The Bewley Building proposal, as currently framed, does not line up with what Lockport’s $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) grant was actually created to support. The state’s program and the city’s own DRI plan emphasize targeted, catalytic investment in downtown’s commercial heart and walkability, not a single $66 million, largely residential conversion that hollows out a signature office and retail landmark.
From the start, Lockport’s DRI pitch was clear: use $10 million in state funds to revitalize a 15-block, Erie Canal–oriented district by redeveloping vacant or underutilized commercial buildings into mixed-use spaces that add jobs and some housing, improving walkability and connections to the canal through streetscape, trail, and public-space projects, and leveraging a mix of market-rate, affordable, and luxury housing while keeping downtown a hub for business, tourism, and culture.
Accordingly, the $10 million has been spread across multiple anchor projects — like the Old Post Office rehabilitation and streetscape/green-infrastructure work — and a small-project fund that helped dozens of local businesses with modest building upgrades. In that original framework, the Bewley was flagged only for “minor improvements” under the DRI small-project fund, such as restroom upgrades, not a wholesale change of use.
The current Bewley concept is a very different proposal: a roughly $66 million conversion of the city’s most iconic office building into about 100 income-restricted apartments with ground-floor retail. To make the numbers work, the developer expects to rely on federal Historic Tax Credits, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, and state housing subsidies — financing tools that reward high “qualified rehabilitation” budgets and layer in significant soft costs, professional fees, and financing charges.
Instead of modest, targeted renovation that keeps and strengthens downtown jobs, the plan would shrink the building’s commercial footprint to create residential common areas, even though city leadership has acknowledged this conflicts with long-standing goals for a vibrant, mixed-use Main Street, and concentrate a large block of income-restricted housing in one landmark property, despite city plans that call for diversifying affordable housing locations and preserving downtown’s role as a commercial and civic core.
Nothing in the DRI rules forbids the Bewley from seeking separate state housing funds, but it is misleading to present this $66 million, heavily subsidized housing tower as the fulfillment of the $10 million DRI vision. The DRI money was awarded to seed multiple catalytic projects, not underwrite one outsized deal; to reinforce downtown’s commercial base and canal-oriented tourism assets, not remove prime office and retail space from the market; and to create a walkable, mixed-income neighborhood, not stack most new income-restricted units into a single historic office tower with strained parking and no on-site green space.
In short, the Bewley conversion may be a housing policy debate, but it is not what Lockport promised when it accepted a $10 million DRI award to “transform downtown neighborhoods into vibrant communities where New Yorkers want to live, work and raise families.”