Historic Milwaukee office tower will be converted to affordable housing

A speculative real estate investment. A gas station tycoon’s HQ. A Greyhound station. The Clark Building has had several past lives.

Now, the 20-story office tower at 633 W. Wisconsin Ave. in Milwaukee will get a new chapter. Its owner, Joshua Jeffers, plans to convert part of the building to 224 residential apartments, with the great majority qualifying as affordable housing.

“This building is a great example of office properties across the country that have been experiencing declining occupancy as a result of a lot more remote working,” Jeffers said.

Jeffers said the building was 88 percent occupied when his firm bought it in 2017. But since 2021, he said occupancy has declined each year.

When his largest tenant, Milwaukee County, chose not to renew its lease in 2024, he projected it would drop office occupancy into the “low 20s.”

Now, he plans to turn the “12 or 13” uppermost floors of the building into apartments, using federal and state low-income housing tax credits.

“We have seen that there’s a pretty tremendous demand for more affordable housing in downtown Milwaukee,” Jeffers said.

To claim those credits, owners must set aside slices of their new development for renters in different income classes — all below 60 percent of Milwaukee’s Area Median Income.

Jeffers said that, taken all together, 80 percent — about 180 apartments — of his new units will be priced at these staggered affordability levels, with 20 percent going at market rates.

He said he aims to keep the building’s remaining tenants, such as nonprofit Legal Action Wisconsin, in the lower floors.

Construction will start in early 2026, and take about 16 months, he predicted.

Building one-time corporate HQ, transportation node

There’s a reason construction won’t start for another year, Jeffers said: he plans to list the 1964 building on the National Register of Historic Places, which takes time.

It’ll allow him to get historic preservation tax credits for construction.

“In the late ’50s and the early ’60s, Milwaukee, like a lot of American cities, was undergoing what city officials liked to call ‘urban renewal,’” said Bobby Tanzilo, an editor at OnMilwaukee magazine who has written about the Clark Building’s history.

He said it was built as a speculative investment by a Tennessee company, then bought by Georgia native Emory T. Clark, founder of Clark Oil.

“Moved up here with his mother and brother, and interestingly, his brother is sort of considered the pioneer of frozen custard in Milwaukee,” Tanzilo said of Clark.

Clark Oil controlled 1,500 gas stations at its peak, before its sale in 1981.

During that time, Milwaukee’s Greyhound station also occupied the building. According to Tanzilo, as many as 200 buses would enter and leave the station each day, including buses to Chicago-area racetracks and Wisconsin ski slopes.

In 2007, intercity bus service, diminished since its 20th-century heyday, moved into the Milwaukee Intermodal Station.

Another of the building’s historic qualities is its material: poured concrete.

“You really don’t see that type of construction in an office tower like this anymore,” Jeffers said.

“This thing could probably survive a nuclear bomb going off,” he added.

He said the thick concrete’s natural sound insulation will ease the stress of renovation work on current office tenants, and “provide a better quality of life experience” for future residents.

“There’s something very intrinsically rewarding about taking a building that’s at the end of useful life, and instead of demolishing it, reimagining it for the next 50, 60, or sometimes 100 or even 150 years,” Jeffers said.

He said that the national trend of converting offices to apartments is “much easier said than done,” complicated by far-flung corporate campuses with “huge training rooms and corporate cafeteria spaces.”

But the Clark Building, in his view, is “very conducive” to such a conversion.

Jeffers’s firm, J. Jeffers & Co, redeveloped the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s old offices into the Journal Commons apartments in 2022.