- Bellevue’s long-discussed $115 million riverfront redevelopment with Neyer Properties is delayed again due to rising interest rates and financing challenges.
- The city’s planned $7.8 million parking garage ballooned to $13 million as rates jumped, forcing redesigns and scaled-down plans.
- Bellevue officials now expect construction to begin in about a year, with a smaller $10 million garage and fewer amenities.
A long-promised $115 million riverfront redevelopment in Bellevue is once again delayed, with rising interest rates forcing the city and developer back to the drawing board.
In August 2022, the Bellevue City Council approved a disposition of property and development agreement with Cincinnati-based Neyer Properties for a project whose investment is estimated at around $115 million of private funds and $17.5 million in infrastructure improvements.
However, nothing has been done with the property since then, and the city has granted multiple extensions to the developer in that time, with the most recent at an Aug. 13 council meeting.
The land is about seven acres and is bound by the Ohio River to the north and Fairfield Avenue to the south, with Lafayette Avenue to the east and Berry Avenue to the west. It has long been the target of redevelopment efforts that ultimately never materialized.
The development is planned to be mixed-use with a hotel, public parking garage, 10,000 square feet of commercial space, and 239 market-rate apartments.
Harbor Greene Drive would be extended in this plan, while improvements are brought to Lafayette and Berry avenues.
“The problem was interest got so high, and the city had agreed to do the public garage and the public right of ways,” Bellevue Mayor Charlie Cleves told LINK nky. “When we first started doing this, interest was only 1% and then it got delayed. It got delayed because the school wouldn’t sign off on it for about a year. Then interest went up to 5.5%.”
Cleves said all of a sudden, a $7.8 million parking garage became a $13 million parking garage because of the difference in the interest rate over the 30 years.
Cleves said the city is hearing that interest rates are expected to decrease over the next year.
“The fact that we couldn’t do the part we promised to do anymore with the IRBs, because they were only going to generate the $7.8 million, and between the different things we had, that’s all we could generate at the beginning, when the interest was low,” he said. “Then all of a sudden, interest took off, and there was no way we could come up with our part.”
The garage has been redesigned with a price tag of about $10 million. Cleves said Neyer’s new timeline to start the project is one year.
Cleves said there are currently no renderings because things are constantly changing.
“We’re trying to still do the same type of thing,” Cleves said. “It’s going to get scaled down because we had to, to make it work, so we can build a smaller garage and get it to work with the money we were able to raise.”