LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Developers ceremonially broke ground Wednesday on the second hotel within the Liberty Green mixed-income development overseen by the Louisville Metro Housing Authority.
The six-story, 130-room hotel at 710 E. Jefferson Street will be the first Tempo by Hilton, a brand that the hotel giant also plans for New York, Boston, San Francisco and San Diego, among other cities.
Rosemont, Ill.-based First Hospitality Group and Louisville’s Weyland Ventures will co-own the hotel, and Weyland Ventures also plans a 190-unit apartment building and shared parking garage on the site.
Weyland Ventures, once led by Bill Weyland and now by his daughter, Mariah Gratz, has redeveloped much of the former Clarksdale housing project under a contractual agreement with the housing authority, which manages Louisville’s public units for low-income residents.
Now called Liberty Green, the former Clarksdale site is being recast as a “mixed use, mixed income” community with public housing units and market-rate apartments and condos.
First Hospitality and Weyland Ventures also built the Home2 Suites, another Hilton brand, at 240 S Hancock Street.
The housing authority’s board in January approved selling a 2.7-acre portion of the old Clarksville site to an affiliate of Weyland Ventures for $749,449, according to a board resolution, though the sale does not seem to have closed as of Wednesday.
Lisa Osanka, executive director of housing authority, said the development of a fancy hotel is in keeping with the mixed-use, mixed-income master plan for the old Clarksdale site approved in 2008 under the federal Hope VI program.
“The theory behind that -- only a theory -- is that when you don’t have 100% extremely low-income in barrack-style housing that that gives more of an opportunity for people to have a better quality of life,” she said.
The proceeds of the sale will be used to further the agency’s mission of providing affordable housing, of which there is still a substantial need in Louisville, she said.
The Tempo is scheduled to open by the May 1, 2021 Kentucky Derby, officials said.
Hotel boom continues
Louisville has seen more than 20 hotels planned or built in recent years, many clustered in the downtown area.
Stephen Schwartz, founder and chairman of First Hospitality Group, said he’s confident there is still “unaccommodated demand” for hotel rooms in the city given the expanded Kentucky International Convention Center and the new Butchertown soccer stadium.
The downtown Omni Hotel, which opened in 2018, and other new hotels “all seem to have absorbed that excess supply,” Schwartz said.
“There is a limit,” he said. “But we don’t think we’ve reached it yet.”
