With a 10-story apartment development financed and teed up for Oakland, Mercer County-based Hudson Cos. has bought another property in the Strip District in what looks to be a redevelopment assemblage there.
The company recently announced on LinkedIn that it has bought an industrial building at the corner of 30th and Railroad Streets in the Strip.
In its announcement, the company described the Strip as “robust” and to indulged readers to “stay tuned for future updates on this property that borders Hudson Companies’ Smallman Street site.”
A recent transaction record indicates that Hudson paid more than $3.4 million for the industrial building, which totals about 30,000 square feet and was at one time occupied by a company called T&T Metals.
The company paid $2.8 million for the former Gateway Paints and Chemical Co. building at 2929 Smallman St. last September, a site of a little more than 26,000 square feet, giving Hudson a footprint of more than 56,000 square feet, combining the two property acquisitions for what’s expected to be a redevelopment.
Jonathan Hudson, a partner in the family-owned company, confirmed the broad plan is to demolish both buildings to make way for a new development on a combined site.
“We intend to redevelop these together in the very near future,” he said.
While a final plan has yet to be designed, Hudson acknowledged that a multifamily
project is “likely going to be the use.”
The seller of the former T&T Metals building is Ahron Freilich, who bought it in 2017 along with its neighbor at 2949 Smallman, a repurposed 19th century meat packing facility turned office, who had considered expanding it, a project that never came to fruition.
It’s a stretch of the Strip in which there’s around 750 apartments in development or construction along nearby 32nd Street amid the Robotics Row of tech firms that have been setting up.
Hudson, which also owns the Brix on 26th apartment property on the South Side, announced in April that it had secured funding from Dollar Bank to build The Julian, a 148-unit, 10-story apartment building slated for Melwood Avenue in Oakland.
Hudson said the company began demolition work on the Melwood Avenue site about a month ago now and that the Julian is expected to be built on a 22-month construction schedule.
“We’re full steam ahead on that one,” he said.
With other properties also up for sale in the 2900 block of Smallman and Railroad, Hudson sounded as though he has enough property on which to build with the firm’s two recent buys.
“I think with the two sites that we have it allows us to really put a nice development of scale together,” he said.