Uptown Mentor’s $10M apartment-and-retail redevelopment moves to groundbreaking

Uptown Mentor’s roughly $10 million apartment-and-retail redevelopment is headed toward construction, with a Sept. 25 groundbreaking at 8677 Mentor Ave. scheduled for the four-story project. It is expected to add 45 market-rate apartments and ground-floor commercial space along Mentor Avenue.

Mentor City Council approved the final financing agreement, cleveland.com reported Sept. 9. Beginning in 2028, the deal will direct the redevelopment’s future property-tax growth toward the Uptown project through a 30-year tax-increment-financing agreement, with separate compensation for Mentor Schools.

What will be built

The approved site-development plan calls for commercial space on the ground floor, apartments on the three floors above and a lower-level garage.

Each residential floor would have 15 apartments, for a total of 45. The ground floor would include about 14,052 square feet of commercial space.

Uptown Mentor, LLC is the developer. Geis Companies and Uptown Mentor, LLC applied in 2025 to rezone the group of parcels for the project.

The development calls for at least $10 million in private investment, not counting the cost of buying the property.

The 30-year financing deal

Tax-increment financing, commonly called TIF, captures the increase in a property’s value created by development. A local government can exempt that increase from ordinary property taxes and instead require service payments in lieu of taxes.

For the Uptown project, those payments will be set aside to support the redevelopment rather than distributed entirely through the usual property-tax system. The local ordinance and financing agreement establish how the money can be used.

Ohio municipalities can exempt up to 100% of the improvement-related increase in value for as long as 30 years, subject to state requirements and the terms of each local agreement.

For the first 20 years, the agreement guarantees Mentor Schools $680,000. Of that, $260,000 is to come from the developer, while the city is scheduled to provide $420,000 from income and payroll taxes connected to commercial tenants — a separate source from the property-tax growth captured by the TIF.

The formula changes for the final 10 years. During that period, the school district is scheduled to receive half of the property-tax revenue it otherwise would have collected.

Tenants still to come

No commercial tenants had been confirmed as of Sept. 9. Possible ground-floor uses discussed for the project have included restaurants, cafes, a brewery, bakeries, shops and offices.

After the groundbreaking, the next milestones will be the completion of the 45 apartments and 14,052 square feet of commercial space — and which businesses ultimately open their doors in Uptown.