Staff photo by Mike Pare / The Edwin will be a boutique hotel near the south end of the Walnut Street Bridge when it opens in 2018.MORE ROOM AT THE INN
A handful of hotels are underway or planned for downtown Chattanooga, adding more than 700 rooms if they’re all built:* Aloft Hotel, 150 rooms* Moxie, 102 rooms* St. George Hotel, 55 rooms* The Edwin, 90 rooms* Tru by Hilton, 114 rooms* Westin, 200 roomsSource: Developers
With a half dozen new hotels either underway or planned in downtown Chattanooga, the central city may see the biggest single rush of room lodging ever.
"We keep growing and keep seeing investment being made," says Bob Doak, who heads the Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau. "To me, it just means a lot of confidence [investors] have in where the city is going."
The new hotels add to an array of nearly $1 billion of housing, retail and other commercial projects under construction or in the pipeline in the downtown area. Estimates are that developers will add more than 700 rooms if all the hotels are complete within the next couple of years. Doak says he believes that's the most rooms ever added during one period in downtown Chattanooga.
"When these developers and owners and flags are looking at a community and investing tens of millions of dollars, they do their research," he says. "These are very smart people." Doak says he's not worried the new hotels planned for downtown will saturate the market.
In the central city, Chattanooga-based Vision Hospitality Group has one new hotel under construction and another under development with work to begin next year. Also, Vision is building its first apartment complex on the city's North Shore.
Andrew Hibbard, Vision's vice president of finance and investment, says the company does its homework. Vision already is raising the 90-room Edwin boutique hotel at Walnut Street and Aquarium Way. The company plans to build a Tru by Hilton hotel on Chestnut Street next to its existing DoubleTree Hotel.Hibbard says the Tru by Hilton will fill a niche that's not currently occupied in the spectrum of hotels available in Chattanooga.
"We were very concerned," Hibbard says about market saturation. "We did our homework and we got comfortable with [the new hotel]. The market will be in good shape."
Marta Alder, who's planning on reviving the vacant St. George Hotel on Market Street into a boutique offering, says the site across from the Chattanooga Choo Choo has been abandoned for about 30 years. Her hotel will fill a different niche as well, she says. The St. George won't just cater to the tourist industry but locals who want a getaway, Alder says. The hotel will be located in the emerging downtown entertainment district, she says, and she's planning acoustic and jazz performances for the site.
Tim Boyle, president of St. Louis-based City Property Co., hopes to start work in March on one of the biggest-ever apartment complexes built in or near the central city. The $57.5 million, 170-unit project is slated to go into the former Standard-Coosa-Thatcher textile factory on S. Watkins Street, a couple of miles from downtown. Boyle says the Standard Coosa Lofts will benefit from the apartments' proximity to the central city and other employment centers in the vicinity, such as area hospitals.
The apartments also will be more affordable than most recently raised or underway downtown, and they'll provide live/work space for artists and others interested in such an environment, he says.
"This project will be transformational," Boyle says.
The downtown apartment market is hot with new units planned for sites ranging from the Southside to the central business district to the North Shore.
Vision is building a five-story, 84-unit apartment building on the North Shore near Renaissance Park which its officials have pegged at costing more than $10 million.
Also, a Franklin, Tenn., developer has a $37 million apartment complex planned at the former site of The Loft restaurant.
Kim White, who heads the nonprofit redevelopment group River City Co., cites development going on in the North Shore and doesn't believe there's an end in sight.
"That whole area is really taking shape," she says. "There are so many under-utilized buildings in that area changing hands and have big-time developments. I don't see it stopping."
Doak says downtown hotel and apartment development speaks well to what is happening in the city.
"We continue to see growth from the private sector," he says. "One of the best ways to gauge the health of the city is what is being forecast for the future."