Community Reinvestment
ZANESVILLE, Ohio – Many Ohio cities have prominent buildings that no longer serve in ways they did in the past but are still important to the character of the areas they are in.
8 Main LLC. is a local investment group that is involved in renovating and developing additional housing in Zanesville. 8 Main LLC. Developer Justin Wagner explained how the Ohio Department of Development’s Historic Preservation Tax Credit Program invests in communities by incentivizing the refurbishing of historic structures to keep them relevant in the 21st century.
“The purpose of the program was to help older buildings like ours,” Wagner said. “You know, it’s pretty expensive to rehab a building like this. It’s 50,000 square feet and with the inflation and everything going up, it’s a lot of money and a lot of buildings like this are going into disrepair. This program supplements the investors equity and the banks equity into being able to make projects like this happen and have downtowns like ours be regentrified.”
The Baker Brothers Wholesale Grocery building located at the end of the Y-Bridge is one of 35 historic preservation projects across the state that the Ohio Department of Development has chosen to invest in. The Historic Preservation Tax Credit program applicants must meet many requirements such as establishing future goals and plans.
“What we’re looking to do here is build a 38-unit, short term… 38 units of short term rentals,” Wagner said. “Most of those can be studio’s but there’s also going to be one bedroom apartments. And then on the bottom floor, it’s going to be retail office space. We are looking for a retail office tenant. There’s 12,000 square feet of space, probably 9,000 of it’s usable for office. So we are still looking for people to occupy that space.”
The buildings were the first ones built in the aftermath of the 1913 flood because they housed the main grocery supplier for all the small, ma-and-pa grocers that many neighborhoods and communities relied on. Currently, they are being repurposed to help fill a housing shortage that only looks to become a bigger issue for Muskingum County in the future.
