The former site of Black Cat Ice Cream on Cottage Grove Avenue will be redeveloped into a mixed-use building with commercial space on the ground floor and residential on the second, said the developer behind the project.

The ice cream shop closed its operation at 2511 Cottage Grove Ave. last year because of structural issues with the building. In early December, Black Cat opened a shop on Locust Street downtown. Earlier, it had opened a store in Valley Junction in West Des Moines.

According to city documents, a demolition permit for the Cottage Grove building was approved on Jan. 21. A pre-application meeting with the developer, DEV Partners, was scheduled for Jan. 20, documents show.

A pre-application meeting is offered by the city to any developer considering the redevelopment of a property. City staff reviews proposals outlined during the pre-application process to help a developer learn what the process would look like and what might be required by the city for a project to proceed.

A redevelopment proposal submitted by DEV Partners shows an 8,500-square-foot building on the site.

Danny Heggen, partner and CFO with DEV Partners, said the number of commercial units on the first floor will be based on a tenant’s use. There will be four residential units for rent on the second floor.

The building will continue to be a space that will serve the neighborhood and community, he said, pointing to other projects DEV Partners has been involved with, including the Varsity Theater, the Val-Air Ballroom restoration and the Ingersoll theater project.

“These are challenging projects and we have to be very precise and disciplined about how we plan for them,” he said. “These are still investments and we want to make sure that they’re quality investments that bring these buildings back to life for another 100 years. But the key focal point is their historic fabric. People know how to use these spaces because these spaces have existed in these neighborhoods, these commercial nodes, for a long time.”

Heggen said the Cottage Grove neighborhood is an entry point to the Drake neighborhood, and an area “where people converge. They are educated on how to use this with commercial use.

“So when we started looking at the site as a mixed-use plan, we know people live in this area, there’s a ton of single family housing, but middle density was missing,” he said.

Heggen said redeveloping the site into middle or medium density is possible because of changes the city made to its codes several years ago to bring back transition zones in neighborhoods.

“How do we bring back these areas, specifically around these commercial nodes, where you have high density and then we need to not have a single family house right next to high density, so how do we step down from high density to middle density and low density?” he said.

Heggen said the planned redevelopment fits into that plan with its proximity to 25th Street and the businesses along that street before University Avenue, and then Dogtown to the east and Drake University to the west on University.

“This is such a great point of entry and we need areas that welcome people and areas that say this is how this area can be used,” he said. “When you give people the opportunity to walk and bike and move around, all of a sudden this is a very welcoming neighborhood. People are walking, people are outside, people are using the spaces. That’s a great welcome sign to a neighborhood.”

Heggen grew up in rural Iowa and lived in Essex, Creston, Rockwell and Swaledale, graduating high school from Woodward-Granger. Those experiences growing up in small towns has helped shape his vision for projects DEV Partners is involved in, not only in smaller Iowa communities, but also in Des Moines.

“The core of what really drives me is building community, and how we interact with one another and how space enhances that,” Heggen said. 

He said DEV Partner’s row homes project at 31st Street and Forest Avenue and another at Park and Indianola avenues are examples of a development first tried in rural Iowa and later brought to Des Moines.

“That was actually versions 3.0 and 4.0,” Heggen said. “I developed my first two versions of that in rural Iowa to test and iterate.”

He said doing that helps DEV Partners learn how to better navigate funding and incentives, and the building of partnerships within a community to bring a project to reality. And doing that often helps take a property that generates zero tax dollars to one that generates $50,000 to $60,000 in revenue for a community, Heggen said.

“It allows us to figure out how this works and then bring it to Des Moines and a very focused market,” Heggen said.