Dublin’s Bridge Park aims to lure young workers, offer option for empty-nesters
Dublin has been the model central Ohio suburb for decades, dotted with large homes that are set back behind sprawling lawns in quiet residential neighborhoods.
With the new Bridge Park development, an under-construction project offering offices, retail and residences at Route 161 and Riverside Drive, it’s becoming a model again.
This time, the model is of an urban-style, walkable neighborhood in the heart of car-centric suburbia. The development offers hundreds of apartments and condos, a boutique hotel, an events center catered by Cameron Mitchell Premier Events and a wide-ranging collection of restaurants, along with entertainment venues, a fitness center and nail salon.
“Both younger people and empty-nesters are looking for very similar kinds of environments,” said Terry Foegler, director of strategic initiatives and special projects for the city. “What interested me were the dynamics of what would drive growth for Dublin.”
The city’s goal was to create a place attractive to young professionals — which also aids major Dublin employers in recruiting efforts — and to give older people whose children have grown a place to downsize and stay in Dublin.
Just as Dublin rose from farmland, building dry stone walls and embracing Irish mystique, the city now is working alongside developer Crawford Hoying to reverse-engineer an urban neighborhood on the other side of the Scioto River from Dublin’s quaint, historic downtown.
Crawford Hoying’s Bridge Park will include 2.5 million square feet of densely
packed buildings set on 25 acres that used to be home to a strip mall, a driving range and an office building — once typical suburban uses.
The first apartment residents and office tenants began occupying space in January. The first apartment building is more than half leased, with new residents moving in each week to apartments ranging from about $900 a month for a studio to $2,700 for a three-bedroom unit. More than 10 leases have been signed for a second apartment building that hasn’t yet been completed.
The first condos, on the West side of the Scioto, are 85 percent sold at prices starting at $500,000. A second phase of condos in the main part of the Bridge Park development will start in the $300,000 range.
Rob Vogt, partner in Columbus real-estate research firm Vogt Strategic Insights, refers to those looking for the upside of urban living without the hassles that come with an authentic city setting as “urban wannabes.”
“I think this is the direction the market is headed for a number of years,” Vogt said. “Millennials have a true interest in living in walkable areas, and many empty-nesters are looking for the same type of amenities.”
Bernadette Hanlon, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University, also sees a trend.
“There’s a buzz around this kind of suburban redevelopment,” Hanlon said. “There’s a lot of effort being put toward how to sort of retrofit suburbs to make them more walkable.
“Some of it is driven by demographic shifts. Household sizes are shrinking, and there’s this aging population that doesn’t need the big suburban home anymore and isn’t necessarily wanting to live in more automobile-dependent environments.”
Crawford Hoying certainly believes in the trend. The developer has done smaller-scale projects in other suburbs including Upper Arlington and Worthington, next to existing shopping centers such as the Shops on Lane Avenue and the Shops at Worthington Place, both extensively renovated in recent years. They also have been working on projects in the true urban neighborhood of Downtown.
A few offices at Bridge Park are now occupied by real estate and financial services companies; restaurants should start opening by early summer. Mesh Fitness — Bridge Park residents receive one membership free — is already up and running. Parking garages dotted throughout the development serve tenants and visitors. The entire project has an estimated completion of the middle of 2019.
Crawford Hoying principals Bob Hoying and Nelson Yoder point to the prime location and great demographics in the area as reasons to commit to the project. In addition, city was already planning to spend millions to improve infrastructure and add parkland adjacent to the site. That public-private development strategy has helped spur growth in Downtown Columbus.
Foegler readily admits the stars aligned on the project in a way that couldn’t easily be replicated by older, landlocked suburbs such as Upper Arlington and Bexley.
“You had a big piece of green land (the driving range) and a struggling strip center next door to each other, and a developer interested in and willing to do the whole thing at once,” Foegler said.
Dublin’s infrastructure work included building new roads through what had been the driving range and moving a portion of Riverside Drive to make room for the new riverfront park.
There were some bumps along the way: A large, new roundabout put in to replace the traffic light at Route 161 and Riverside was the scene of dozens of fender-benders after it opened in August. The city now is studying whether adjustments to the roundabout are called for.
Down the road, even bigger plans may be in the works down the road from Bridge Park.
Last summer, Crawford Hoying bought the Shoppes at River Ridge, a lifestyle shopping center directly across Route 161 that included the Montgomery Inn. The developer has no immediate plans to replace the restaurant, which closed early this year, but the rest of the center is essentially fully leased with retail, restaurant and office tenants after years of struggling with vacancies.
Yoder said that building some type of walkway over 161 has been discussed, to connect Bridge Park and the lifestyle center. But for now, that remains just an early-stage idea, he said.