Attendees of the 10th annual BizTimes Commercial Real Estate and Development Conference last week chose Mandel Group Inc. chief operating officer Robert Monnat’s plan for five domed sports facilities on the west side of downtown Milwaukee and a transformation of the Shops of Grand Avenue into an urban sports outlet retail center as their favorite dream development.
At the conference, Monnat and Grucon Group president Gary Grunau and WiRED Properties founder Blair Williams presented their dream development projects for Milwaukee. The conference theme was: “Developer’s Fantasy Camp.”
Grunau proposed a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks in the Park East corridor. Williams proposed a neighborhood development in the Park East corridor focused on local and start-up businesses, with a pedestrian mall and incubator buildings.
The attendees at the conference were asked to pick their favorite dream project. The vote totals were:
Monnat, 84
Grunau, 68
Williams, 58
In his dream development project, Monnat said he would build several modest domed venues on the west side of downtown to attract youth and amateur sports events and tournaments that could be played year-round. The market for traveling youth and amateur sports competition is significant, Monnat said, and Milwaukee could fill downtown hotel rooms and attract new customers to stores and restaurants downtown if it had several indoor sports facilities to host these events.
“There would be thousands and thousands of people coming to play,” Monnat said. “This is a way to create a completely new attraction that would put Milwaukee on the map.”
All of the athletes who come to play in the domed facilities, and their family members, would also create a significant boost to retail traffic on long-struggling West Wisconsin Avenue, Monnat said. He recommends that the Shops of Grand Avenue move all retail, including the food court, to the ground level and transform itself into an urban sports outlet retail center by evicting the non-sports related tenants and replacing them with sporting goods and sports apparel stores such as Nike, Reebok, Under Armor and other sports stores commonly found at outlet malls.
Read more about Monnat’s vision, and the dream developments presented by Grunau and Williams, in the next issue of BizTimes Milwaukee.
