Owners of the former Nix Hospital building are moving forward with plans to turn the 24-story River Walk tower into the Nix Apartments.
The Rio Grande Valley-based hotel developer that acquired the building in 2019 filed a state notice earlier this month that describes a $10 million renovation of the former downtown hospital into multi-family housing.
City staff in recent months has reviewed and approved an architect’s preliminary plans for renovating the interior of the building at 414 Navarro St. The documents do not outline the number of planned residential units or show renderings. The City also requires a final technical review for such projects.
When InnJoy Hospitality bought the historic Nix Hospital building, the managing partner declined to say if the circa-1930 building in the heart of downtown would be redeveloped into a hotel.
Weeks later, a company spokesman told the Report that InnJoy was planning a multi-family development with mixed-use retail at street level. Construction would be finished within two to three years of completing an economic and feasibility study that was to come, he said, and design concepts were also in the works.
Nitin Kasan, managing partner at InnJoy, has since not responded to multiple requests for information about his plans.
Meanwhile, the future of the building, a local landmark, remained a mystery and the city added it to the vacant building program list. A recent inspection resulted in a notice to the owner that several boarded windows were open and needed attention.
Designed by architect Henry Phelps, designer of the 1922 Maverick Building on Houston Street, the Gothic-style structure was built as a “medical mall,” the first of its kind, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
The tower combined a hospital with physicians’ offices and a three-floor valet parking garage in what was known as the Joseph M. Nix Professional Building. It featured a cafeteria, tailor, barbershop, and a lobby with marble floors and brass fixtures. It was at the time the tallest and largest building in San Antonio.
The descendants of developer J.M. Nix owned and managed the building until 1984. Merit Health Systems of Kentucky acquired the Nix Hospital in 2004.
In 2012, Merit sold the building to California-based Prospect Medical Holdings. Seven years later, Prospect closed the 208-bed Nix Medical Center, citing years of declining demand and laying off more than 1,000 workers at its San Antonio medical facilities.
In August, city staff from the Development Services Department met with representatives from XA Collective, a San Antonio and Laredo-based architecture firm, according to documents requested by the San Antonio Report.
Various staff reviewed the plans for upgrades to the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, and commented on the type of demolition permits that would be required.
The documents also describe a concern over excessive noise from the building’s mechanical equipment that can be heard in the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant and the River Walk below. Changing the equipment is not in the scope of the project, it states.
A staffer from the city’s Office of Historial Preservation (OHP) also recommended that the design team contact OHP for a review. The Nix building is a historic landmark located in a historic district.
The overabundance of unused office space since the pandemic, combined with a lack of housing, has sharply increased the number of building conversions to housing.
A RentCafe report found that in 2023, 17% more apartments were converted from outdated buildings, including offices and hotels, compared to the year before.
In 2022, Red McCombs Enterprises partnered with real estate investors Jon Wiegand and Ed Cross to acquire the Tower Life Building, a 1929 office building at 310 S. St. Mary’s St. The new owners announced several months later plans to convert the building to apartments starting in 2024.
A recent Urban Land Institute report, which looked at two dozen such office-to-residential conversions, found that the median conversion cost came to about $255,000 per unit, not counting the acquisition cost.
