In February of 2012, we mentioned 932 Arch St. as an aside in a story about a project across the street. At that time, the property, which has a hair salon on the first floor, had received a five-story cinderblock addition. Previously, this was just a very deep one-story building.
When the property owners went to the ZBA back in 2011, they got permission for a six-story addition, with twenty apartments on the upper floors, office space on the second floor, and commercial space on the first. Seems like an innocuous enough project, no? But something is amiss here and we can't quite put our finger on it. Prior to their presenting to the ZBA, the owners got a boatload of violations which have all been cleared. Perhaps those violations led to the project going before the ZBA in the first place. Soon after getting approvals, the addition went up and by the time we wrote about it way back when, the construction seemed to be moving along at an appropriate pace. But something has happened in the two and a half years since. Well, scratch that. Actually nothing has happened, at least from what we can tell.
The property is seemingly unchanged since February of 2012. That's a really long time for a project to stall out like this. Looking at L&I records, the owners have undertaken a little bit of permitting activity in the last year, but there's still no apparent progress outside. Fortunately, it seems like the windows are at least keeping the inside of the building protected from the elements. Still, does anyone have any idea what's happening here?