Grand Avenue awaits

In its periodic update on development activity, the Downtown News manages to find a middle ground in summarizing the status of 109 projects: slower than in the heyday of a few years ago, but livelier than the doomsayers believe. That sounds about right - at some point the credit market will improve and long-stalled developments will get going, but bankers are likely to be very stingy, especially for all but sure things. Here's what the newspaper has to say about the dead-in-the-water Grand Avenue project:

The first part of the project, a 16-acre, $56 million Civic Park, is expected to break ground by next summer. There is still no groundbreaking date for the rest of the approximately $1 billion, 1.3 million-square-foot first phase of the project, which would create a 48-story Mandarin Oriental Hotel & Residences with 295 hotel rooms and 266 condominiums, a 19-story tower with 126 market-rate apartments and 98 affordable residences, along with a 250,000-square-foot retail pavilion. [Bill Witte, West Coast president of developer the Related Companies], said Related is waiting out the current recession and the frozen lending markets, and will still need an estimated $700 million construction loan. The project's entitlements will remain in place until February 2011.