Six years. That is how long it took to assemble the capital stack for one 40-story tower on East Ninth Street, and the shape of what finally closed says more about 2026 adaptive reuse than the renderings do.
ErieView Development announced on 4 September that it has closed $218 million for the Erieview Tower redevelopment. Conventional senior bank debt in that number is $20 million.
C-PACE carried the building
The anchor is a $93.4 million C-PACE loan from Nuveen Green Capital, funding variable refrigerant flow mechanical systems, curtain wall and elevator modernization, and pitched by the lender as the largest C-PACE transaction ever closed in Ohio. ERIEBANK, a division of CNB Bank, provided the $20 million of senior financing.
Everything else is credits and public participation: Foss & Company invested in Ohio historic and Ohio Transformational Mixed Use Development credits, Consortium Structured Investments in federal historic tax credits, Midland States Bank bridged the federal HTCs. A Cuyahoga County loan sits against the hotel. Ohio Brownfield Remediation Program funds, a City of Cleveland tax abatement and TIF, and a port authority sales-tax break on building materials fill the rest.
Anthony Delfre, managing director at BGL Real Estate Advisors, which advised on the financing, told News 5 Cleveland the deal required getting one lender across the entire campus, and blamed the delay on risen interest rates plus uncertainty on labor and materials costs. BGL was exclusive financial adviser, KJK lead counsel, TurnDev project manager.
The program
Harrison & Abramovitz designed the tower in 1964; it is 529 feet, roughly 700,000 square feet, and on the National Register. The conversion delivers a 210-key W Hotel, the first in Ohio, with 215 apartments on floors 17 through 28 and Class A office above, a restaurant and bar on the 38th floor, a 15,000-square-foot ballroom and a 450-space subterranean garage. Rockwell Group leads design, Beyer Blinder Belle is preservation architect, Berardi + Partners architect of record, with Turner & Townsend and Novogradac on the team. No general contractor has been named.
Hotel, apartments and restaurant are targeted for late 2027, office floors turnkey through 2028.
What is a claim and what is a filing
All parties here are private and there is no SEC filing behind any figure. “Largest C-PACE transaction in Ohio,” the “first W Apartments developed exclusively as rentals” and “highest restaurant and bar in Ohio” are all claims by parties with an interest in them; the release itself hedges the W Apartments line with “anticipated to be.” The 600-plus jobs and $125 million of projected 30-year City revenue are developer projections with no published methodology. The announcement is dated 4 September; public records indicate the money actually came together in August.
The transferable lesson is the ratio. Nine percent of this stack is ordinary bank debt. Office conversions of this vintage are not being killed by construction cost, they’re being killed by the senior lender’s underwriting, and the ones getting built are the ones that found something else to sit in that slot. The Gulf Tower conversion in Pittsburgh is working the same problem on a similar 1930s asset.