A Houston developer is taking a step toward reviving a vacant San Antonio hospital.
Innjoy Hospitality submitted plans to the city’s Historic and Design Review Commission to convert the former Nix Medical Center at 414 Navarro Street into a 329-unit apartment building with ground-floor food and beverage space, the San Antonio Business Journal reported.
The application marks the first public movement on the project since last year, when the company completed a preliminary review with the city.
The commission is expected to take up the proposal at its Aug. 6 meeting. Plans submitted by Innjoy include a mix of studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments. Local firms XA Collective Architecture + Planning, HM3 Engineering and A-1 Engineering are part of the design team.
Innjoy acquired the more than 300,000-square-foot building in 2020 and floated the idea of converting it into a hotel. But multifamily use seemed the better economic play, partner Adrian Ramirez said in an interview at the time. A state filing from late 2023 had projected a construction start in early 2025, though no visible work has begun.
“It’s still in the air, but the multifamily component is what seems to make the most economic sense at this point,” Ramirez said to the outlet in 2020.
The 23-story Nix tower sits near the River Walk and was long home to Nix Health. After the hospital closed in 2019, the building has remained vacant, a high-profile gap in San Antonio’s effort to reenergize its downtown core.
If approved, the conversion would be one of the largest adaptive reuse projects in the city’s central business district. Developers across Texas are eyeing similar plays amid persistently high office and medical vacancy rates and a deepening shortage of housing near downtown employment hubs.
A construction timeline for the Nix project has not been disclosed.
The project would join a growing list of downtown San Antonio conversions either underway or in the pipeline, including Broadway East and the Continental Hotel redevelopment.
— Judah Duke
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