By Simon Achterberg
BUFFALO — Private developers are lining up to turn the Theatre District’s tired office buildings into apartments. The one building on that stretch of Main Street that the public actually owns is still empty.
Two and a half years after the city closed Hostel Buffalo-Niagara at 667 Main St., the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency has spent nearly $1.5 million stabilizing the building, run two rounds of proposals and turned down the only bidder. City Hall now says a third request for proposals is coming. As of this morning, BURA’s proposals page still lists the summer solicitation and its July addendum, and nothing newer.
The stalemate matters beyond one address. It’s a test of whether the city can get a deal done on a small historic building at the same moment the private market is betting tens of millions of dollars on the blocks around it.
A building the city keeps buying back
The three-story building, known as the Glenny-Norban Building and designed by architect Edward B. Green, faces Shea’s Performing Arts Center. It’s joined by a party wall to a former warehouse behind it at 664 Washington St. The city used $1.5 million in federal loan money in the mid-1990s to convert it into a 40-bed hostel, Investigative Post reported this month.
The hostel opened in 1996 and hosted 6,000 to 7,000 overnight stays a year until the city ordered it out in early 2024. Structural engineers had warned that the neglected rear building could collapse and take the front with it, according to The Buffalo News. In November 2024, the BURA board hired Lakeside Construction for $1.2 million in emergency repairs to the roof, the frame and the water damage, plus a new HVAC system. Costs eventually climbed to nearly $1.5 million.
BURA’s June 30 request for proposals left the door open to mixed-use, residential, hospitality or commercial plans, but said continued operation of the hostel was “strongly encouraged.” Proposals were first due July 28. An addendum pushed the deadline to Aug. 17.
One bid, then a rethink
Only one proposal came in, from the hostel and developer Samuel Savarino. He would buy the building, renovate and expand the hostel, keep an arts and performance space on the Main Street side and add a coffee house on Washington Street. He would then lease it to the hostel and eventually sell it to the organization. A city spokesperson told Investigative Post that Savarino offered about $300,000. The city deemed that too low to recoup its stabilization costs.
“At this point in time, I’m fielding all ideas,” Thomas Baines, the deputy mayor overseeing planning and economic development in Mayor Sean Ryan’s administration, told Investigative Post. “What we do know is that that property can’t just stay vacant any longer without a plan. So that’s the objective. If we can, we would love for it to be a hostel if it makes sense.”
In August, Baines told The Buffalo News the city was rethinking how widely it advertises these offerings. “Oftentimes, we’ll just put it on the city website, but we definitely want to see if there’s a way that we can get it out there, so we can get a different type of response,” he said.
The apartment pitch
That wider net has already caught one of downtown’s best-known preservation developers. Rocco Termini told Investigative Post that city officials asked him to consider bidding, and he said he would. Termini pitched a deal that would boost the project’s historic tax credits to “north of $2 million” and use them to convert the buildings into apartments. He said he wasn’t sure whether the hostel would stay.
“Can it support itself or would you have the same problem that you had with Braymiller [where] everybody puts all this money into it, and it dies anyway?” Termini said. “If you redo that building, there’s going to be debt service. How do they pay it? And what bank would give you the money?”
Hostel supporters argue the opposite. They say a low-cost place to stay across from Shea’s is exactly what a theater district should have, and that the city has plenty of market-rate housing already.
“If the hostel owns the building, there’ll always be a hostel in Buffalo,” Cliff Madell, the hostel’s longtime former board president, told Investigative Post. Board president Katherine Pessecow told The Buffalo News the group is still paying taxes and insurance with no revenue. “We’re waiting in the wings, and that’s how we’ve always felt,” she said. “We plan on continuing. We are not giving up.”
The market around it
The debate is happening against a wave of private office-to-residential conversions within a few blocks.
Ciminelli Real Estate plans to turn the 1980s-era tower at 10 Fountain Plaza, designed by Mark Mendell of Cannon Design, into about 160 apartments in a roughly $50 million project. The plan leans on historic tax credits after a State and National Register listing. In December, Kyle Ciminelli told WBEN that work could start in the fourth quarter of 2026. “If we don’t take this risk, we may not have a downtown left,” he said. “We are modeling this after what other developers have done in places like Manhattan.”
Up the street, the 1920 office building at 700 Main St. is under contract to Alexander Mejean of Third Nature Capital for 54 market-rate apartments, Buffalo Rising reported, citing The Buffalo News. Mejean said he “cannot comment on it at this time.” His firm is also converting 505 Pearl St. into 53 apartments. Other projects in the works include Chris Jacobs’ 22 apartments at 122 Genesee St., Sinatra & Company’s work at the Market Arcade and Greenleaf & Company’s plans for the former Courier-Express complex.
Those deals pencil out, when they do, on the same tools Termini and Savarino both say they want: state and federal historic tax credits. What separates 667 Main is that the seller is the public. The city has to choose between getting its money back, keeping a hostel and getting a building back in use quickly. It hasn’t said which matters most.
What to watch
The key questions for the third solicitation are whether BURA sets a minimum price tied to its $1.5 million in repairs, whether keeping the hostel stays a scored goal or becomes optional, and how long bidders get. Baines told Investigative Post the city wants a request with “more flexibility for how that building could be used.”
The Buffalo Chronicle will report the terms of the new request when BURA issues it.
Investigative Post has disclosed that Savarino is a member of its board of directors and a donor, and that Termini is a past donor.
Featured image: The Glenny-Norban Building at 667 Main St. Photo by w_lemay via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped.
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