Construction crews have begun renovating the former church property at 250 S. Foster Drive, adjacent to the A.C. Lewis YMCA branch near Government Street, that will be the new home to consulting firm Franklin Associates.
Work got under way earlier this summer and is scheduled to be completed in time for a January 2021 opening of the facility, which will include not only 6,600 square feet of office space but also a 5,000-square-foot conference center that will be available for business and civic groups to rent for gatherings and meetings.
“I am excited about it,” says Franklin Associates founder and owner Perry Franklin. “A lot of groups have already approached me to say, ‘Hey can we have our Kiwanis Club at your place?’ That is the type of people I want to have as my regular tenants.”
Franklin will also use the center for public outreach and educational meetings, which his firm often facilitates on behalf of its government clients.
Those clients include the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, with which Franklin is working on both the Interstate 10 widening and the new south Mississippi River bridge project, and also the city-parish, with which Franklin is working as a subcontractor on MovEBR.
Franklin is spending more than $2 million on the project, including the July 2019 acquisition of the property, but believes it will be more than worth it in the long run. In addition to leasing out the event center, the property contains two undeveloped outparcels he plans to redevelop as two separate retail spaces.
“It is a significant investment in a part of Baton Rouge that I have been working in for almost 20 years,” says Franklin, who was tapped to head the Mid City Redevelopment Alliance in 1994, when the agency was just three years old. He would run it for the next 11 years.
The property is the second in that immediate area Franklin is redeveloping. In 2019, he razed a car wash at 4550 Government St. that he had acquired several years ago and redeveloped it in a build-to-suit deal as a physicians’ office building, which recently opened.
“That building follows all the guidelines of the Government Street Overlay District,” says Franklin, who helped draft the district regulations in 2003. “It’s built to the front edge of the property, parking is to the rear, it is landscaped in a way that shields the vehicles from the street view and it has monument signage. So for me it is an example of how you improve a neighborhood and create a pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly district.”
