Nine months after work stopped on what was to be America’s tallest mass timber building, the Milwaukee alderman overseeing the city’s development committee has ruled out a quick sale of the failed Edison site, even with a formal $11.3 million judgment clearing the riverfront parcel for market.
That is according to Robert Bauman, chair of Milwaukee’s Zoning, Neighbourhoods and Development Committee, who said statutory waiting periods built into Wisconsin’s foreclosure process preclude any fast transaction of the half-built site at 1005 N. Edison St. “I am sure it will happen eventually. It is a good location,” Bauman said, tipping a residential future for a parcel once earmarked for 378 luxury apartments above the Milwaukee River.
His comments follow the 29 June default judgment in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, where Judge Glenn Yamahiro cleared the failed 31-storey tower’s site for sale, with the written judgment formally awarding Fond du Lac-based C.D. Smith Construction $11.3 million after developer Neutral never lodged a legally valid response.
Court records show the general contractor performed $13.67 million in work on the half-built tower while receiving just $2.37 million in payment, with the award covering the unpaid balance before interest, fees, and court costs.
Because C.D. Smith’s March suit also named 11 other contractors and vendors as defendants, project architect Hartshorne Plunkard is among those chasing unpaid bills on the tower it designed, with the joined action pulling every party holding a financial stake into a single case rather than a string of separate claims.
Neither C.D. Smith nor Neutral responded to media requests for comment on the award. Nate Helbach, the Neutral chief executive, had earlier sought to push the dispute into arbitration, but the filing was struck because Helbach, who is not a lawyer, cannot represent a limited liability company in court.
Concerns over Neutral’s performance had already cost the developer its biggest Milwaukee prize, with city officials removing the firm as preferred developer in November for the $700 million redevelopment of the Marcus Performing Arts Centre parking structure across the street, a scheme calling for up to 750 residential units, 90,000 square feet of office space, and 300 hotel rooms.
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The residential future Bauman expects has already been before the city’s development committee, which in April weighed a pivot to workforce housing that would reposition the luxury tower for households earning up to 100 per cent of the area median income.
“We’d certainly love to see something move forward,” Lafayette Crump, the Commissioner of Milwaukee’s Department of City Development, told the committee at the time, as Neutral executives explored every option, from a redesign to a new development partner.
Any thaw between developer and builder proved short-lived, with Crump telling members that proceeds from Neutral’s fire sale of Bakers Place, the Madison mass timber building offloaded for $37 million, had cleared an overdue construction loan owed to C.D. Smith, a step he hoped would open a path to a restructured deal, before the contractor pressed its foreclosure claim to judgment regardless.
Beyond the contractor claims, the parcel carries $44,333 in delinquent property taxes, a debt that prompted Bauman in April to raise the prospect of the city filing its own foreclosure action.
Designed by Chicago-based Hartshorne Plunkard as a hybrid of 100,000 cubic feet of cross-laminated timber and glulam over an eight-storey post-tensioned concrete base, the 378-unit Edison was to eclipse Milwaukee’s 25-storey Ascent as the tallest mass timber building in the United States, with Neutral projecting a 54 per cent reduction in embodied carbon compared with equivalent steel-and-concrete construction.
A budget that swelled from $205 million to at least $230 million under tariff and inflationary pressure stopped work in September 2025. For now, the award leaves C.D. Smith holding an $11.3 million judgment, and Bauman holding to his forecast that housing will eventually rise on one of downtown Milwaukee’s best riverfront addresses.
