He‘s Building Midtown: Tim Burden Transforms the Heart of Traverse City

July 28, 2004

Ask Tim Burden if it’s true that he started out as a hippie house painter and a little smile dawns on his face along with the glimmer of youthful memories.
“Yeah, I started out painting houses when I was 19 years old,” he recalls with a laugh, adding that the painting gig was the first in a series of companies he launched. “I learned the painting business over a lot of mistakes and learned from them.”
From that humble beginning, Burden, 52, went on to establish Burdco, Inc., one of the largest asbestos-removal companies in the nation. And from that platform, he has become one of Traverse City’s most notable developers. Currently, he’s building the $22 million Midtown Centre, a residential project which sprawls across four-and-a-half acres off Eighth Street, just south of downtown. Midtown segues into another Burden creation, the $12 million River’s Edge condo tower which houses the popular 310 restaurant.
All told, Burden has created nearly $35 million of new real estate from an industrial waste site along the Boardman River, building a whole new midtown south of the city’s core. Scores of workmen swarm over the site – contractors not unlike Burden himself 30 years ago at the start of his rags-to-riches tale.

THUMBS UP
Burden has avoided the scathing treatment many developers receive in Northern Michigan because he’s working on the creation of what his brochure calls “a traditional urban neighborhood” that’s in line with the New Urbanist vision of anti-sprawl activists in the region. One of the chief New Urbanist tenets is to bring new high-density housing back to the city core, limiting the kind of suburban sprawl that chews up the countryside.
“I wanted to build something different along the lines of the new urban planning,” he says. “I didn’t want to build a new subdivision. What we’ve done here is to de-emphasize the car. The garages are all underneath the buildings and the street is designed to encourage people to drive slow. Cars take up so much space if you let them. I wanted to create something that people would identify as a neighborhood.”
At Midtown Centre, Burden has done just that, with city residents watching agog as rows of tightly-packed townhouses have gone up over the past year between the Boardman River and Lake Street.
In June, Burden was awarded the 12th Annual Lyle DeYoung Award by the Downtown Traverse City Association for transforming the toxic wasteland of the former Iron Works site into what’s expected to be a robust riverside neighborhood.
Not everyone has been pleased; initially there were grumbles from local residents over the aesthetics of the project, which is a departure from what some might consider a traditional neighborhood. “I think they’re butt-ugly and can’t believe the city allowed them to be built,” comments one critic.
To another observer, however, the homes have the pleasant feel of “clapboard seaside rowhouses.”
Whatever your opinion, there’s no denying that the Midtown Centre homes have been popular. Burden had 31 reservations for homes before he even broke ground and the remainder have been snapped up as fast as they’re built. When he started building the homes of Midtown a little over a year ago, an entry-level residence was going for $149,000; today it’s $172,000, with pricier homes ranging in the $249,000-$278,225 range. It’s expected that all 80 homes will be sold by the time the development is completed.
Who’s buying in?
“Our M.O. is mostly empty nesters who want to live back in town,” Burden says. “The location is certainly quite special -- it’s a beautiful little spot along the river -- you can hear the birds singing here and it’s walkable to the restaurants and shops downtown. It’s very peaceful here in the evening.”
He adds that only about 10-15% of Midtown’s new residents are from outside the area. “A lot of people moving here just want to downsize and simplify their lives. The first thing they do is get rid of an extra car -- everyone seems to be okay with that.”
Burden is considering the acquisition of a “community car” for the neighborhood, which could be shared by residents. The only downside on the project thus far has been its finite borders.
“We ran out of room – I wish we had more ground to keep going,” Burden says. “The smaller units all sold by the end of the year.”

RIGHT TIME & PLACE
Burden grew up in Traverse City, graduating from St. Francis High School in 1970. As a youthful entrepreneur, he bought an airless paint sprayer from local New Urbanist and builder Mark Nixon when he was 18 to launch his first business. That led to Burdco Construction, Inc., a business he started with Craig O’Donnell in 1976. When O’Donnell left the partnership to pursue a career in real estate, Mike Brown joined the company to guide its business side.
“We were trying all kinds of things: sandblasting, work for the oil fields, roofing and waterproofing and wallpaper -- anything you could do,” Burden recalls. “We actually painted trucks for quite awhile, the big semis and cabs and chassis -- we did all kinds of stuff until finally asbestos removal came along in the early ’80s and we got into that in ’82. We were one of the first companies in Michigan and took off and grew like gangbusters for a bunch of years.”
Local lore has it that Burden was checking out a house painting job at a home on Sixth Street when the woman occupant asked him to investigate the strange asbestos substance in her walls. Looking into the matter, he learned that the federal government was on the verge of lauching a mammoth intitiative to rid the country’s buildings of asbestos, a dangerous form of insulation that can result in severe lung damage.
“We were one of the largest asbestos abatement companies in the country,” Burden says. “We were licensed in 40 states and had seven or eight offices.”

HANDS-ON GUY
Did those early days mean getting his own hands dirty in the brutally difficult task of asbestos removal? “I’ve done everything from A to Z, including hauling out the trash and sleeping in the warehouse,” he responds.
By the mid-’90s, Burden was ready to try something new. He and Robert Forsman of Burdco investigated the possibility of developing the TC Iron Works property, which was heavily contaminated with metal slag residue. A $1.6 million brownfield reclamation grant was obtained from the State, and in 1997, Burden made an offer on the property. He started building the River’s Edge condo building that fall.
“I kind of got talked into it,” he says, when asked why he became a developer. “I sold the environmental business and had people saying that I should develop this land. I had wanted to uncomplicate my life.”
But it was the complicated route that he ultimately chose -- as it turned out, more complicated than he imagined.
“In the fall of ‘97 we had everything in front of us and I had to make a decision whether to begin the project or not,” he recalls. “I spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking, do I walk away from the investment I have, or move forward? So I jumped in with both feet and it started out like gangbusters.”
River’s Edge was both a hit and a miss, plunging Burden into a business disaster.
With the first phase of River’s Edge completed and getting thumbs up from the community, Burden began work on the second half of the project. “Then the economy went bad, the bank foreclosed on me and there was an auction and a liquidation. It got pretty ugly for awhile.”
Lenders foreclosed on close to $3.9 million on River’s Edge, threatening to put an end to Burden’s vision of developing the riverfront.

MOVING ON
Even though his credit and reputation were damaged in the River’s Edge debacle, Burden decided to move forward with the Midtown Centre project on the other side of Cass Street.
“It was very difficult, very difficult,” he says. “But I had faith in the project -- sometimes I was the only one that had it.”
An undisclosed friend with deep pockets also had faith. When Burden was unable to get financing to begin Midtown Centre, his friend co-signed on a loan to make the development possible.
Burden applied the New Urbanist principles of a walkable community to Midtown Centre with the help of Cornerstone Architects John Dancer and Lisa Ferenga, among others. Homestead developer Bob Kuras also offered many helpful suggestions for the project.
Plans for Midtown confounded some, however. “Initially, we engaged about six architects and about half of them didn’t get it,” he notes.
Then too, some thought that the inclusion of eight low-income condos at Midtown was a bad move. The condos were purchased by Homestretch, a community outreach organization.
Burden is proud of the low income decision. “There was a lot of criticism that adding affordable housing would destroy the neighborhood, and that hasn’t happened,” he says, adding that one critic even predicted that Midtown would become a slum in 10 years. “No matter what you’re doing, there’s always someone who doesn’t like it.”

ADVICE ON GROWTH
The husband of Debbie and the father of two, Matt and Jacob, Burden says he’s considering other New Urbanist developments after Midtown Centre is complete. “I’m looking at doing more thoughtful developments like this -- I’ve had a lot of fun with it over the last year and a half and it’s been an education.”
But there’s still more to be done on Midtown Centre before moving on. “It’s still a developing vision at this point,” he says. “It’s been rethought a bunch of times. I thought we would build it out in five years and it’s been seven and a half since we started River’s Edge.”
Speaking of which, Burden says the key to good development in the region is to go slow.
“As I look at developments and options for the area I think it’s too bad that people don’t have more patience,” he says, referring both to those who leap to negative judgments and to those who rush developments through. “Even downtown with buildings four to seven stories, you get a much better product the more time you take. That can be an interesting, challenging, painful process, but more time involved makes building design and site design better. The more people who look at a project, the better it gets.”