The crane came down in November. That was the tell.
A Milwaukee County judge granted C.D. Smith Construction a default foreclosure judgment on June 29 against the Edison, the 378-unit tower that developer Neutral spent two years marketing as the tallest mass timber building in America. The Fond du Lac contractor says it’s owed $11.3 million. If it ends up with the site, it can sell it to another developer, though it needs one more filing before Judge Glenn Yamahiro issues a foreclosure order.
How the Edison mass timber project unraveled
Neutral broke ground in June 2025 to a lot of press. Work paused in September, which the developer framed as a temporary move to trim costs against tariff and inflation pressure. By October, a city official told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the project was short roughly $25 million. In November, C.D. Smith removed the crane and filed a $10.1 million lien.
Eleven other firms have filed over unpaid bills, including Chicago-based Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture. Neutral CEO Nate Helbach tried to push the foreclosure case to arbitration; the judge ruled the request was improperly filed because Helbach isn’t an attorney.
Mass timber’s real constraint isn’t engineering
The structural case for mass timber has been settled for a while. CLT and glulam perform, the code has caught up, and the carbon math is genuinely better than concrete. The constraint is money.
Timber pro formas assume a premium that gets paid back in schedule compression and floor-plate efficiency. That assumption is fragile. The National Association of Home Builders reports the U.S. imports about a third of the lumber it consumes, and softwood tariffs have moved the input side hard over the past year. A project that pencils at a 5% structural premium doesn’t pencil at 15%.
Neutral was also a small developer carrying an outsized, first-of-its-kind building. When the gap opened, there was no corporate balance sheet behind it.
What this does to the next timber deal
Nothing about this failure indicts the material. Everything about it indicts the capital stack. But lenders don’t make that distinction quickly, and the next mass timber sponsor walking into a credit committee is going to get asked about the Edison.
The projects that will keep getting built are the ones with institutional sponsors who can absorb a cost overrun without the whole thing going to a judge. Groups like WoodWorks have spent a decade building the technical case. The financial case now needs its own advocates.