Trico Building Apartments: A $112M Reuse of Buffalo's Wiper Factory

The windshield wiper was mass-produced in this building. It now holds 242 apartments.

Trico Products Plant No. 1 is a seven-story, 500,000-square-foot factory on the edge of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. Krog Group and BMW Management Company have been working on it since 2016. Construction finished in February 2025 at $112 million, up from an original $108 million after a pause and restart.

Project Scope

242 apartments across six floors, 56,000 square feet of office and retail spread over three floors, and 230 indoor parking spaces in the basement and part of the first floor. Architectural Resources did the design and Krog’s own construction arm built it.

The financing is the part worth studying. The stack leans on federal and New York State historic rehabilitation tax credits, New York State Brownfield Cleanup Program credits, an Erie County Industrial Development Agency inducement and a National Grid grant. Four separate credit and incentive programs plus a utility grant, which is close to the minimum viable capital structure for a building this size in this market.

The first 138 units took tenants in August 2024. The remaining 104 finished in February 2025.

Why It Matters

The building was headed for demolition. What saved it was the Buffalo Brownfield Restoration Corporation acquiring it, which bought enough time for a developer to assemble the credits.

That sequence matters more than the design does. Half a million square feet of heavy industrial floor plate in a second-tier city does not pencil on rents alone, and it did not here either. Units are marketed from roughly $1,800 a month. What made it work was a decade of patience and a capital stack that monetised the building’s age instead of treating it as a liability.

Every rust-belt city has a Trico. Most of them are still empty.

Project Team & Details