The developer of one of Milwaukee's newest apartment buildings is reporting strong interest, including a noticeable number of tenants relocating from out-of-state.
Milwaukee-based commercial real estate firm
Ogden & Co. recently opened Elevation 1659, a 76-unit market-rate building at 1659 N. Jackson St. on the Lower East Side.
Ogden is positioning Elevation 1659 for the “middle market,” according to Monica Skellie, director of multifamily and new development.
“We’re not the lowest price point, we’re not the highest,” Skellie said, pointing to other new apartment buildings downtown like 333 Water and The Couture that have much higher rents. “We’re somewhere in that middle market. We’re appealing to a lot of different demographics and are seeing a lot of out-of-state interest, specifically Chicago.”
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Rents for available floor plans range from $1,545 per month to $2,950 per month, according to Ogden's website. Almost all the building's units are one-bedroom or larger, which is largely due to the site's triangular shape.
"A lot of the new buildings now are doing more studios, but we have kind of a tricky triangular site," said
Jason Pietsch, principal at Ogden. "It's a really deep site, and you don't want to fill that up with a 20-foot wide hallway or something that you can't get rent for, so we opted to fill that space with slightly larger units."
Ogden is banking on Elevation's larger units and larger share of one-bedroom units, along with most units having three sides of natural light, to set them apart from other new buildings in the downtown area, Pietsch and Skellie said.
"You can fit king-sized beds in the bedrooms, you can fit sectionals in the living room," Skellie said.
Located across the street from Ogden's headquarters, Pietsch emphasized that the building includes several historic photographs and murals inside to "tell the story of the neighborhood."
Building the project required overcoming some unique challenges due to the site’s steep grade. The project included a tiered, zigzagging retaining wall along Water Street.
“That took lot of concrete,” Pietsch said. "Retaining that hillside was very complicated. We and the city didn’t want just a 30-foot-tall retaining wall, we wanted it to look cool.”
The project was first pitched in 2019 and received $5.6 million in financing from a Washington-based firm in 2022, which allowed construction to proceed.
