Cuyahoga County Okays $2 Million for Carriage Co. Development in Ohio City

The Carriage Co. will have 129 apartment units in Ohio City’s Market District when it’s finished. Cuyahoga County just handed the project a $2 million loan on Monday. Credit: MRN

Ohio City’s latest adaptive reuse project is just about ready for its groundbreaking.

Cuyahoga County Council’s Economic Development & Planning Committee threw in their support for the renovation of the Carriage Co. Building off West 25th and Hancock by greenlighting a $2 million loan for development this week.

The $50.7-million project is now fully funded, with the county’s help going to the construction costs of $31 million to reshape the vacant structure in Ohio City’s Market District into a lively place-to-be.

Bought in 2021 by Ari and Jori Maron, the owners of MRN, the Carriage Co. project floundered a bit through the pandemic years as the team attempted to round-off funding, including a $750,000 state brownfield grant in 2022.

As confirmed Monday by members of Cuyahoga County Department of Development, The Carriage Co.—as it’s being called for now—will host 129 apartments along with office space (where MRN will move) and two retail spaces, one of which will be a restaurant.

Rents will run from $1,570 to $3,820 per month, Economic & Community Development Specialist Matthew Karey said. Half of these units, he explained, will be “set aside to be affordable” at Ohio City’s area median income—$97,000, he said.

Cuyahoga County economic development officials Matthew Karey and Anthony Stella sold the project to Council in the same vein as your average luxury complex going up in Hingetown. Credit: Mark Oprea

Carriage Co.’s move forward, along with its approval by the City Planning Commission in January, represents a notch in new developments across Cleveland’s West Side this year.

That includes, but is no way limited to, the Bridgeworks building off West 25th and Detroit; a boutique hotel across the street from Great Lakes Brewing; an apartment over the old Vibrator Building in Hingetown; $25 million in improvements underway at the West Side Market; and a near-completion of the excavation of the Irishtown Bend Park project up the road.

Movement that, in some councilmembers’ minds, begs important questions as more and more dollars flow into the coffers of optimistic developers: Is the latest Cleveland mixed-use bubble waiting to soon pop?

“We started this about ten years ago on this Council, [helping] convert buildings into apartments and condos,” District 11 Councilwoman Sunny Simon said. “I believed, at that time, this maybe was a bubble—so how is this going in terms of population trends?”

Karey said his office received a report that gave a thumbs-up for something like the Carriage Co.

It “indicated that there is sufficient demand to absorb the units that are in this building,” he told Simon.

But what about ground-floor retail?

After all, just on Friday, City Goods in Hingetown closed. And a handful of retail spaces at INTRO and Church + State still remain empty years after these projects got funded—including, in the sake of the latter, by similar County loans.

“I mean, some of these buildings talked about having a vet office for animals, a pharmacy, all this retail. Visions that I don’t think happened,” Simon said, referring to Church + State and Edge32 off Detroit Ave. “Is that correct? Because we were sold on all that at the time.”

“I think it was,” Economic Development Administrator Anthony Stella said. “It all seemed reasonable at the time.”

As does, the developers seem to claim, the burger bar that is slated to be The Carriage Co.’s first retail client.

Not, as Simon suggested, something that’s not a restaurant.

“At some point, somebody in our department of development needs to come in and talk to us about that because there’s this vacancy of that market that is mind boggling to me,” she added. “People are living downtown, they need to shop, and all they have is food and beer.”

County Council will most likely be approving the $2 million loan by the end of February. Construction is scheduled to begin this summer or fall.