Four buildings planned — but never started — at Point Ruston were to have included 222 residential units and 69,000 square feet of commercial and retail space.
Permits for four planned buildings at Point Ruston have been voided by the city of Tacoma after months of inactivity.
The move, which came at the end of June, arrives as Point Ruston’s developer, Point Ruston LLC, faces an array of financial and legal challenges surrounding the $1.4 billion, 97-acre mixed-use community on Commencement Bay, which began development in 2013.
The four buildings initially planned for 5106 Main St. — referred to as buildings 9A, 9B, 9C and 11B in permitting documents — were to have included 222 residential units and 69,000 square feet of commercial and retail space. The site would have also had 3.3 acres of open space and about 16,690 square feet of landscaped area.
Groundbreaking was to take place in early 2022, but no progress has been made.
Loren Cohen is the managing director and the sole owner of Point Ruston LLC. He also owns Point Ruston’s development manager, McBride-Cohen Management Group LLC, and other related entities.
A representative of McBride-Cohen did not respond to a request for comment.
The city of Tacoma voids permits after 180 days of inactivity. Permits can be reactivated, but at the discretion of the building official or their designee, a city official told the Business Journal. If new code regulations have been adopted since the permit’s initial approval, reactivation becomes more complicated.
The Point Ruston development has been hit by a pair of legal setbacks since permit applications were first filed in 2019.
The first was related to an adjacent property, a parking garage once fully owned by McBride-Cohen and also includes the Waterfront Market at Ruston, a 32,000-square-foot public market building.
In the spring of 2022, an arbitrator awarded a portion of the property, including the public market building and part of the garage, to Serpanok Construction after Point Ruston LLC didn’t pay for work Serpanok performed on the structure.
The other setback involves a lawsuit filed by a group foreign investors who loaned Point Ruston LLC $66 million a decade ago to get the development off the ground and are seeking to recover their money. Point Ruston LLC was directed to pay the investors $11.5 million in interest in 2021, though the principal was not due until April 2024.
The planned buildings were to have been developed on land involved in the suit, based on listed parcel addresses. The trial for that case is scheduled for November.
The Point Ruston developer faces other financial issues unrelated to the lawsuits.
Six properties in the development were put into receivership in May after a lender, El Segundo, California-based TerraCotta Real Estate Services, sued to collect $73.8 million in debt owed on the properties.
The properties are slated to go up for auction if the debt is not paid off. A payment deadline originally set for July 24 was extended to Aug. 14 after a court date was rescheduled for Aug. 25. TerraCotta’s attorney declined to comment.