Manhattanville FACTORY DISTRICT: Columbia University

The Manhattanville Factory District is a neighborhood redevelopment project in West Harlem that repurposed a block of manufacturing buildings and ware-houses into a mixed-use retail and office district. Located between 125th St— Harlem’s “Main Street”— and 128th St., the site borders the more affluent Columbia-anchored Morningside Heights to the south and the historically disadvantaged residential neighborhood of Manhattanville to the north. From 1997 to 2015, the Janus Property Company [“Janus”] acquired eleven buildings and empty lots through developer-initiated transactions and one city-sponsored RFEI, assembling a multi-block site across three acres. Throughout the 18-year acquisition/development period, Janus has undertaken adaptive reuse on three of the buildings, planned two ground-up buildings, and renovated one small retail space which currently provides 385,000 square feet of commercial, retail, and community facility and when fully built out will be 1.1 million square feet. Today, the Factory District is home to a diverse mix of tenants that includes the West Harlem Development Corporation, research laboratories, medical facilities, arts organizations, and non-profits. Janus has funded the Manhattanville Factory District’s $40 million of acquisition and development costs to date with conventional loans, partner equity, incentive-driven Federal tax credit programs and seller-financing. This analysis will conclude with the first building in the Factory District, the Mink Building, reaching full occupancy in 2015; however, the District is continuing to progress with buildings in each stage of the development process: in design, permits applied for, under construction, or leased up and preparing for the next round of lease expirations.