Page 42 - BusinessWest July 24, 2023

“Someone growing lettuce and micrograins can’t afford a $40 million building, but if the redevelopment authority can gain control of that building or sell it without needing to make a profit, andwecangeta whole industry or a bunch of small businesses going, we can create a food economy, and that would be huge.”
looked at it like it was the golden goose. If you had a building, you asked for four times what it was worth, and if you had space to lease, you asked the tenant to spend millions of dollars to fix up your run-down building. And, quite honestly, very few people could afford that.
“Some of the big, multi-state operators came in with deep pockets and dumped tons of money,” he went on. “And as we can see with Trulieve, that doesn’t seem to work.”
He’s taking a different approach, one he thinks will generate some long-term success.
Indeed, at the Cabot Street property, he’s drawing on 20 years of experience with renovating and then leasing out a former mill building to emerging small businesses in New Hampshire.
“We’re trying to help these small businesses get start- ed; we’re doing the lion’s share of the renovation work and essentially giving them a turnkey operation except for fixtures and whatever they need to run their business, whether they’re doing cultivation, manufacturing, or pro- cessing,” he said. “We’ve talked with multiple tenants; we’ll have a retail dispensary in the front of the building that we’re working on.”
Elaborating, he said he and Karen purchased the building “for a song” and have invested far more than $1 million in it thus far. He said he’s had some experience with the cannabis industry in New Hampshire and Maine and understands its potential, both as a source of tenants and its importance to the community in question.
At present, there is one business operating at the property on Cabot Street, Mill Town, a cultivation and light-manufacturing operation, Cusano said, adding that several more are in the pipeline, ventures that will occupy 10,000- to 35,000-square-foot spaces.
He believes this model will fare better than some of the other strategies that have been tried — mostly com-
panies overpaying to purchase or lease property, a situa- tion that adds another layer of challenge to their ability to remain competitive in a rapidly changing market.
“People were overpaying, dumping a ton of money into these properties, and then the market collapsed because of oversupply, and they were upside-down,” he said. “We have a saying in the retail business — you can sell below cost and make up the difference with volume. But not for long.”
Bottom Line
Returning to his thoughts about indoor farming and how properties like the Trulieve facility might be turned over to such uses, Vega said such prospects represent just one of the ways the changing real-estate climate in Holyoke represents both challenge and opportunity.
“Let’s keep the cannabis industry, but let’s also help the local food economy,” he said. “Someone growing let- tuce and micrograins can’t afford a $40 million building, but if the redevelopment authority can gain control of that building or sell it without needing to make a profit, and we can get a whole industry or a bunch of small business- es going, we can create a food economy, and that would be huge.”
He acknowledged, without actually saying so, that such plans represent a real long shot. The reality is that, rather than solutions, there might be more question marks for the buildings bought with designs on entering what looked at the time to be a lucrative cannabis sector.
And if things break the wrong way, Holyoke may wind up with what it had before it rolled out the red carpet for this industry — a large number of vacant and underuti- lized properties. BW
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