$13 million in public money would help Donald and Thibault Manekin convert the Census Building at 2601 N. Howard St.
Manekins look to rehab Census Building into hub for nonprofits
ROBBIE WHELAN
Daily Record Business Writer
July 15, 2008 7:25 PM
With the help of more than $13 million in public money, a father-son team is planning to convert a landmark 19th-century Baltimore industrial building into a hub for community-oriented nonprofits and work force housing.
Donald A. Manekin, a former partner at Manekin LLC, the Columbia-based developer, has joined his son Thibault in a venture to convert 2601 N. Howard St., also known as the Census Building, and former site of the H.F. Miller and Son Tin Box and Can Manufacturing Plant, into 40 units of housing for city public school teachers, with 35,000 square feet of office space on the ground floor.
City officials will review the final piece of the developer’s financing plan, a $700,000 low-interest city loan to the father-and-son team, known as Seawall Development Co., at a Board of Estimates meeting Wednesday.
The remainder of the money for the $19 million project will come from a variety of state and federal loans and tax credits and private investors.
“We’re looking for those sorts of real estate opportunities that are as much about community development and community revitalization as they are about profit,” said Donald Manekin.
The older Manekin sold his interest in his family business in 2000, after 25 years with the region’s fourth-largest developer.
Around the same time, his son Thibault, just out of college, was living in South Africa and running a youth program meant to overcome race barriers through basketball leagues.
When his son returned, Manekin said, he was interested in using the family’s real estate experience to give back to the community.
“I spent 25 years as a partner in a family-based business,” he said. “To build another office building didn’t have the same sense of excitement for me as doing something for the community.”
Manekin said the project is made possible by its inclusion of the office space, which allowed the developer to obtain $5.5 million in federal new market tax credits, which are meant to bring capital investment to low-income communities and a $700,000 loan from the state’s Neighborhood Businessworks program.
Seawall has letters of commitment, Manekin said, from nonprofits — the Baltimore Urban Debate League, Catholic Charities of Baltimore, Sports4Kids and Building Educated Leaders for Life — that will occupy about half the office space and locate 91 jobs in the building.
“From my perspective, any employer, be they for-profit or nonprofit, who is able to hire at a service level, is a good thing, especially in this market … even if they bring 10 jobs,” said Dana Pedersen Moore, president of the Charles Village Civic Association. “This has 100 percent support from the neighborhood.
“Thirteen – it’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of other people’s money, a lot of public funding, but we know that that’s what it takes to jump-start development in an area that has neglected for a while,” she said.
The building has been without a permanent tenant since 1953, when the Miller plant closed, although it was used as the Baltimore headquarters for the U.S. Census Bureau’s activities in 1990.
In the past few years, there have been two attempts to convert the building into housing units. The first, by Virginia-based developer H. Louis Salomonsky, fell apart in 2002 when Salomonsky was indicted for bribing a member of the Richmond City Council.
His company, Historic Housing LLC, sold the structure to a company owned by Gary A. Lofaso, a Washington-based developer who planned to put 80 housing units inside it, according to Manekin.
Details are unclear as to why this plan never came to fruition, but Seawall bought the building at a foreclosure auction from First Mariner Bank in August 2007 for $2.5 million.
The Census Building project is the second of its kind in Baltimore.
In 2005, Astor Court, a 36-unit teacher-housing development funded by the Abell Foundation, opened at the corner of St. Paul and 25th streets.
Astor Court, like the Census Building, has a commercial component, containing a Subway franchise and the headquarters of the Charles Village Community Benefits District, and benefited from a Maryland Neighborhood Businessworks loan.