photo by: Bremen Keasey

The office building at 2000 Bluffs Drive is pictured in September 2024.

The site of a large, vacant office building has gone from being the proposed site for a new City Hall to being the proposed site for actual hallways — and bedrooms, kitchens and baths too.

An approximately 6-acre site northeast of Sixth and Iowa streets — for years it housed the call center for the student loan company Sallie Mae — was on the verge of being bought by the City of Lawrence in October to become a new home for City Hall.

Now the property has been bought by a local investment group that plans to refurbish the 50,000-square-foot office building that is on the property, and is evaluating whether to build housing on one of the parking lots at the property.

Lawrence-based Midwest Property Management said in a recent social media post that it is involved in the project and that plans call for multi-family units to be added to the upper parking lot that has rarely been used since Sallie Mae and its hundreds of employees moved out of the building more than a decade ago. The project would create a “dynamic and inclusive community space,” the company said in the post.

I reached out for more details, and heard back from Richard King, a Lawrence resident and real estate investor who said he was serving as a leader of the project for the local investment group. King stopped short of stating that the redevelopment project would include a new apartment component for the old Sallie Mae site.

For one thing, plans haven’t been filed with the city for any redevelopment of the site. Rather, the group recently finalized the purchase of the site, and is evaluating its options.

But . . .

“There is an abundance of parking,” King said. “The building originally was a call center with lots and lots of people. Those days are gone, and there is some additional space that we might be able to do something with.”

So, indeed some apartments or living units might find their way onto the property’s parking lot. We’ll have to wait for a formal redevelopment plan to be filed at City Hall to learn more details, though. The property does have RSO zoning, according to county documents, which generally allows for a mix of office and residential uses. That may mean a residential project wouldn’t have to go through the city’s rezoning process to proceed, although it would require other approvals.

King did tell me that there is no current idea to try to convert the actual office building on the property into apartments or residences. Instead, he said the group was focusing on how to use that building for offices or other such purposes.

“There are probably a number of use cases for that building,” King said, noting the group was still early in its evaluation of its options.

“We would like to breath some life into an area that has been vacant for quite some time, and we think there is some opportunity to do that,” King said.

The property — which has an access point off of both Sixth Street and McDonald Drive, but has an address of 2000 Bluffs Drive — was purchased on Dec. 23 by the aptly-named Bluffs 2000 LLC group, according to land documents from the county.

It sounds like the local group began looking at the property shortly after city commissioners rejected a plan to move Lawrence City Hall into the vacant building, which city administrators had proposed as a solution to a space crunch in its downtown Lawrence spaces.

“From our first walkthrough to closing, it took exactly 60 days, but we made it happen,” John Salvino, president of Midwest Property Managers, said in a recent social media post. “Now we’re excited to revitalize the building and add multifamily housing to the property.”

I’ll let you know when I see a formal plan filed for the property.

•••

If the idea of building some housing in a commercial parking lot sounds familiar, it might be because I wrote about such a plan for a downtown property last week.

Lawrence businessman Adam Williams has filed plans at City Hall to build 15 row houses along the eastern edge of the private parking lot that serves the former Borders bookstore building at Seventh and New Hampshire streets.

As I reported, Williams’ plan calls for three-story homes to line Rhode Island Street. Each home would have three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a one-car garage. The homes would be oriented to face Rhode Island Street, but the access to the garages would be on the backside of the house, meaning the vehicle traffic for the homes would go through the Borders parking lot, using either the existing Seventh Street or New Hampshire Street driveways.

When I reported on the project last week, I didn’t yet have any renderings to share of the proposed project. But I do have one now. The project is being designed by Lawrence-based Paul Werner Architects, which provided me with is rendering of the proposal.

photo by: Paul Werner Architects

A rendering shows the proposed design for a row house development in the former parking lot of the Borders bookstore building east of Seventh and New Hampshire streets.

The actual architectural design of the project is one of the few items that the City of Lawrence needs to approve for the project. The property’s zoning already allows for the row house development. However, the property is in the downtown area that has special design guidelines, which means the city’s Historic Resources Commission will need to review the overall look of the project.

Williams is hopeful to get that and other approvals done in time to start construction this summer.

•••

While we are on the subject of parking lots, perhaps you have seen one of those development pending signs along the edge of the parking lot of the Menards home improvement center in south Lawrence.

Indeed there are several undeveloped commercial lots in front of the Menards store on 31st Street. But, no, the yellow development sign isn’t a sign that a new retailer is coming to the site. Rather, Menards has filed plans with City Hall to add an additional “express lane” to entrance/exit of its gated lumberyard. So, not overly exciting — unless, of course, you have a truckload of lumber and a thimble-full of patience.