A bright future for Great Northern?

TOWN OF CLAY – Last week, Onondaga County and developer Guy Hart Jr., of Hart-Lyman Cos., announced that the legal issues that threatened the deal to purchase the Great Northern Mall from an out-of-town landlord who has let the aging facility fall into disrepair had been resolved, paving the way for an ambitious redevelopment as a new mixed-use neighborhood.
Last week, Hart, along with Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon, held a brief press conference in the parking lot of the dilapidated mall. The terms of the purchase agreement are confidential, Hart said, but they are similar to the original purchase offer of $9 million. He expects to close on the property in July, he said.
Plans for the redevelopment, at this point, are conceptual, Hart said, but those concepts fit with Onondaga County’s comprehensive land use plan, which call for investment in walkable, village-centric mixed-use developments. Hart said he expects there will be hundreds of housing units as well as a mixture of businesses including a variety of goods and services, including restaurants, retail and medical.
“[It’s going to be a] walkable community, following that village-center, town-center comprehensive plan,” Hart said. “The exact look of all that will kind of take place over the next several months.”
The target market for the project is “blue collar up to middle class” residents, and he said he expects the residents to be a cross-section of people who want to live in a community where they can walk to the gym or the coffee shop.
Hart, who is also developing the Lakeshore Village project in Cicero, said he is currently in discussions with several national investment groups to provide financing for the project, which he expects will cost several hundred million dollars.
“Some of the national groups, who I would say have never looked at any of the upstate markets probably from Buffalo to Albany as potential investment sites, Syracuse is on the map for them now,” Hart said. “In an economically challenged national and international landscape, they’re seeing Syracuse as one of the few diamonds in the rough, which is a great change from what I grew up being used to.”
McMahon pointed out that a few years ago, when Amazon arrived in the area with a $400 million project, it was the largest investment in the history of the county. This project, he said, will rival the Amazon facility in terms of investment, and there are other nine-figure residential and mixed-use projects in the works – ShoppingTown in DeWitt and Lakeshore Village in Cicero – that show how much momentum Onondaga County has right now.
Hart said that a project like this normally would take up to 10 years to complete, but with Micron arriving in the next couple of years, the demand for housing will likely speed up the pace for the Great Northern project.
“I think you’ll see five years from today, a substantially complete project, with the possibility that there might be pockets that we haven’t finished yet,” he said.
Currently, Hart said, they are in the process of working on an asbestos survey and demolition survey with the expectation that demolition of most of the existing mall will take place later this year. There are also a few current tenants of the existing mall, whom Hart said he needs to “have conversations” with. Hart also said there are no plans to purchase the existing Olive Garden restaurant adjacent to the mall property.