Tom Huff is a man possessed.
Having long since retired from a successful legal career, one of Kalamazoo's real estate moguls now has the time and the capital on his hands to continue to reshape the city, his hometown.
"I am possessed by this," says Huff, 69, owner of
Peregrine Realty. "I just take these buildings and I just do it. It's what I do now."
Huff sits at a thick wooden desk high above downtown Kalamazoo in an office on the 7th floor of the Peregrine Tower, a former Michigan Bell Telephone building that he bought more than a decade ago, turning it into 25 luxury apartments.
He walks out onto the terrace. Looking north, low-hanging clouds coat the city in a milky mist. From this vantage point, Huff is able to point out his handiwork, as well as discuss the plans for the future.
Huff leans back in his chair, then a cat emerges from behind his desk. The cat, "Cosette," named after the orphan daughter of a prostitute saved by the redemptive protagonist Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's book "Les Miserables," is a kind of metaphor for what Huff is doing with his projects.
He saved the cat from the Kalamazoo County Animal Shelter on Lake Street, giving Colette a new lease on life. Now, he's saving buildings, giving them new life, new purpose.
Cooking right now is his $2.4 million project at
Peregrine Plaza, adjacent to the tower on the corner of the Kalamazoo Mall and South Street. The Kalamazoo Gazette's new "news hub" will find a home in 7,300 square feet in the space once held by the Kalamazoo Advantage Academy, a charter school that closed in 2008.
On the second floor, Huff is developing 16 residential units, each between 1,500 and 2,000 square feet. Eight of the units will have penthouse stylings, with walkout decks and terraces. Natural light pouring into the units and greenery on the roof will create a living environment second to none in the city's downtown, Huff says.
The project is expected to be completed by this summer. And more work is on the backburner.
He plans to develop 16 apartment units for the upper floors of the former Walgreen's building on the Mall, which now houses Urban Salon and Terrapin on the first floor. The adjacent building, which houses Fandango Tapas Bistro, will have eight apartments on its upper floors in the coming years, Huff says.
He also owns the London Grill restaurants in Kalamazoo and Plainwell, and Winston's, a Kalamazoo bar on East Michigan Avenue specializing in single-malt scotch. The large parking lot behind the establishments is also his, a site for future development, he says.
It's a portfolio that has grown substantially since he made his first real estate acquisitions in the 1970s, including the building that houses residential space and Café Casa on the Mall.
"There is a lot of excitement right now about development downtown," Huff says. "It's all good but we need to know how to manage it. A lot can happen.
"I've been fortunate. I could have gone to Florida, or taken my money to some investment house. But I want to see it change the city. It's gratifying. It's not too often that you can make a difference in things."
Huff earned a bachelor's degree from Michigan State University in 1964 and earned his law degree from Wayne State University in 1967. He formed his own practice -- Huff, Kreis, Enderle, Callander and Hudgins -- in 1975.
He opened the first Kalamazoo office for
Varnum, Riddering, Schmidt and Howlett in 1987, where he stayed until retiring from full-time law in 2003. He still does work for several clients.
In addition to serving as a director for
Chemical Financial Corp., the work that consumes Huff these days is residential and commercial development through his company.
But he has his concerns.
Property taxes in Kalamazoo are too high, Huff says, and if they aren't lowered might lead to developers like himself taking their foot off the development accelerator pedal.
Huff points out that Kalamazoo is flush with nonprofit agencies that pay no property taxes, while commercial real estate developers like himself are subject to some of the highest property taxes in the state.
The city's tax structure needs to change, Huff says, and that might mean touching a kind of third-rail locally -- taxing nonprofts.
"It's become so expensive to build down here that it almost becomes counterproductive," he says. "(Mayor) Bobby (Hopewell) and the other city commissioners need to hear from developers and people like myself that they have to be careful, because once the people just abandon it (development), you could have a problem.
"Like now. There are very few downtown condos for sale. No one wants the tax liability. They (commissioners) need to deal with the tax issue or no one will come downtown to buy."
Huff wants to see people get together to invent creative ways to engineer government for the future. Maybe, he says, townships should be done away with, and have instead a countywide government.
Maybe there should also be a countywide tax, Huff says. It's all about fairness, he says.
"If someone from Portage comes to Bronson Hospital, why shouldn't they pay taxes for the roads they use?" he asked.
But don't think that Huff is a raging, anti-tax right-winger. He's not.
He travels to Europe once a year, visiting Germany, Switzerland, Austria and other nations. He's enthralled by European city culture, with well-functioning public transportation and people who live downtown and support local, organically sprung businesses.
"Look at Germany," Huff says. "They have a 19 percent value added tax. It costs more to drive. But they take that money and they invest it into society so that the most people get the most benefit."
Regardless, Huff is excited about Kalamazoo's downtown.
Whether it's the $24 million The Exchange project or the 330,000 square feet of Pfizer's former Building 267 at Lovell and Portage streets -- and donated by MPI Research -- to house Western Michigan University's medical school, the downtown area is experiencing change at a fast and constant pace.
"There's a movement now. People want to live downtown," Huff says. "You are starting to see projects feeding off one another. New construction really hasn't happened here, but it has to happen -- and I think it will."
Chris Killian is a freelance journalist based in Kalamazoo, Mich., where he's lived full-time since graduating from Western Michigan University in 2004. He writes regularly for local media outlets and specializes in feature, environmental and political stories.
Photos by Erik Holladay