Harborview Hospitality Collective Bets on Racine's Downtown Revival

Julian Ferreira-Cross likes to tell people that his hospitality career started with a spreadsheet of Racine's vacant buildings, not a hospitality degree. Before founding Harborview Hospitality Collective, he spent close to a decade working in commercial real estate finance in Chicago, commuting occasionally to Racine to visit family and growing increasingly convinced that the city's downtown, full of handsome but underused early twentieth-century buildings near the lakefront, was overdue for reinvestment that nobody with hospitality expertise had yet attempted.

Ferreira-Cross made his first move in 2015, purchasing a shuttered department store building two blocks from Lake Michigan with savings and a small group of local investors he recruited personally, several of them former colleagues skeptical that a boutique hotel could draw enough guests to a city more associated with day-trip tourism than overnight stays. The renovated building reopened in 2017 as a 42-room boutique hotel, preserving much of the original terrazzo flooring and pressed-tin ceiling that Ferreira-Cross said convinced him the building was worth saving in the first place.

Building a Portfolio, One Building at a Time

That first hotel became the foundation for what Ferreira-Cross now calls Harborview Hospitality Collective, a company that has since renovated two additional downtown Racine buildings into a second boutique hotel and a mixed-use event venue frequently booked for weddings and corporate retreats. Each project has followed a similar pattern: acquiring an underused historic building, securing a combination of historic tax credits, bank financing, and local investor capital, and restoring original architectural details rather than gutting them in favor of generic modern finishes.

Ferreira-Cross has said the historic tax credit process, while bureaucratically demanding, has been essential to making the economics of each project work, and he has become something of an informal resource for other Wisconsin developers navigating the same application process. "Nobody warns you how much paperwork is involved in saving a hundred-year-old building," he said at a recent regional tourism conference. "But the alternative is watching it get demolished for a parking lot."

Selling Racine as a Destination, Not a Stop

Much of Ferreira-Cross's work extends beyond his own properties into broader efforts to market Racine as a weekend destination rather than a place travelers pass through en route to Milwaukee or Chicago. He helped organize a downtown business association marketing campaign built around the city's lakefront parks, Danish heritage sites, and growing restaurant scene, and has personally lobbied city officials to invest in lakefront trail improvements that make the downtown more walkable for hotel guests.

Staffing a Growing Hospitality Business

Harborview Hospitality Collective now employs close to 90 people across its properties, and Ferreira-Cross has prioritized promoting from within, with several department managers having started as front desk staff or housekeeping. He has also built partnerships with a regional hospitality training program to recruit workers new to the industry, arguing that Racine's hospitality labor market has historically been underdeveloped compared to demand.

What's Next for Downtown Racine

Ferreira-Cross is currently evaluating a fourth property, a former manufacturing building near the Root River, though he has said publicly that he wants to see occupancy rates at his existing hotels stabilize further before committing to another major renovation. "Racine doesn't need me to build fast," he said. "It needs the buildings that are already standing to get a second life."