Photo provided An artist’s rendition of a new assisted living facility planned for the southeast corner of Middle and Rocky Ford roads.
City officials on Tuesday night gave initial approval to rezone property for a planned assisted living and memory care facility.
Columbus City Council members passed the first reading of an ordinance to rezone 8.48 acres at the southeast corner of Middle and Rocky Ford roads from Commercial: Neighborhood (CN) to Residential: Multi-Family (RM).
Assisted living facilities are not a permitted use under CN zoning, but are under RM.
The vote was 8-0. Councilman Jay Foyst, R-District 6, was absent.
The rezoning request was made by the applicant, St. Louis-based Dover Development, LLC, which has about 50 similar facilities across the midwest, according to Nick Dwyer, the company’s director of development.
The proposed facility is called Cedarhurst Senior Living Facility and will have 87 units, the majority of which will be for assisted living. Cedarhurst will be private pay and priced similarly to other assisted living options in Columbus, Dover Development officials said.
The building itself will be “very residential,” where each resident would have their own apartment, Dwyer told council members. Most of the units will be one-bedroom, one-bathroom, but there will be some two-bedroom options for couples as well.
The Columbus Plan Commission during a meeting on Aug. 13 voted 8-2 to forward a favorable recommendation to the city council on the request. During that same meeting, some members of the public who spoke didn’t want commercial development on the site and were concerned about the condition of Trestle Drive, which provides secondary access to the east side of the property.
The three parcels comprising the site were rezoned for commercial use in the 1970s, but have yet to be used for anything commercial. The parcels have been on sale “for an extended period of time and no buyers have shown serious interest in developing the property in a manner consistent with the current CN zoning classification,” Dover Development wrote in their application to the planning department.
Planning Director Jeff Bergman said to council members on Tuesday that he didn’t believe the parcels, which are owned by Jefferson Crump, have ever been listed with a commercial developer.
An infill analysis found that over 90% of the adjacent area is already developed as residential, with Candlelight Village Mobile Home Park to the north, Cedar Ridge subdivision to the south and Heathfield subdivision to the west.
Planning staff put forward an unfavorable recommendation to city council members on the request, in part because the site is one of the few CN-zoned properties in the northeast part of the city that could “provide convenient, walkable commercial uses” to nearby neighborhoods. That was the conclusion of a 2017 internal “Neighborhood Commercial Access & Design Study” by planning staff.
“Both at the staff level and plan commission meeting, (there was) a lot of discussion about what the best long-term play is for this property,” Bergman summarized. “Are we, as a community, better off to hold out longer for some neighborhood-serving commercial development at that corner that would potentially fill that gap that the study identified, or should this current rezoning be supported as an alternative to that?”
Dover Development in their application pointed to the city’s 2024 housing study about how, by 2035, over 10,000 households in Columbus will be older than 55 and 4,300 over 75 as reasoning for why they intend to locate a facility in Columbus. Dover Development officials later in their application said they expect payroll to be $2 million annually, and that the development would contribute six-figures to the tax base every year.
