If you listen to anyone in the business of building or renting properties talk long enough, you’ll hear them opine on the lack of housing for people in the Northland. It’s a problem that exists across the United States, and the Twin Ports have certainly not avoided the conundrum.
People need homes, and there have been many recent approaches to the issue in the forms of brand-new apartment complexes being repurposed, renovated older buildings being turned into apartment complexes and businesses learning that they can turn unused space on their property into long- or short-term livable spaces. (Affordable housing that the dweller can come to own with relative ease instead of renting remains much tougher to come by, it seems.)
Lake Superior Apartments is one of the latest bites at the apple of the housing shortage. A project spearheaded by father/son team Ryan and Logan Nelson, the 50-unit LSA (formerly the Lake Superior Elementary School) is being built by Vision Inc., a development company established by Ryan in 2024.
The elder Nelson is known in the area for founding P&R Properties, a property-management firm that’s been in operation for about a decade and was the natural next step for him after years in the construction industry.
“I found passion in [not] just the construction, but taking part in the actual, real development of the projects,” Ryan Nelson said.
Vision Inc., then, was a refinement of that mission. “I was really just finding the right path forward to make things work for me and to [create] more housing in the communities that needed it. One of the bigger changes was just not working in the market anymore and more or less creating the market that I wanted to work in.”
P&R is the larger company of the two, with an employee roster in the upper twenties, whereas the newer Vision Inc. is Ryan and his son and a handful of others. Lake Superior Apartments is essentially the first job for the year-and-a-half-old business, and it came about in a low-key way.
“At first, I didn’t really have a strong interest in it,” Nelson said, “but after I started taking a closer look at it – the location, the infrastructure that was there – and [thought about how to] reuse the property and make the best out of it, I felt like it was new enough to be able to repurpose it and make it meaningful. And I found a good layout that would work in there that people would like. So as time went on, it just seemed like it was more and more interesting.”
The approximately 40-year-old former school was just new enough to be a viable candidate for a renovation, Nelson said. “I wouldn’t [have done] if it was built in the early 70s, but the early ‘80s definitely takes it to the next level of materials and things like that that I feel have longevity from an infrastructure perspective.”
The school’s location just on the outskirts of Superior turned out to be perfect for Vision Inc. “There’s a lot of success stories” with regard to projects like this, Ryan said. “People that live in the country their whole lives and want to downsize and go into an apartment, or people that have pets and things that want to be more out of town – those were the kinds of things I was looking at.”
Nelson said the project ended up being “pretty close” to what he had initially envisioned. “I think they always come out a little better than what you think they’re going to in the end, just because everything is so new when it’s done,” he noted.
The list of amenities is long. The apartments – which range in size from 348 to 906 square feet – boast large skylights to provide tons of natural light. A full fitness facility and an indoor pickleball court in the former school cafeteria will be available to all residents and new appliances come with each unit. And around half of the spaces are designated as affordable housing for low-to-middle-income residents.
“It was kind of hard for me to make a decision [about the cafeteria] because of the space of the interior part of that building,” Nelson said. “It’s not typical that you would have units or amenities with that large of a space for that few units, so I decided to get a little creative to make all that space work. It was really like: how do you create large amenity spaces and try to keep the cost low as much as possible, but then also add some curb appeal that others don’t have? It adds a distinct character to the building. Every building needs to have its own character.”
For his part, Ryan’s son Logan – who is a property manager with Vision Inc. – said the key draw of the LSA project was that it used an existing building as its base.
“We wanted to reuse something that normally doesn’t get reused after it closes,” he explained. “Once a school gets closed, you never really see it except as a demolition project. It was kind of the opportunity we wanted to take, where we could reuse something that was in pretty good shape.”
The project is one that Vision Inc. took on in part to communicate their aims as a company to the community. “That’s the main goal of what we do,” Logan said, “to continue on with multi-family [housing]. We need so much of it in Superior. It’s one of those things that we want to keep pushing ourselves to do, and we all have a passion and love for doing it.”
Logan noted that there were a few main upgrades that had to happen to set the LSA project into motion.
“We had to reroute all the plumbing in the building and add additional plumbing all over the place,” he said. “We had to get new water mains and stuff like that.”
While a few subcontractors were involved, most of the work was done by Vision Inc. “There’s work that we don’t do, but most of the carpentry, plumbing and electrical was all us,” Logan said. “We wanted to keep it really tight-knit. A handpicked crew.”
All told, the project looked to create a welcoming, friendly community, and it’s well on its way to being just that. Some construction work remains, and only about 20% of the building is occupied thus far. But, as far as first projects go, the Lake Superior Apartments has been a joy for the father/son team that led it.
“It’s all been going really well,” Logan Nelson said. “People are really enjoying the community, so far.”
Tony Bennett is a freelancer writer based in Duluth.
