Brick by Brick
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Brick by Brick
Repurposing Factories, Warehouses, Malls and Schools
Look around and you’ll see plenty of vacant buildings. Can they be turned into housing? Adaptive Reuse is on the rebound and estimates say ninety-percent of real estate development in the next decade will involve adaptive reuse, or repurposing buildings for something other than their intended use. Most cases involve offices or hotels but factories, warehouses, malls and schools are also undergoing transformations. We even found a bowling alley transformed into housing.
Interview guests: CBRE Senior Associate Marianne Taylor, Executive Director UC Real Estate Center Carl Goertemoeller, and CEO G.F. Bailey Co., Tim Forbess
Ann Thompson:
Adaptive reuse projects are on the rebound and for good reason. There are a lot of empty buildings.
Marianne Taylor:
We've seen a number of schools be converted and some factories, we even in Greater Cincinnati had a jail conversion.
Ann Thompson:
Factory 52 is having a moment in Norwood, just north of Cincinnati.
Grover Smith:
The card factory. Yeah, I remember when it was just a shuttered card factory.
Ann Thompson:
In downtown Dayton The Delco is being called the mother of all properties, a former plant then factory outlet repurposed into apartments.
Zachary Graham:
To recreate It would be mind boggling if you actually rebuilt this brick by brick or yard by yard and concrete terms.
Ann Thompson:
And what about area malls that stand largely empty? Conversion plans are moving slowly.
Carl Goertemoeller:
Every significant retailer out there is in the process of rationalizing their real estate.
Ann Thompson:
On this episode, we take a second look at adaptive reuse beyond office space, and whether these projects can fill a gap in housing. The transformations are expensive, but
Emmanuel Karikari:
To do a ground up development right now is extremely expensive, right? Interest rates, the cost of construction, so on and so forth.
Ann Thompson:
Let's get into it. This is Brick by brick Solutions for a thriving community.
Ame Clase:
Brick by Brick is made possible thanks to leading support from Debra and Robert Chavez, Greater Cincinnati Foundation and the George and Margaret McLane Foundation, with additional major support from The AES Ohio Foundation, Laurie Johnston and the Seasongood Good Government Foundation, Diane and Dave Moccia, The Robert and Jean Penny Endowment Fund of The Dayton Foundation, the Robert & Adelle Schiff Family Foundation, and more. Thank you.
Ann Thompson:
Hello, and welcome to Brick by Brick, where we're highlighting solutions for a thriving community in Southwest Ohio. I'm your host, Ann Thompson. Estimates by the auditing firm Deloitte show that within the next decade, 90% of all real estate nationwide will involve adaptive reuse. This means turning a building into something it wasn't originally designed. How much more housing could this create? Office and hotel conversions lead the way, and Cincinnati remains a key player. We focused on office reuse in episode two of Brick by Brick. In this episode, we look at factories, warehouses, malls, and schools. The international real estate brokerage firms CBRE has been noticing these transformations. Here's Senior associate Marianne Taylor.
Marianne Taylor:
We've seen a number of schools be converted and some factories. We even in Greater Cincinnati had a jail conversion, so we've seen it all kind of across the board. From an adaptive reuse standpoint.
Ann Thompson:
Factory conversions are the next largest slice of adaptive reuse behind offices and hotels. A rent cafe national analysis of Yardi Matrix data shows more than 25,000 new units from former factories between 2013 and 2023. In just three years, Cincinnati added almost 500 apartments from factory conversions. Dayton is also set to open dozens and dozens of new apartments at a former factory site right across from the ballpark. Brick by Brick”s. Emiko Moore is here to explain. Hi Emiko.
Emiko Moore:
Hi Ann. The historic Dayton Landmark, the Delco, has a new life as a vibrant mixed use development of apartments and businesses. We took a tour inside with the developers to see how well their adaptive reuse of the enormous property is turned out.
Erik Wood:
This is our rooftop amenity, so just a great place for residents that live here in this building to be able to come in and hang out, especially in the evenings. And then just views of downtown's 360 degree view of downtown Dayton. So just no other space really like this in Dayton.
Emiko Moore:
Zachary Graham is the developer of the Delco, a 500,000 square foot building in Dayton, along with Eric Wood, vice President of property management. The development houses 162 apartments, 100,000 square feet of commercial space and a 463 parking garage.
Erik Wood:
It's like stacking five Walmarts on top of each other. That's how big it is. Yeah,
Zachary Graham:
So we're on the sixth floor. This is the floor plate that we're standing in here is approximately 26,000 feet rentable. So just to put that in perspective, you could have a hundredish people in here working in a fully built out office.
Emiko Moore:
The size is also what attracted the developers for this mixed use development.
Zachary Graham:
To recreate it would be mind boggling if you actually rebuilt this brick by brick or yard by yard and concrete terms. It would be dramatic undertaking. So I think the sheer size of the opportunity was attractive. This project is a partnership between Crawford Hoing and Woodard Development. Those are the development partners. Woodard being local, Dayton and Crawford Hoing in Dublin. So it's a continuation of our investment Water Street district, but this type of project to this scale and scope doesn't happen without robust public private partnership. So City of Dayton and the Dayton Port Authority in particular were critical to being able to get this project done.
Emiko Moore:
Built In 1915, the Delco played a historic role in Dayton industry.
Erik Wood:
So originally it was the Delco plant back in the days of Charles Kettering. So lots of inventions and things happened here during that time period. Went to Mendelssohn's and was a giant warehouse full of items. When we took over the property
Emiko Moore:
Pumping in $100 million, the developers embrace the character of the landmark building while working to capitalize on existing infrastructure.
Zachary Graham:
One of things you'll notice as we walk through here is this is all, there's original floors through here, so these have been cut and polished. You'll see some embedded remnants of prior use, like the steel plates and things like that, but adds to I think the industrial chic character of the project.
Emiko Moore:
They also kept the majority of the exterior of the building and with a stroke of good luck found the spacing between the many support columns worked perfectly to fit two cars between them in the garage.
Zachary Graham:
So if you had to reconstruct, if you had to rebuild a parking garage, you can easily be 30 to $40,000 per space and there's 463 spaces here, so you can do that arithmetic. It would be an expensive garage,
Emiko Moore:
But delays due to covid and some unique construction added significantly to the cost, including many windows and electrical wiring through 15 inch concrete floors.
Zachary Graham:
It's not for the faint of heart. Adaptive reuse is challenging because it doesn't follow any particular roadmap for development.
Erik Wood:
Right now we're in the club room here. It's an amenity space for the residents that live in this building. We also have a really big dog park outside as well, so a great place to take your pet. Usually in an urban environment, it's tough to find a place to take your dog on a walk, but we have a great place that you can unleash your dog and let 'em run free and play, which is a great amenity for the building.
Emiko Moore:
In just three months since it opened, 60% of the apartments are leased,
Erik Wood:
So we have some local Dayton moving here from other areas of Dayton, maybe the suburbs, maybe other areas of Ohio. But we see large market folks come into Dayton, Ohio, so New York and California and Texas, Florida coming here for jobs and really taking advantage of the cost of living in Dayton, Ohio. Compared to some of these bigger markets,
Emiko Moore:
New businesses are moving into the Water Street District Base Camp Outdoors owners, Claire and Brycen Cross recently had their ribbon cutting opening, attended by Mayor Jeffrey Mims and are thrilled by the location.
Claire Cross:
This area now is very lively, very walkable. It's family friendly. It's truly here for everyone. There's great places to eat, there's great places to hang out, and there's a great family, family way to watch ballgame.
Brycen Cross:
We're right across the street from the Dayton Dragon Stadium, really close to Riverscape Metro Park, the great Miami River Trail, so really a hub for activity in Dayton, and that's what base camp is.
Zachary Graham:
If you think about the sustainability impact of a building like this, there's a carbon footprint associated with reproducing all of that, and we not only didn't send it to a landfill, but we embraced it and used it again, and I think that's a piece of it that makes it just rewarding to do for sure, is to just see something like this saved and embraced and maybe made better than it was in the first place.
Ann Thompson:
I really like the sustainability part, which is one positive for adaptive reuse. Emiko. I'm wondering how expensive are these apartments?
Emiko Moore:
Well, the apartments range from micro apartments, which are less than 500 square feet to three bedrooms, and the rents range from $980 to 3,500. Currently 60% of the 162 apartments are already leased. The developers also have other rental properties and hotels in this street district, including the Delco Lofts across the street, which is another example of adaptive reuse of a building. And if you love baseball, this is the area to be because it's literally right behind the day air ball field where the Dayton Dragons play, and you can watch the games from many of the apartments and we'll be following the Delcos impact on the Dayton community in the future.
Ann Thompson:
Alright, well thanks for that Emiko.
Emiko Moore:
Sure.
Ann Thompson:
South of there, just off I 75 in Norwood is another factory transformation now called Factory 52. Even on a Thursday afternoon, there were plenty of people milling around. I'm standing on the 20 acres site that was once us playing card for more than a hundred years. The company manufactured regular novelty and custom playing cards right here in Norwood before moving its operations across the river. Now the site has been transformed into a mix of restaurants, retail, and apartments.
Brandon Rinear:
I really like the area just because of how they rebuilt everything around the factory. It's kind of a bit of history in a way.
Jacinta Roberson:
I mean, it's definitely cool. I think it's nice now because on Sundays they have the game where they show on that screen over there or the projector, so I really like that. And then also just the breweries and the restaurants and all that. It's a nice place to live.
Ann Thompson:
Developer PLK worked with the city of Norwood on the project PLK says Factory 52 has been repurposed, redesigned, and reimagined. It repurposed the wood beams here from the factory into hardwood flooring, and rather than throw out the bricks, it didn't need, it sent 700,000 of them to be repurposed across the country. 90% of the materials used were upcycled, giving them a second life.
Chaz Anderson:
Oh, I love Factory 52. It's a beautiful area. I wish they had more places like this that looks, that's so peaceful.
Ann Thompson:
There are more than 300 apartments of food hall retail in a pickleball complex, and that's only the beginning. This site is actually grown from 20 acres to 33 because PLK bought another factory right next door here. The former multicolor site developer, Nick Felder, told Brick by Brick, phase two includes up to 400 more apartments, a hotel, lawn, and event space and more. It's important to note much of the housing is new construction because the original structure either couldn't be saved or didn't pass. Ohio EPA standards for housing
Coming up on Brick by Brick, largely vacant area malls are in the process of being redeveloped.
Carl Goertemoeller:
I think people think that you can just bring a bulldozer in and start scraping and flatten everything and start over. It's not that easy.
Ann Thompson:
Plus plans for a historic Dayton school to become housing.
Tim Forbess:
I tried to think about how to say no in 10 different ways because I knew that it was going to be an ominous piece of work
Ann Thompson:
That's ahead on Brick by Brick.
Ame Clase:
Brick by Brick is made possible thanks to the generous support of so many, including Rosmary & Mark Schlachter, The Camden Foundation, Patti & Fred Heldman, DeeDee & Gary West, The Stephen H. Wilder Foundation, Judith & Thomas Thompson, a donation in memory of Frank and Margaret Linhardt, and more. Thank you. We couldn't do this work without you.
Emiko Moore:
Hey, it's Emiko Moore from Brick by Brick. Our new podcast is about finding solutions that will allow our communities to thrive. What does a vibrant and engaging neighborhood look like to you? Maybe it has more restaurants, coffee shops and art galleries, more multi-generational park activities, or a livelier music scene. We want to know, please go to the Brick by Brick show page on cetconnect.org or thinktv.org. Just click on the green audience button and tell us what a thriving community looks like to you. You can also email us at Brick by brick@publicmediaconnect.org. Imagine big and wide get creative. We can't wait to hear from you and thanks.
Ann Thompson:
Welcome back to Brick by Brick. Have you been to a mall lately? There are plenty of vacancies at Northgate Tri-County Forest Fair, Eastgate and Town Mall. Carl Goertemoeller used to work for a firm that owns the majority of US malls and for years he oversaw Macy's Real Estate. Now as the executive director of UC’s Real Estate Center, he's keeping up with redevelopment plans at local malls. He says it's a slow process.
Carl Goertemoeller:
You really haven't seen wrecking balls starting to swing really at any of these locations just yet, and that's a function of the sheer amount of time that it takes to bring a development plan to fruition.
Ann Thompson:
One problem is there are many owners and all have a seat at the table.
Carl Goertemoeller:
There are multiple projects across the country where the introduction of housing into that project has been a huge success. It can happen. It can work. At the end of the day, it's got to make financial sense to all the parties.
Ann Thompson:
Goertemoeller is seeing successful adaptive reuse projects at malls, but most are in larger cities. He points to suburban LA and Chicago of 135 mall redevelopments nationwide. 54% include housing. Goertemoeller says converting malls is extraordinarily expensive. Read about plans for local mall redevelopment at cetconnect.org and thinktv.org Of the adaptive reuse projects this year, nationally, 3% are schools. Dayton's, former Longfellow School is seven buildings connected, built in the late 18 hundreds. Developer Tim Forbess is turning them into housing. He says it's nothing he could have ever built and wanted to preserve it.
Tim Forbess:
The ceilings in the 1882 building are almost 18 feet and copper, 10 ceilings, and with 12 foot windows, you just don't find that type of construction, and it really is so worthy to be bold enough to take these adaptive reuse projects and make them work.
Ann Thompson:
Plans call for 126 units on the four acre plot, which is in Dayton's historic Grafton Hill neighborhood across from Gem City Market. Forbis is still working out the financing. The market rate senior housing is not exclusive, but intentionally welcoming of L-G-B-T-Q individuals in a separate project.
In 2017, the Port of Greater Cincinnati worked with the city and the Wall Hills Redevelopment Foundation to renovate the historic Windsor Elementary School built in 1888. It is now 41 market rate apartments. The Port is also planning to redevelop Bloom School in the West end. It's near the office of developer Kai Lus, and he's dreamed of the possibilities.
Kai Lewars:
They even have the original gym pool, things of that sort that in today's modern world, I could see could be very accommodating to a high end spa recreation workout facility. The classrooms could be turned into condos or Airbnb apartments, even a restaurant. They have a nice upper terrace,
Ann Thompson:
But the middle housing developer says he hasn't done any adaptive reuse projects yet and isn't planning on it anytime soon. So are you willing to at least dream about it or look at doing that
Kai Lewars:
Someday? Yeah, yeah, yeah, most definitely. Most definitely.
Ann Thompson:
There are some pretty quirky adaptive reuse projects, including one in the Cincinnati suburb of College Hill Brick by Brick’s Hernz Laguerre Jr. Joins me to talk about it. Hey, Hernz
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
Hey. So yeah, I'm sure most of our listeners have gone to a bowling alley. Normally you have a space with multiple lanes, a hardwood floor, maybe even a front desk to get your shoes. But imagine the same space transformed into an apartment building. In this story, we take a look at the College Hill community to see how a nonprofit transformed and abandoned bowling alley into 14 affordable apartment units. Take a listen.
Kym Terelll is a Cincinnati native, born and raised in East Clifton. After she retired in 2009, she found herself in the College Hill neighborhood.
Kym Terell:
We have an apartment complex here called the Hollywood.
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
It became an issue for Kim to enter and exit the front door of the historic apartment building. After a life-changing incident.
Kym Terell:
In 22, I had a pain in my leg. Long story short, I ended up to the emergency room. I had infections in it, and I brought in this one doctor and the way he looked at my leg, and then I said, get that look off your face. You ain't getting my leg. They wanted to do the procedure that morning.
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
Since then, Kym has relied on her wheelchair to navigate her day-to-day, which was difficult. The Hollywood was not a compliant.
Kym Terell:
I was paying someone to take me up and down the steps when I had to go places. Trust me, my savings has not come back yet.
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
Little did Kym know at the time, a former bowling alley in the neighborhood that was vacant for quite a while called Mergard Lanes was being transformed into affordable housing. That was ADA accessible. Kim is familiar with the building but couldn't see how they were going to transform the space into apartments.
Kym Terell:
Never really thought of it as being housing. I was only in here once, and I remember that it was like tables full of shoes and stuff. It was like one giant hall. So at the time, no, that thought never crossed my mind,
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
But it did cross the minds of the members from the College Hill Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation or CHURC for short. This nonprofit owns the Hollywood and aims to transform my guard into a space that would benefit people like him.
Emmanuel Karikari:
How do we now turn this building, which was a bowling alley, which converted into a shoe store. How do we convert this into housing?
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
That's Emmanuel Karikari, CEO of CHURC. He saw that the College Hill neighborhood needed my garden lane's apartments.
Emmanuel Karikari:
You really need a group of folks who have the vision to be able to transform a property like that. Just architecturally being able to kind of figure out what that looks like, figure out zoning, putting all those pieces together presents a unique set of challenges for what we call adaptive reuse.
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
Home developers, AK Construction shared the same vision with CHURC on how they want to develop the College Hill neighborhood principal developer Michael Tuning approaches development differently based on the neighborhood's needs.
Michael Chewning:
In a neighborhood like College Hill where we did the adaptive reuse of Mergard Lanes, we saw a 10,000 square foot single floor plate and a community that also wanted and desired affordable housing. The adaptive reuse made a lot of sense for that neighborhood specifically,
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
But it's hard to strike the perfect design that'll remodel a bowling alley into 14 affordable housing units.
Michael Chewning:
We really have to give a lot of credit to our architect who is ARCX Studio. The pure layout of it was very, very difficult to figure out, and we got into it. It was more resembled a cave than anything that had light because you have four walls and three of them didn't have any windows
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
To create robust light safety. They installed skylights in every unit. In addition to that, they formatted the space to have a U-shaped corridor to allow for all the units to fit with front facing windows as well. Emiko MooeWhy not just tear it down, start fresh? Why approach it using adaptive reuse methodology?
Michael Chewning:
Right. That's a great question. I think the biggest reason is there's so much value there. There's already exterior walls, there's a foundation, there's a roof. There's a lot to work with. So I think in a lot of instances, not all of 'em, but adaptive reuse can be a more affordable way to make affordable housing.
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
I know you guys were all in this project, but is there any point that you were just like, ah, I don't think this is going to work?
Michael Chewning:
No, we don't think like that. It had to work. When you look at some of these buildings and neighborhoods, it's like, I always have this thought. What else could it be?
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
And to Michael 8K and CHURC, they say, this project was about more than just making a new development.
Michael Chewning:
Both of my partners, we said that if we make $1 from this project, we'll do it.
Emmanuel Karikari:
Being able to shine the spotlight on Kym, letting her tell her story, it means the world to us to be able to impact somebody like that. But just across all the work that we do within the community, it starts and ends with how is our work impacting people.
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
Do you think with adaptive use College Hill could be transformed?
Emmanuel Karikari:
Transformed? I think not just in College Hill, in the city of Cincinnati. We just have a great opportunity to rethink what development looks like.
Ann Thompson:
Thanks. That was interesting. I'm wondering how is Kym adjusting to her new space?
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
Oh, she loves it. The moment the apartment building opened up, she moved in and I know she is enjoying the fact that she doesn't have to pay somebody to go up and down the stairs. She's able to gain her independence back in a sense, right? She's able to navigate with her wheelchair with no issues of entering or exiting the building.
Ann Thompson:
Thanks for that, Hernz.
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
No problem.
Ann Thompson:
We heard about the challenges of turning a bowling alley into apartments. Architects who work for the international firm, BDP, came up with the top 10 challenges of adaptive reuse among them, installing the latest technology into historic buildings, balancing the needs of the present and the future with the need to preserve the building's unique character. Another thing when having to add something to one part of the building that the other part doesn't need, like internal insulation that can create condensation, compromising the building's fabric and structure. The architect in this case, solve this with computer simulation. Check out other challenges at cetconnect.org and thinktv.org. We want to hear from you as Brick By Brick develops more episodes. Go to our website, CT connect.org and think tv.org where you'll find a big green button to give feedback. That's where you'll also see related articles, a link to the podcast and Hearns and Emiko’s video stories, as well as online extras. We'd love to hear from you. It's time for, and we bring to the mic Emiko Moore and Hernz Laguerre Jr. Hey guys. Emiko, what are your thoughts?
Emiko Moore:
Well, if a building has enough assets that can be reused and adapted for a new purpose, then it's a great way to reuse building materials and keep them out of landfills and also create much needed housing, and especially so if a building has historical significance to the area, then it can help anchor a neighborhood or a community by giving it a strong presence to continue to build the community, like in Longfellow or with the Delco.
Ann Thompson:
As long as it makes economic sense, it really can be any type of building, including jails and prisons. A
2024 news report I read said that since the year 2021, states have closed or partially closed at least one correctional facility. Recently, just this year, Queensgate Jail closed and reopened here in Cincinnati as a hub for small business.
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
Yeah, and yeah, I agree, but I want to reiterate something that Michael Chewning from 8K said. He was saying that it depends on the need of a neighborhood to see whether a building could be adaptively reused. What they encountered was, I would say, a benefit for them because they encountered a bowling alley that had this shell intact, and they were able to transform the space inside to create 14 affordable apartment units. However, they did have some difficulty. They had to reformat the plumbing. They had to reconfigure the lighting so that it could fit a space that fits those 14 units, but that's not always the case. It's not always manageable to create those solutions. Even Michael himself said that adaptive reuse is great, but it's not the solution for every single vacant building factory, so on and so forth.
Ann Thompson:
Thanks for your thoughts, guys. Always very insightful.
Emiko Moore
Thank you.
Hernz Laguerre Jr.:
No problem.
Ann Thompson:
Coming up on the next episode of Brick By Brick, large apartments are aging at an alarming rate. Meet an Atlanta developer who renovates rundown housing and adds an educational component to help residents thrive, an afterschool program.
Marjy Stagmeier:
My parents renewed their leases. They weren't worried about their kids after school. I did not have children running around the property.
Ann Thompson:
We sit down with affordable housing developer and author Margie Meyer. Join us for another solutions sidebar on the next Brick by Brick.
That's our show. If you like what you hear, please rate and review our podcast. It helps make finding the pod a little easier. We hope you learn something about adaptive reuse, and if you did, please share it with your friends and family. For Emiko Moore and Hernz Laguerre Jr. I'm Ann Thompson. We'll be back soon with more solutions. Take care.
Our show is produced, hosted an edited by me, Ann Thompson with reporting and story editing from Hernz Laguerre Jr. and Emiko Moore. Our Executive producer of Mark Lammers. Our show consultant is Gloria Skurski. Gabe Wimberly is our audio engineer and mixer. Zach Kramer runs the lights and cameras. Derrick Smith is our production specialist and Jason Garrison is our production manager. Kellie May heads up our marketing and promotions, along with Mike Shea and Bridgett Dillenburger. Elyssa Stefenson handles the website and Steve Wright is our designer. Bill Dean and Andres Kruza are the engineers for the show and our Chief Content Officer is Colin Scianamblo. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Brick by Brick: Solutions for a Thriving Community is a production of CET and ThinkTV, Southwest Ohio PBS member stations.