CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Playhouse Square Foundation's plan to add high-rise housing to downtown's theater district won rave reviews and initial design approval from the Cleveland City Planning Commission on Friday morning.

The commission gave its conceptual OK to the 34-story project, a glass-and-metal-clad apartment building and garage that will replace a parking lot at East 17th Street and Euclid Avenue. The nonprofit foundation, a theater-district steward with a robust presence in real estate, aims to start construction in late 2017. If that timeline holds, the 319-unit building would open by early 2020.

Playhouse Square will own the project. Hines, a global real estate firm that has built residential and office towers elsewhere, is playing the role of development manager, but will not be an owner.

Devon Patterson of SCB points to a contextual model of the planned Playhouse Square tower during Friday's Cleveland City Planning Commission meeting.

That structure evolved to address the challenges of building from the ground up in Cleveland, where rents aren't high enough to generate the returns that private developers and real estate investors expect on their money.

As a nonprofit focused on the long-term health of the district, Playhouse Square has a different perspective and is willing to accept more modest profitability.

"We at Playhouse Square see this as a working endowment, as an important part of the overall plan," Art Falco, the organization's president and chief executive officer, told the planning commission. "Playhouse Square has never developed such an important project."

Devon Patterson, a principal at architecture firm SCB, described a building that will enliven a quiet corner just steps away from offices, restaurants and more than 10,000 theater seats. The facade of the apartment building will shift, at points, to capture views of downtown, Lake Erie and Progressive Field. A residential deck atop the four-story, 550-space parking garage will include a swimming pool, gathering spaces and a dog park.

A model shows how the planned 34-story tower will fit into downtown Cleveland's theater district.

The project won't feature street-level retail, a decision that disappointed members of a city design-review committee at a public meeting earlier this month.

But Playhouse Square expects to line the garage along Euclid with shallow display bays that could, if more demand for shopping materializes, be expanded into storefronts.

Lillian Kuri, a planning commission member, applauded Playhouse Square for carving out that placeholder space. "We don't see that very often," she said. "It's a liner building for the future. It can't truly be that today, but that's understandable."

Renderings show that the garage's metal-paneled facade would function as a screen, a projection surface for images or videos tied to Broadway shows or district events.

The project team could come back to the planning commission for final approval within a month. "We'd actually like to put a shovel in the ground before the end of this year," Falco said.