Hub 27 Affordable Housing Project in Clark-Fulton Moves Forward Despite No Longer Having a Grocery Store

Hub 27’s first phase will be 53 units of “workforce” housing in the southern part of Ohio City, just below I-90 on West 27th Street. As of now, there will be no grocery store or retail building built. Credit: Pivotal

Hub 27, the second major apartment complex set to rise in Clark-Fulton near the border of Ohio City and Tremont, was given approval by the City Planning Commission on Friday.

Or, at least a part of the original plans.

Proposed in 2022 as a mini neighborhood, with its own grocery store and midrise office building, the version of Hub 27 presented to the CPC is a much more scaled-back, risk-averse plan for affordable housing just south of I-90 and West 27th Street.

The goal now, Pete Schwiegeraht, the vice president of development at Pivotal Housing Partners, is to construct a little more than 50 “workforce” apartment units on the northeastern edge of the site, roughly a minute walk west from Porco Tiki Lounge and Treo nearby.

Workforce meaning, Schwiegeraht said, eighty percent under Cleveland’s annual median income. Which comes to, according to the U.S. Census, apartments “affordable” for households making somewhere in the range of $20,000 to $30,000 a year.

Pivotal’s first ever build in Cleveland limits is a tad bit different than other projects set to expand the area’s population in the next few years.

Hub 27’s aim to attract the so-called workforce could separate it rent-wise from more of the luxury complexes up the road, like Treo, INTRO and the soon-to-break-ground West 26th Apartments.

Schwiegeraht said second and third phases could come—if they can wrangle the funding. (Hub’s first phase will cost some $40 million to build.)

“It’s planned as a multigenerational form of development,” he said. “Meaning we’re gonna have workforce housing, families and phases of senior housing—to create a multigenerational campus. All ages, family sizes and types.”