As the former YWCA building, a brutalist grey box with a sign advertising future luxury apartment complexes at the site sits empty with no power or activity, hopes for more “off-campus” housing right in-between Point Park’s campus continue to dwindle.
The old YWCA building, which also held Point Park’s Center for Media Innovation (CMI) before the space moved to West Penn Hall, and Mandarin Gourmet until the restaurant closed in 2023, has been owned by City Club Apartments (CCA) since April 2022.
The Detroit-based company bought the former YWCA building for $3 million and is included in the October 2024 Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP) funding from the state.
According to the Pennsylvania Office of the Budget, CCA requested a grant for $3.5 million toward the project and received all the money from Pittsburgh’s Urban Renewal Authority (URA).
In total, all apartment projects Downtown requested up to $62.6 million in RACP funding. This comes out of $600 million in total RACP funding from the state.
Pittsburgh’s Urban Renewal Authority (URA) also gave an additional $2 million toward the apartment project, according to the URA’s November 2024 meeting agenda, bringing the total money from URA grants to $5.5 million.
The CCA site at the former YWCA building has a total development cost of $117.8 million.
Besides CCA, other apartment projects getting funding include the Gulf Tower conversion project, “The Porter” at 601 Grant St. and Smithfield Lofts at 4 Smithfield St.
Jonathan Holtzman, CEO of CCA, said in a November 2023 interview with the Pittsburgh Business Times that the project is still alive and well despite the apartment project being what he called nearly impossible due to market conditions at the time. He blamed the issue on inflation, rising costs of construction materials and difficulty finding lenders.
“You have horrible, miserable problems and you add them all together and it’s nearly impossible,” Holtzman said.
A representative from CCA did not return requests for comment. Additionally, the phone numbers for the company’s offices in Detroit and Chicago are no longer in service.
Two years after the building was bought by CCA and a year after Mandarin Gourmet permanently closed, little activity has happened in or outside the former YWCA building.
While the former CMI space is mostly gutted, the YWCA lobby and Mandarin Gourmet look completely unchanged except for a few smashed windows boarded up with plywood.
CCA owns apartment complexes in other cities but some are in the process of being sold to other companies, amid what the Pittsburgh Business Times calls legal and financial troubles.
CCA Cleveland, now called “Skyline 776,” was sold to the building’s lender, Stanley Dickson in July 2024. CCA Union Central in Cincinnati was sold to the same company.
As for financial troubles, a CCA-backed apartment complex in Detroit is eight months behind its loan, according to business-oriented news outlet Crain’s Detroit Business, which said creditors are after Holtzman and his companies.
Despite this, the apartment project at the former YWCA building is still on CCA’s website. Nobody from the company has officially said whether or not the project is in progress or not.
