Duluth Central site still seen as major housing opportunity by mayor

The former Duluth Central High School hilltop still sits at the center of one of the city’s biggest housing bets, but the hard question remains whether it can actually become homes or just another long-running promise. Mayor Roger Reinert still believes the former campus could host Duluth’s next major residential neighborhood, a claim that keeps the old school property squarely in the middle of the city’s housing debate.

The site carries a long and complicated history. Duluth Central High School closed in 2011, demolition of the 50-year-old building began in November 2022 and finished that winter, and Duluth Public Schools sold 55 acres of the property for $8 million in March 2023. The buyer was STC Building LLC, formerly Chester Creek View LLC, a New York-based development entity associated with Luzy Ostreicher. The district kept 22 acres for offices and related uses, a split that reflected the school board’s 2019 plan to sell and redevelop both Central and Historic Old Central High School.

Any real housing project there still has to clear a series of practical hurdles. The former campus rises above downtown Duluth and Lake Superior, near Central Entrance and H. Courtney Drive, on terrain that supporters themselves have described as rocky and marshy. Earlier development attempts at the property fell through, and that history has kept skepticism high around whether this parcel can absorb the infrastructure work and financing needed for a large-scale neighborhood.

The city has already spent months testing the ground for redevelopment. Duluth opened public comment on a Draft Alternative Urban Areawide Review covering about 80 acres near the former school site in February 2024, examining two possibilities: a light industrial and warehousing business park or a mixed commercial-residential development. The Duluth Planning Commission adopted the final AUAR and mitigation plan on May 14, 2024, keeping the mixed-use path alive.

That path was most fully embodied in Incline Village, a proposed $500 million development for the site that was projected to include up to 1,300 housing units, 80,000 square feet of retail and public amenities such as a pavilion, a trailhead connection and possibly an amphitheater. The Duluth City Council approved a $25.8 million subsidy for the first phase on an 8-1 vote in February 2024. That first phase was described as two connected condo buildings and one apartment building, with later phases adding more structures.

The project takes its name from the incline railway that once ran there from 1891 to 1939. More than a century later, the old Central hill still represents one of Duluth’s clearest tests: whether a prominent but difficult site can become much-needed housing, or remain a symbol of how hard it is to build on the city’s most visible ground.