Court Clears Path to Sell Milwaukee’s Stalled Edison Timber Skyscraper

After nine months in limbo, the site of what was billed as the tallest mass timber building in the United States is headed for a foreclosure sale, with a judge entering a default judgment against the developer of Milwaukee’s half-built Edison tower.

Because Neutral failed to lodge a legally valid response within Wisconsin’s statutory deadline, Yamahiro granted the judgment by default, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Tom Daykin reported. The ruling allows the contractor to take ownership of the site and to resell it to a new developer.

While Neutral CEO Nate Helbach had moved to push the dispute into mediation or arbitration under the general contract, Yamahiro struck the filing because Helbach, who is not a lawyer, cannot represent a limited liability company in court, with neither Helbach nor a Neutral attorney appearing at Monday’s hearing.

Having performed $13.67 million in work while receiving just $2.37 million in payment, C.D. Smith is chasing a balance of $11.3 million before interest and legal fees, part of more than $14 million in claims lodged by contractors against the project. In its March filing, the contractor argued that Neutral “ran out of capital” due to cost overruns and that it terminated loan agreements with senior lenders.

“Owner has all but abandoned the Project,” the foreclosure suit said.

The judgment follows April revelations that the stalled plyscraper could be revived as workforce housing, with Milwaukee Development Commissioner Lafayette Crump telling councillors that Neutral executives were “exploring everything possible”, including a redesign, a new development partner or a pivot to apartments targeting households earning up to 100 per cent of the area median income.

Crews broke ground in June 2025, but work on the 31-storey tower stopped abruptly in September, when a budget that had swelled from $205 million to at least $230 million under tariff and inflationary pressure left the project with a $25 million funding gap. By November, the tower crane had been stripped from a site holding little more than a partially completed foundation.

Compounding the developer’s troubles, Neutral has been working through debts tied to Bakers Place, its first mass timber apartment building in Madison, which sold for $37 million, or close to half its reported development cost.

Designed by Chicago-based Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture, the Edison was to combine 100,000 cubic feet of cross-laminated timber panels and glulam beams over an eight-storey post-tensioned concrete base, delivering more than 350 luxury apartments with a 54 per cent reduction in embodied carbon compared with equivalent steel-and-concrete construction. At full height, it would have eclipsed Milwaukee’s 25-storey Ascent, certified in 2022 as the world’s tallest timber-concrete hybrid, and stood as a proof of concept for tall timber in the United States.

While the causes of the collapse remain contested, trade policy looms large: weeks before work stopped, the US Commerce Department more than doubled its softwood duties on Canadian lumber from 6.74 per cent to 14.63 per cent, pushing combined countervailing and anti-dumping duties from 14.5 per cent to 35 per cent, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

Should C.D. Smith take control of the parcel, the contractor could sell it to another developer or pursue an alternative resolution, though Yamahiro must first sign a written foreclosure order after the firm’s attorney, Benjamin Prinsen of Kravit, Hovel & Krawczyk, files updated documents accounting for resolved subcontractor claims. Neutral, for its part, could seek to reopen the case, but only by retaining an attorney and persuading the court to set aside the default.