects he would build in State-Thomas, Shaw, a former center for the Dallas Cowboys who cut his teeth in real estate with Roger Staubach, got busy building in the neighborhood Lardner had dubbed Uptown, comprised of State-Thomas, the McKinney Avenue corridor, and Cityplace. Shaw and Lardner are credited with starting the intown housing boom in 1990 with the Meridian, a 133-unit luxury apartment project that Shaw’s Columbus Realty built at State and Allen streets in State-Thomas. Joint venture financing for the project was provided by principals of Lard-ner’s Lehndorf Group and a Japanese firm, Sumicon. The Meridian was completed in 1991 and has been 100 percent occupied since its opening.

Lardner has continued to encourage the city to get behind Uptown. Ditto for Shaw, a former president of the Oak Lawn Forum, a board mem-ber of the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority and the CDA’s housing committee, and an active founding member of the Uptown Public Improvement District. Like the State-Thomas TIF, the Uptown PID, created by the Dallas City Council in June 1993, is another creative way for the city to encourage private investment. The PID allows the city to levy special assessment against property in the district and then turn over those proceeds to a nonprofit management entity, called Uptown Inc., for improvements such as landscaping, lighting, and other services for the neighborhood. The McKinney Avenue Trolley, for instance, received $88,000 through the PID in 1994.

Since the Meridian, Shaw has built a total of 1,600 units renting from $400 to $2,000 a month in the Uptown area, and more are in the planning stages. He works hard to make sure his tenants feel like they live in a neighborhood, organizing several events a month for residents and sponsoring a concert series in the Quadrangle.

“It’s hard to meet people in their cars,” says Shaw. “But get them out of the car and give them the opportunity to meet one another. That’s how you create sustainable neighborhoods.”

At the Albertson’s on McKinney Avenue, the aisles are crowded. The neighborhood’s diversity shows as residents of nearby Turtle Creek luxury high-rises shop for produce side-by-side with tenants of city housing projects. Across Central Expressway at the Target at Cityplace Market, the full lot tells the same story.

With Shaw and other developers active in the area, Tom Lardner is finally seeing his early predictions for State-Thomas come true. L&B’s 24-unit Carriage House development across from the Meridian at State and Allen streets is now leasing 1,250-square-foot units with attached one-car garages for about a dollar a foot. Under construction nearby is an L&B project too new to have a name. These 50 for-sale units, 1,650 square feet and up with two-car garages, will sell in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

Fueled by success in State-Thomas and Uptown, development has escalated in Deep Ellum and the Cedars. The intown boom is on.



The beauty contest

By 1993, while areas surrounding the Central Business District were seeing housing activity, the traditional city core could claim only the Manor House, built in 1965, as its lone residential outpost. The risk was still too great, loans too difficult to obtain. Meanwhile, the city’s directors of planning, housing, and economic development were busy traveling around the country, to St. Louis, Memphis, Milwaukee, studying how other cities had developed intown housing. They learned-eureka!- that Dallas needed a specific plan with financing incentives if it was serious about a downtown renaissance.

In February of 1993, Kent Collins came to Dallas to lead the Dallas City Center project, a public-private revitalization effort geared to a specific sector of downtown-the city’s old core including Main, Elm, and Commerce streets. Collins, whose salary is paid half by the Central Dallas Association and half by the city of Dallas, worked closely with the city staff, with CDA housing committee chair Susan Mead, and with property owners to develop a plan to revitalize downtown.

By May of 1993, the council passed the staff’s Intown Housing Policy with the specific goal to stimulate private development of 1,350 housing units within the CBD and 4,000 units within a one-mile radius of downtown.

The key to the city policy was the Section 108 loan guarantee program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The city applied for a $25 million Section 108 loan, promising in turn to loan that money to developers of in-town housing. In addition to stimulating economic development in the core, the Section 108 loans would create some affordable housing for low-income people; any project using the funds would have to provide at least 20 percent of its units at an “affordable” rate for low-income families, defined as 80 percent of the median income in Dallas ($36,400 for a family of four). The four projects highlighted here-Joske’s, Kirby, Sante Fe II, and Deep Ellum Lofts (see “The Players and Their Projects” throughout)-will all offer these affordable rates.

Next came what developers sarcastically refer to as “the beauty contest” and what city staff calls an “RFP” or request for proposals. The beauty contest was announced in the spring of 1993, and the city got 10 responses. Eight of those, says Cherryl Peterman, the city’s director of Planning and Development, were viable projects. Over the next two years, Peterman was the only constant lifeline for the developers involved, while a revolving door at City Hall left vacancies in the three key departments that were involved in the project: Housing, Economic Development, and Planning. Peterman moved from department to department and finally landed-with the Intown Housing Program-as director of Planning and Development.

Of the eight viable projects considered by the city in 1993, the four still alive have been a grueling learning process for the city and developers alike. Some developers who dropped out of the process and others who were scared away early on by red tape complain that the city is still making it difficult for developers to build intown. But Susan Mead, who in various roles with the CDA has worked toward intown housing for 15 years, is impressed with what the city has accomplished.

“No redevelopment process is perfect,” Mead says. “But the city of Dallas has been talking about this for over 30 years, and we have really pulled this together in the last two years. It has been a very creative process. I don’t know of any other city that is using the Section 108 funds the way Dallas is. We may still need to tweak the process, but the important thing is to keep it in place so that developers will begin to trust it.”

That trust, of course, comes from seeing projects work, and finally, Dallas is on the threshold. After two long years, the Sheet-rock is going up for the four pageant beauties.



Risk and reward

Craig Hall, knee-deep in redeveloping the KIrBy Building downtown, admits that the risk is still high for intown housing-even with the special financing and tax credits that allowed him to move forward. “We aren’t going to know whether these work until they are done, but we are doing it anyway because we believe it is good for downtown. It is uncharted waters,” he says. “It has risk.”

So along with the city and a second tier of developers waiting in the wings, Hall looks to the fall of ’96 when his project is finished and tenants fill the building-or don’t.

“This is only the first round of development,” cautions the city’s Cherryl Peterman. “There is still no proven market. Noone knows right now it” these projects will lease or stay leased,”

That’s why she’s busy with the second round of the beauty contest. In round one, the city only committed half of the total $25 million. So Peterman announced another beauty contest to find projects worthy of the rest of the money. Seven applications were submitted. “This time around we will be a lot smarter and a lot more efficient,” she promises.

Lew Wood, a winner of the city’s first intown housing beauty contest as developer of the 140-unit Deep Ellum Lofts, points to the 480-unit Gaston Yards project of JPI Texas Development when he wants reassurance about his own sanity. JPI’s project, financed with private capital, was under construction when D Magazine went to press. Wood and other smaller developers in the area look to the $30 million project at the southeast corner of Good-Latimer Expressway and Gaston Avenue as further proof their hunches were sound.

“We did a lot of market research,” says JPI’s Guy Brignon. “We think 10 percent of our tenants will come from Baylor, 25 percent from downtown, 10 percent from Uptown projects, 25 to 30 percent from out of town, and the rest from other areas of Dallas.”

Columbus Realty’s Shaw thinks the risk is high only for the wrong kind of project. You can’t bring garden-style apartments like The Village intown, he says, and expect them to work.

“People aren’t moving intown for the homogenous suburban experience,” says Shaw, adding that developers have to work together to give intown residents the pedestrian-friendly, diverse neighborhoods they want.

“We want more of every thing down here,” says Lew Eood. “More people, more restaurants. People here want something more than listening to the grass grow.” Walk down McKinney Avenue one evening and get a feel for what Shaw and Wood are talking about. As the office buildings empty, the lights come up and the city-dwellers come out. Out to a restaurant, the grocery, the cleaners, the gas station, or the grocery store in their urban neighborhood, all just a few blocks from their home. Sit at one of the sidewalk cafes and watch what urban planners call “revitalization of the core.” It’s not quite Manhattan, but the activity of the neighborhood is real, the energy obvious, the future bright.

THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PROJECTS

The Santa Fe II Building



Cliff Booth is not a newcomer to redevelopment of older buildings. He came to Dallas in 1979 from Montreal and his Southwest Properties has been pursuing such projects ever since. Booth’s 268-unit Santa Fe II, at 1122 Jackson Street, is expected to be under construction some time in the fall. Units will range from 585 to 2,000 square feet; rental rates will range from $461 to $1,500 a month. The average unit will be about 681 square feet, Booth says. Forty percent of his project will lease at the affordable rates. The project will also include 15,000 square feet of retail space.

Santa Fe II is near City Hall, the Southwestern Bell building and the downtown courthouses, so Booth expects to draw tenants from the clerical and middle management workers in that employment base. Having worked on Santa Fe II for almost three years, Booth is ready to start making some money.

“I tell people alt the time that we could not afford to do this downtown if we did not have projects going on in other areas. This isn’t a hobby, but it is something we care about that hasn’t made us any money to date,” Booth says.

Once Santa Fe II gets going, Booth has several other downtown residential projects on deck. He expects to convert the Await Buildings in the West End and the Union Bankers complex on Good-Latimer Expressway in Deep Ellum into mixed use projects that include residential as a major component.

THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PROJECTS

The Joske’s Building



WHAT MOST PEOPLE’ CALL THE Joske’s building, 1901 Main Street, architect Graham Greene and his partners, Jack McJunkin and Dan Boeckman, prefer to call the Titche Goettinger Building. Constructed in 1928, the building has beautiful architec-tural detail. Greene lights up when he begins to talk about the 130 units being built there: 15-foot ceilings, some two-story units, a luxe penthouse, unique art deco exterior lighting, underground parking, a ground-floor retail concourse, nearby pocket parks-and his list of selling points goes on. The units will range from 650 to 2,500 square feet and will lease for between. $500 and $2,500 a month.

Greene quickly admits that sticking with the project and the city process to get Section 108 financing was difficult. Rehabilitating a historic building is no easy task. And it’s expensive. Asbestos removal alone will cost these developers $2.50 a foot-the equivalent of putting in two sprinkling systems, The layer upon layer of financing required to pay for such procedures in these unproven markets pushes many developers to the suburbs where construction is easier.

For the 1901 Main building, those layers include historic tax credits, tax abatement from the city, private money, conventional bank financing for a construction loan, and perhaps a long-term Fannie Mae mortgage. But the Section 108 money had to come first, Greene says, before anything else could fall into place.

Greene calls working through the city’s Intown Housing Program “a game of persistence” and to his colleagues describes a project’s difficulty in terms of the amount of “brain damage” required to make it happen.

“There are so many people involved that have to agree to get all of this financing and these plans in alignment. That takes an incredible amount of time and patience,” Greene says.

Greene’s patience and that of his partners paid off this spring when they received HUD approval for this project. When D Magazine went to press, work on I901 Main was scheduled to be underway any day.

THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PROJECTS

Deep Ellum Lofts



Early in June, Lew Wood and John Miller were revving their engines just waiting on the nod from the city to move forward. Their Section 108 financing had already Keen approved, they had raised $2 million in private investment through Henry S. Miller, and they had commitments from two banks for interim construction loans. Their construction company, Wright Commercial, was on alert for an aggressive six-month completion target.

“This is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life,” says Wood, who has been in the real estate business for almost 20 years. “Every time you add a layer of financing, it exponentially increases the difficulty. Working with historic buildings further increases the complexity. Compared to this, developing in the suburbs is so easy.”

But Wood and Miller stuck with it, they say, because they had a firm belief that they had the right product in the right location.

Deep Ellum Lofts will encompass the entire 3300 and 3400 blocks of Main along with 3311 Elm and 3401 Commerce. Wood and Miller’s Pan American Capital Corporation purchased a portion of Second Avenue to be its future front entrance. The 140 units will range from 500 to 2,000 square feet and will rent for about a dollar a foot. Thirty percent of the building will be leased at affordable rates.

Several of what Miller calls “outdoor living rooms” are reminiscent of New Orleans-style buildings with interior courtyards. Fountains, reflecting pools, fire pits, and the first swimming pool in Deep Ellum are some of the features Wood and Miller say make their project unique.

“A lot of people question our sanity,” Woodsays. “But we believe there is a large pent-up demand for living here.” He points to the 110,000 workers in the Central Business District and 10,000 more close by at Baylor Hospital as the two most obvious audiences interested in Deep Ellum Lofts.

Then there are the creative types who already call Deep Ellum home and, over the years, have shown they were willing to sign leases for the right product at the right price. Developer Don Blanton has been converting warehouses in Deep Ellum for 10 years. According to Blanton, his apartments, which go for $425 to $2,000 per month, stay 100 percent leased.

“When someone moves out, they have a friend ready to sign a lease,” Blanton says.

THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PROJECTS

The Kirby Building



The Kirby Building, 1509 Main Street, is another Dallas architectural gem that will soon be converted to apartments. Originally built in 1913, the Kirby Building is on the National Register of Historic Places and is considered a fine example of late Gothic Revival style.

In this case, Hall Financial Group is the developer, with Craig and Kathryn Hall leading the way. Financing for the 214-unit residential conversion of the Kirby Building is every hit as layered as that for the other downtown projects. According to the Section 108 financing structure, a third of the building will be leased at the affordable rates.

“This is the most expensive type of housing to develop,” Craig Hall explains. “It’s more expensive to redevelop than to build new projects. High-rise is more expensive than low-rise, and historic projects are the most costly of all.”

Still, you can tell Hall is having more fun with the Kirby Building than with the other 10,000 apartment units his company owns and manages. The project’s design elements change daily but included, in early summer, a six-story interior atrium, six loft-style three-story units attached directly to garages in the building’s adjacent parking garage, an exercise room, a pool and common area on the roof, six luxury units on the roof with large, private balconies, and special finishes in all of the units. Apartments in the Kirby Building will rent for between $400 and $3,000 a month.