March 2024: The Couture reaches its final stages of construction. Credit: Josh Wankowski In 2012, Rick Barrett the founder and chief executive officer of Milwaukee-based Barrett Lo Visionary Development, unveiled plans for The Couture, a 44-story luxury apartment and hotel tower on the site of the Downtown Transit Center near the
[caption id="attachment_588407" align="alignleft" width="300"] March 2024: The Couture reaches its final stages of construction. Credit: Josh Wankowski[/caption]
In 2012, Rick Barrett the founder and chief executive officer of Milwaukee-based Barrett Lo Visionary Development, unveiled plans for The Couture, a 44-story luxury apartment and hotel tower on the site of the Downtown Transit Center near the downtown Milwaukee lakefront. Twelve years later the project is finally nearing completion as a 46-story luxury apartment tower with retail space and a transit concourse (the hotel plans were dropped). To complete The Couture, Barrett had to overcome a three-year dispute over the development rights of the property, and a five-year struggle to obtain financing for the $188 million project, which was completely derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As project delays dragged on for years with no visible signs of progress at the site, many in the community thought The Couture would never be built. But Barrett refused to give up.
Now, as the three-year construction of The Couture winds down and the first residents of the building move in this month, Barrett spoke with BizTimes Milwaukee editor Andrew Weiland in an exclusive interview about how he was able to preserve, overcome obstacles, ignore the doubters and near completion of such a challenging project.
Q: How does it feel, after everything that The Couture project has been through, to get to this point?Barrett: “It’s exhilarating. For the longest time I would go to sleep at night and I would be nervous about, is this really going to happen? Is this really going to be something that will stand for the next 200 years in the City of Milwaukee on the lakefront on a site that deserves a building of this nature? And now I know, yes. Now I know we are here to stay. So, exhilarating. It’s beyond exciting.”
Q: How did you overcome the doubts that you faced during the project?
[caption id="attachment_588566" align="alignleft" width="300"] Rick Barrett[/caption]
Barrett: “It’s where you actually go back to what they teach you in school and what you learn about real estate. You go back to the main tenant and that is: highest and best use. This building is the highest and best use for this piece of property. I said I’m going to put all of my faith in that concept. And I did.
“The second thing that was really important was the public-private partnership. They never bailed on me. They never quit. The county never quit, the city never quit. We kept finding a way to work together as a team. That public-private partnership was monumental in what you are seeing today.
“I understand why (the site) was a bus barn for all of those years, because (redevelopment is) hard to do. I understand why there hasn’t been a building 40 stories tall built in this state in 50 years, because it’s hard. It’s really hard.
“It’s hard because you know Milwaukee as many times as we went out to raise money and equity for this project, we went from coast to coast. 150 different groups we spoke to. And a lot of them didn’t even know where Milwaukee was, to be honest. There’s coastal bias. We’re kind of like a flyover state, a flyover city.
“What I think this building gives us is guys younger than me that now are going into real estate development, it will set a new goalpost. Because of this investment that was made here, I think others will follow. And it just makes our city better. That’s my contribution to what is Milwaukee, what makes Milwaukee better and what makes us grow. It’s kind of like a muscle. If you don’t work the muscle, it will atrophy. And you see cities like ours at tipping points, where it’s are they going this way or are they going that way? This building is a shiny representation to all that we’re going this way. That’s what I think is most important. That’s why I work so hard. That’s why I continue to persevere. Because I believe in the Midwest, I believe in Milwaukee.”
Q: The name of your company is Barrett Lo Visionary Development. Compared to other developers that may be more analytical in their approach “visionary” seems appropriate for yours. Talk about your mindset as a developer.
[caption id="attachment_588442" align="alignleft" width="300"] Rick Barrett at The Couture groundbreaking ceremony.[/caption]
Barrett: “What you have captured there is exactly the essence of what I think makes developers great. When you get caught up in saying what can we do? What does the pro forma say we should do? When you get into that conversation you have lost the development, in my opinion.
“You’ve got to concentrate on putting together a great vision first and making it financially feasible second. You know, there were a thousand times that my analytical guys would come into my office and say to me ‘This doesn’t work, that doesn’t work.’ And I would say ‘We have to work harder. Get back to work. Let’s figure this out. There’s a way. We can do it.’
“Everybody said, ‘Oh you’ve got to build a rectangle. If you don’t build a rectangle you’re never going to price out your building properly.’ Well, I fought that all the way along. The value engineering option was there throughout. And I chose not to take it because everybody said, ‘Oh the floorplate needs to be bigger, the design is expensive.’ Yeah, it’s expensive, but it’s worth it. And so, from my perspective, you know a double-nested ellipse is not where you say, ‘Wow that’s a model of efficiency.’ But I felt that in this community there would be a world where it would resonate with people.”
Q: It took nine years from the time that The Couture was proposed until construction finally began. There were a lot of people in the community that through this project was never going to break ground. You faced many setbacks along the way. How do you find the way to persevere and see a project through when many others would probably have pulled the plug?
[caption id="attachment_588443" align="alignleft" width="300"] Rick Barrett[/caption]
Barrett: “I think it’s a mental makeup situation. As you know I was a baseball player, a pitcher (Barrett had a brief Minor League Baseball career in the Baltimore Orioles’ organization). I remember my dad telling me, ‘You’re never as good as you think you are, but you’re never as bad as you think you are.’ Like when people would say, there’s no way this is gonna happen, I would kind of take the mentality of pitching where I’d say, ‘We have another day to play. Tomorrow’s a new day. Today was a bad day, but tomorrow’s a new day.’
“There were games when I didn’t even make it out of the first inning. I’d call my dad, and he would say to me, ‘Son, you’re not as bad as you think you are.’ And I’d say, ‘They knocked me all over the park, Dad. Anything I threw they hit it out of the park.’ And he’d be like, ‘Ah, that’s going to happen.’
“And it’s the same kind of thing with development. I think I was built for that. It’s like pushing a very heavy rock up a hill and sometimes that rock comes back down and you have to push it back up. Then finally I got this building financed, finally we broke ground and I actually pushed the rock over the hill and it started going downhill on the thing. That’s kind of how I view this project.”
[caption id="attachment_588444" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Milwaukee skyline with The Couture under construction during the summer of 2023. Credit: Andrew Weiland[/caption]
Q: Did you ever consider giving up on this project?Barrett: “No. I never, I just don’t. I don’t have that in me. I believed in it so deeply and I just feel like if I hadn’t finished this it would have been a profound failure for me in every sense of the imagination, from my perspective.
“And like I would always think to myself, there’s going to be guys in this city who struggle to get things done and as I age and I get old I’ll be the one guy who can say to those guys, ‘Don’t give up keep it going, let’s go, we can do this.’ I think that had I stumbled here maybe I wouldn’t be that guy to help those guys when they need that. You know that’s what building a city is all about. You’ve got to have guys that step up for other guys when, you know, things are tough and say, ‘Yes, you can do this.’”
[caption id="attachment_588397" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Rick Barrett talks with Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Milwaukee Ald. Robert Bauman and Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson at the opening of The Couture's transit concourse.[/caption]
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