New hotel in downtown Muskegon gets approved for tax incentives
Posted By: mlive on January 29, 2025. For more information, please click here to read the source article.
Two tax incentives were approved Tuesday for a developer constructing a new hotel in downtown Muskegon. Lakeshore Hotel Partners is the developer in charge of the Harbor 31 housing, retail and hotel development – including an Element Hotel by Marriott.
On Tuesday, Jan. 28, the Muskegon City Commission approved a Commercial Redevelopment District and Commercial Facilities Exemption Certificate for 12 years for the hotel. That freezes the building’s taxable value and makes it so the owner does not have to pay full property taxes during that period of time.
“I’m here quite ecstatic about trying to move this forward – it been a process,” said Mike Hausman, representative from Lakeshore Hotel Partners.
He said they are close to finalizing a deal with their financial lenders for the $31.8 million hotel construction and plan to use their own funds to break ground “in the next month and a half.”
Hausman said he hopes to have the hotel complete before summer 2026.
The five-story hotel is set to be located on Viridian Drive across from the Grand Valley State University Innovation Hub on Muskegon Lake. The hotel will have 132 rooms, a restaurant, fitness center and indoor pool. There are expected to be 50 new jobs and 225 construction jobs during development.
The hotel will be operated by Schahet Hotels, who have “operated Hilton and Marriott hotels since 1962,” Hausman said. The developer has been working with the city to plan for sidewalks that will connect to existing pathways downtown and neighboring residential communities.
The hotel project will “revitalize underutilized property along the lakeshore,” according to city staff.
Harbor 31 housing, tourism project
The total Harbor 31 development is a $130 million development spanning 31 acres. As of January 2025, Hausman said they are about halfway through construction.
Ground broke in 2022, so several pieces of the development have been constructed and are already being used by residents. This includes the Viridian Shores neighborhood, a single-family condo project where 11 of 30 condos have been built and sold. Twelve of those will be situated on the shores of the lake. Most are moved in and currently living in the development, Hausman said.
Prices in Viridian Shores are expected to be around $575,000 for off-water condos and between $800,000 to $900,000 for on-water condos, which also have more amenities. Harbor Terrace Senior Living opened in the summer of 2024 with 124 beds with access to the various levels of independent living, assisted living, nursing care and memory care.
“It filled up pretty quickly,” Hausman said. The center is run by Trilogy Health Services. Still being built is The Meadows, a duplex housing project that will go next to Viridian Shores.
There will be 13 duplexes with 26 units for sale, with prices to be around $375,000. The duplexes will be situated around a restored wetland that will be gated off but still accessible to the residents.
“It will be a unique backyard for people, that’s for sure,” Hausman said. A pool and pool house will be constructed to be shared between the Viridian Shores and The Meadows.
“A place to go hang out and lay out in the sun, cool off and jump in the pool a little bit,” Hausman said, adding that the pool would likely be five to six feet deep.
A marina is slowly being built slip by slip. Fourteen slips have been created with a possibility of 44 large slips and 23 floating dock slips.
“We’re just working our way down the shoreline as demand occurs,” Hausman said. He said while all the slips so far have been purchased by residents in the Harbor 31 development, anyone is able to purchase a slip.
Overall, the Harbor 31 housing developments are “designed more for older families,” Hausman said.
He said the ranging prices were because “we were trying to get a nice mix of income levels there.”
Also planned for Harbor 31 are a boat sale and rental company with a fuel dock, a two-story waterfront restaurant with an open patio on top – “so they have a really nice view of Muskegon Lake and the sunset” – and transient docks for boaters to park and hang out at the restaurant.
There is also more space that the developer is still figuring out if it will be retail, office space, a breakfast restaurant or daycare center.
Wolverine Building Group is behind Lakeshore Hotel Partners, which was created specifically for this development project. Great Lakes Capital and Henrickson Architecture are also involved in the project.
“We’re very proud of it,” Hausman said. “It’s been a very hard road with the economy being the way it is.”
He said finding ways to save money, like getting tax abatement from the city, has been “instrumental” to getting the project done. The 35-acre parcel is the site of a former Teledyne Continental Motors industrial facility and had some contamination and other challenges to its development. The developer worked with the Michigan Department of Energy, Great Lakes and Environment to abate any contamination. Hausman said that essentially meant digging parts of the wetland up, filling them with healthy soil and reseeding native wetland plants. There were 900 wetland bushes planted and over 4,000 feet of fence placed around the wetlands.
“That’s almost a mile of fencing,” Hausman noted.
The housing developments will also connect to the bike path that goes along Shoreline Drive and will create a public access to a boardwalk on Muskegon Lake.
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