WRIGLEY

From Page 9

Jones said he hadn’t thought of needing or wanting another partner but to his surprise it made sense.

“When Dan came to me, I was like, ‘Do I want to do this?’ e more I talked to him, we were like brothers.”

For now, the plan is for Jones to manage the 20,000 square feet of retail space under the apartments at the south side of the building, with plans including a soap store, a candy shop and a bakery.

Failing miserably at retirement

In 2008, Jones thought he was retiring. He shut down his large construction company, Laingsburg-based Carpenters Build America Construction, which at one point employed 80 carpenters and did framing for large housing construction projects around the state and country. He also sold his nearby 1,200-acre farm, which grew wheat and corn and raised beef cattle.

Jones says he had never been to Port Huron but wanted to live on the water, and when he visited the city, he was struck by the deep blue water owing past downtown into the St. Clair River. Life on his 35-foot yacht in the marina there would be a ne to relax his days away.

Soon, the Great Recession was in full swing. Port Huron’s downtown real estate market, long su ering pre-recession, with for-sale and forlease signs in ground- oor windows on every block, got even more depressed.

“Downtown was dead,” said Jones, who thought the old buildings downtown had ne bones and the prices they could be bought for, combined with his background in construction, made it time to unretire.

“Prices were so low. I said to myself, ‘If I’m serious about this, I gotta buy as many buildings as I can,’” he said.

Jones had a good friend in Calgary, Alberta, a businessman named Brent Marsall, the owner of World of Spas, a company with four retail stores selling hot tubs, spas, gazebos and patio furniture in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

e contrast between sky-high real-estate prices in Calgary and bottom-of-the market prices in Port Huron helped Marsall decide to be Jones’ partner in buying and rehabbing properties.

Today, they own 11 buildings in downtown Port Huron and several businesses, including the Senior Tequilas restaurant, the Everything Classic antique mall and a Jimmy John’s. ey have also renovated 93 loft apartments. ey employ 14 directly, with about 110 employed by those who have leases on some of their businesses.

With the Great Recession over but Port Huron prices still depressed, St. Clair County bought the former Wrigley store in 2014 for $560,000, and after years of failed attempts to get it back on the tax rolls, local ocials planned to tear it down.

Jones entered the picture in 2020. The county sold it to him for $350,000, a deal contingent on other support. The community foundation invested $175,000 in the center, which was matched by an equal grant from the Ralph C. Wil- son Foundation. e Michigan Strategic Fund approved a $1.5 million Michigan Community Revitalization Program grant; the Port Huron Brown eld Redevelopment Authority got approval from the Michigan Strategic Fund for $689,143 in state tax capture for brown eld remediation; the city of Port Huron’s committed almost $1 million in funding and granted a 10-year Obsolete Property Rehabilitation Act tax abatement of $2.7 million. e project was originally projected to cost $14.4 million and open for business last August. But COVID, supply-chain issues and rapidly rising costs of building materials, particularly wood, raised the price to what is now expected to be $15 mil- lion and pushed back opening until this spring.

Jones said design elements were changed to help bring down costs, including lowering the projected ceilings in the apartments from 10 feet to nine and eliminating the planned indoor parking lot when concrete for the outdoor parking lot was poured.

Jones said he and his wife, Tracy, routinely are in the center doing cleanup and maintenance themselves and he, despite being 66, joined the concrete crew to do whatever needed to be done when it was time to pour concrete for the parking lot.

Contact: thenderson@crain.com (231) 499-2817; @TomHenderson2