The former Value City headquarters on Westerville Road would be turned into a modular home factory and housing complex under a $100 million plan that received state tax breaks this week.
The proposal, by the Columbus development firm Connect Realty, calls for converting the former Value City warehouse and headquarters into a factory that could build up to 1,500 modular housing units a year. The factory would employ an estimated 233 workers.
The units would be stacked and combined to form apartment complexes that the developers say would help address a severe housing shortage in the Columbus area and beyond.
“We’ve been working on this and planning for three and a half years,” said Brad DeHays, the founder of Connect Realty, which is developing the project. “For us, it’s a generational project.”
DeHays said his firm has been working with experts in the automotive industry to design a product – called Connect Housing Blocks – that could be manufactured assembly-line style.
The “blocks” would be 14-by-35-feet, small enough to be transported by a truck. One unit would include a kitchen and living area and another would include a bedroom suite and balcony. A third unit could be attached to add another bedroom, or a single unit could be used as an efficiency.
The units would be made of steel framing and emerge from the factory fully finished, with drywall, plumbing and wiring, insulation, windows and fixtures. They would be attached to one another and wrapped in siding on site.
Steel framing would allow the units to be stacked up to seven stories high, without additional support. They could be trucked to a site and assembled within weeks instead of months with conventional construction, DeHays said.
“We want to be the Toyota Camry of housing,” DeHays said. “This product represents a paradigm shift in production.”
DeHays said his team has been working closely with the city and the city’s building department to make sure the blocks meet all code requirements.
The first blocks out of the factory will be assembled into the Reserve at Maryland housing complex planned for Maryland Avenue near Woodland Avenue on the Near East Side that Connect has been working with the city to develop.
“Clearly there is a need for housing in our region. As Mayor (Andrew) Ginther has talked about, there needs to be a regional approach to solving this problem and we believe CHB (Connect Housing Blocks) helps to solve that while also providing jobs in an important area,” DeHays said.
Connect bought the 27-acre property, at Westerville and Innis roads on the Northeast Side, in 2020 for $4.5 million.
The site contains several connected buildings that housed Value City’s former office and warehouse and a Value City Department Store, which had replaced a Schottenstein’s Department Store on the site. Value City closed that store and others at the end of 2008, a few months after the chain filed bankruptcy.
DeHays’ proposal calls for manufacturing the homes in part of the former 500,000-square-foot warehouse. Other parts of the building will be leased to other manufacturers. Two tenants have committed to the site, including a plastics recycling company, adding about 116 jobs to the site, according to the tax credit application.
DeHays said his team has been working with the employment services Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio and Impact Community Action to find workers for the factories.
In the second phase of the Connect plan, some of the modular homes would be built into 54 apartments in a five-story complex on the site. Additional phases call for 66 more apartments.
DeHays said Connect envisions the units eventually being used as single-family homes as well as apartments.
“Single-family homes are in high demand; we don’t have enough of those,” he said. “But we’re having an even larger gap in the number of affordable housing units.”
In its application for state tax credits, Connect Realty estimated the project’s cost at $98.7 million. The Columbus Franklin County Finance Authority has committed $8.1 million to the project.
On Wednesday, the Ohio State Tax Credit Authority approved $7.1 million in tax breaks for the project, one of five central Ohio projects approved for the credits.
@JimWeiker
