Repurposing a large building to residential- financing questions!

[Dmetri Black]

I'm looking for help with financing questions mostly: 

There's a large building available in a developing area and I want to know how to finance the purchase and subsequent renovations. 

The building is already zoned for mixed use, and we hope to live in the building during and after renovations. The problem is that it doesn't have any rental history (currently belongs to a city agency) so my commercial lender says he can't make the loan, and the plan would be for more than 4 units, so I think that this would disqualify it for 203k loans and similar. 

If we could just figure out a way to purchase the building, with financing, then further renovations could be completed with cash on hand, if done in stages. However it would still be preferable to get financing for the renovations too, for leverage and also for timeliness. Because of the low price, the payments on this large building would actually be lower than what we pay for our primary residence, so even with no income from the future additional units payments would not be an issue if the financing is anything close to a conventional mortgage.

The building seems to be in good shape structurally, but it would probably need some work to be brought up to code for residential.

Any financing ideas would be greatly appreciated, and also any advice from those that have taken on such a project before! Thanks!