The exterior of the future Lotus Crown building pointing to the southwest. The UTOG Brewing Company is seen on the first floor. Image via Lotus Company.
After years of the project sitting in limbo, a plan to build loft-style apartments in Ogden is now poised to move forward.
The Ogden City Council voted 4-3 to amend a 2015 land transfer and development agreement last week, paving the way for artist-oriented apartments to be built on the upper floors of the Thorstensen Building, located at 2331 Grant Ave.
With the council’s vote, the amended agreement will allow the site to become home to 25 loft-style apartments. The housing units will be in the building’s upper floors, as the first floor is currently home to commercial space like the UTOG Brewing Company, which opened in 2019.
Eric Gibson, Ogden’s economic development director, told the council that back in 2015 the city’s Redevelopment Agency and Lotus Company entered into a land transfer and development agreement that involved multiple properties. Lotus paid around $1.9 million for the Thorstensen.
However, aspects of that deal never materialized. Lotus did not build the units as intended, a parking structure that factored into the deal was never built, and space that Ogden City was supposed to lease wasn’t. Two businesses that were supposed to occupy the Thorstensen’s ground floor never did, which led Lotus to find new tenants like UTOG Brewing.
Gibson said the initial plan for the Thorstensen was to create 30 market rate, high-end urban lofts or condominiums. By 2017, plans for the housing units fell apart and the upper floors were listed as potential office spaces. By 2020, interest rates and inflation made residential and office builds more difficult, causing the upper floors to sit vacant for years.
That is, Gibson said, until Lotus was awarded federal and state tax credits for the artist-focused loft concept, which allowed the project to progress this month. The units, which are being called the Lotus Crown project, received $4 million in state LIHTC credits in October.
Gibson said Lotus reduced the number of units from 30 to 25 to make sure every unit had window access and to create larger live/work units. The average unit size would be 839 square feet.
Project Details
- 21 one-bedrooms
- 4 two-bedrooms
- 25 total
Christian Graf, a development manager at Lotus, told the council that Lotus plans to build high-quality units, which would be offered to households making 60% AMI or below. In the Ogden-Clearfield metro area, the AMI for a family of four is $117,900, and 60% AMI for a family of four is around $70,740.
Ricky Becerra, a development associate at Lotus, said the building’s pro forma calls for charging $1,300 per month for a one-bedroom unit and $1,500 for the two-bedroom units.
Council Member Dave Graf asked the developers why they shifted to affordable units instead of keeping the project at market-rate. Graf cited past Building Salt Lake reporting where Lotus’ director of development, Steven Blomquist, touted Ogden’s benefits for developers seeking to build either market-rate or affordable units.
“It’s a historic building, it overlooks the ballpark, it’s walkable to our downtown, it’s walkable to mass transportation to Salt Lake City — it just deserves more, in my mind,” Graf said. “I don’t understand why this isn’t market-rate for you all.”
Becerra said if Lotus was to do market-rate for this building, “we wouldn’t be able to have the finishes we have currently. We wouldn’t be able to meet our debt service, in other words we wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage. The construction costs would just not be able to pencil for the rents we’d be able to achieve, whereas the LIHTC structure actually enables us as a developer to provide dignified housing with good finishes that you’ve seen at other projects.”
Graf worried that the income limits on its apartment units would mean residents wouldn’t be able to have the disposable income needed to support businesses downtown.
“I’m worried about our downtown area not having enough people in it with disposable income in their pocket at the end of the month to support the amenities we want to see supported in our downtown area,” Graf said.
Christian Graf told the council member that affordable housing addresses those concerns, as affordable units help remove the cost burden to renters so that they can spend their extra income as they see fit.
Following input from the public — where multiple people asked why the loft units wouldn’t be for-sale — the city council voted 4-3 to approve the proposal.
Council members Kevin Lundell, Flor Lopez, Shaun Myers and Alicia Washington voted in favor, while council members Graf, Ken Richey and Richard Hyer voted against the proposal.
After the vote, Richey said he hopes the project works out, but he said there are plenty of low-income units found around Ogden. Instead of creating affordable units in this space, he said he felt that there could be a different opportunity further down the road for ownership opportunities and to create a higher-end development at this property.
“Maybe somebody else would be willing to take it on, Lotus could potentially sell the project — those were all things that were swirling in my mind,” Richey said. “I just feel like we have a lot of (LIHTC) in our community and I was hoping to see something a little different in this case.”
Dave Graf said his vote wasn’t about discriminating against those with a lower income, but it was about balance. He said he knows people who would love to downsize and purchase a condominium downtown, and he wanted to encourage those sorts of people to buy and live in spaces like the Thorstensen.
Hyer said not everything should be for rent in Ogden, and the city needs more home ownership opportunities. He added there’s too many rental units for a community as large as Ogden. Hyer said, “I just couldn’t get past that. Matter of fact, it’s gonna be hard for me going forward to vote for these subsidized rentals in lieu of something that somebody could buy.”
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