We’ve heard all the naysayers.
“Why don’t we put the green lights around the whole city?”
“Why don’t we just rename it “Promedica-ville?”
Why all the hate, mate? We don’t recall such angst when Owens Corning decided to move their headquarters a few blocks and redevelop vacant industrial land on the riverfront. Or when developer Dave Ball went around buying up properties all over downtown, or when the Eyde brothers, from Lansing up north, did the same.
Heck, there wasn’t this kind of hand-wringing when Owens Illinois LEFT downtown for greener Perrysburg pastures.
Mebbe it’s just the tenor of the times, and the haters gonna hate. The truth is, there’s lots of need for redevelopment in an aged industrial city like Toodleydoo. What is needed is not just a vision for repurposing. What is needed is a vision backed by cold, hard cash.
Checks and balances
It might surprise some of you, but healthcare is big business these days. It’s true. The baby boomers are now in their sixties and seventies. And there’s a whole gob of ‘em. With health insurance. Paying ever rising costs to the health care system.
It might also be a surprise that Promedica is a not-for-profit enterprise. That doesn’t mean they can’t make a profit. They make a nice one. It just means they don’t have stockholders or other such beneficiaries to whom those profits are owed.
What to do with all that green? And we don’t mean neon lights, folks. What better to do than reinvest it in ways that improve the community? Enter the vision of CEO Randy Oostra. Redeveloping an abandoned property downtown, one that has had several artists’ renditions but not a shovel of dirt turned, into a new HQ. Refocusing the aged Colony into a dynamic main campus complex for the Toledo Hospital.
And now, facilitating the sale of the Marina District so it can be developed into a signature riverfront Metropark. Yeah, that’s not what all the artists’ renditions pictured over the years. It’s not what Larry Dillin or Dashing Pacific promised.
If wishes were wings, kids, pigs would fly. They aren’t, and pigs can’t. And neither can Dillon or DP.
Here we are in twenty sixteen, and some of the long standing eyesores downtown are at long last poised for redevelopment, with wishes backed not by pretty pictures but by checks with lots of zeroes. The kinds of checks that have been missing from every promise for the last two decades-plus.
Stop lamenting the by-lines on those checks. It’s finally happening.
Big mo’
In other news, the former Jeep plant site is being redeveloped into a major Dana manufacturing facility. This is in part because the current Jeep facility will continue humming along productively. And an as-yet unidentified end user has been found for the old Southwyck property. This because of the development and financial wherewithal of Ed Harmon and the NAI Harmon Group. Can NorthTowne be far behind?
We await the cynicism and negativity blasted toward these projects. It will surely come. But the rebirth won’t be deterred by social media vitriol. The forward-thinking momentum is too strong.
Fine. Haters gonna hate. Meanwhile, haters, get outta the way and let the shovels turn dirt.
