A vacant four-acre lot along Eastgate Parkway in Gahanna is on track to become a 36,000-square-foot flex-industrial park with room for two dozen small businesses, after the city's planning commission gave the project unanimous approval earlier this month. The development, dubbed Gahanna Flex Park, still needs sign-off from Gahanna City Council before it can move forward.
The site sits just east of Taylor Station Road, according to NBC4 WCMH-TV, and the plan calls for three separate 12,000-square-foot buildings rather than one large structure. Each building would hold eight tenant spaces of 1,500 square feet apiece, for a total of 24 units designed to suit small-scale office, retail and service operations as well as storage needs. Every space would come with its own overhead door and a separate entrance topped with a canopy, and the buildings themselves would be built primarily from gray and white metal panels.
Who Would Actually Move In
Leland Vogel, principal of Galena-based Como Development, said he expects Gahanna Flex Park to resemble Hilliard's Commerce Park, a campus he described as home to a diverse set of mostly local-business tenants alongside a handful of out-of-market companies. Those outside firms, Vogel said, sometimes take space there for reasons like setting up a satellite office. He added that the kind of businesses likely to fill similar developments include contractors, automotive service businesses and print shops.
The Gahanna proposal also includes 49 parking spaces and a 12,000-square-foot storage area, which would be enclosed by a 10-foot chain-link fence with a privacy screen, per the same NBC4 report. The property tied to the application carries parcel ID 025-006522 and is currently zoned Innovation & Manufacturing, according to Docket City's legislative filing for the project.
Council Still Has to Weigh In
Gahanna City Council must approve the development before it can proceed, and council held a first reading of an agreement regarding the project's construction. It remains unclear when the proposal will next come before the city.
A Regional Pattern of Small-Business Space
Vogel has pointed to strong demand for this kind of flexible space elsewhere in central Ohio. There are a lot of businesses interested in locating or expanding in the region, he said, but a lack of readily available spaces for them to do it, as he told Arch:Ally in connection with a separate Como Development project. That comment came as construction got underway on a $7 million, 42,000-square-foot flex-industrial development in Jerome Township, built in partnership with Chris Schnetzler of Distinctive Marble & Granite. That project consists of two buildings, 24,000 and 18,000 square feet respectively, with tenant suites designed to run as small as 3,000 square feet up to 12,000 square feet.
Como Development's portfolio includes other flex-industrial work around the state. The company's own site notes that Make Build Ship Logan, a 50,000-square-foot flex-industrial building developed as a joint venture with the Hocking County Community Improvement Corporation, is now fully leased by an elevator manufacturer. Como also served as owner's representative for a roughly 55,000-square-foot multi-tenant flex building in Marysville built for Pioneer Development, adding another data point to a growing regional footprint of these small-business-oriented industrial parks.
