Business View Magazine | June 2019

329 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JUNE 2019 XENI A , OHIO careers, including aircraft maintenance and mechanics, an in-demand field. “As all of this was being announced, we were approached by Ryan Homes, which is one of the larger single-home developers in the nation, especially in this area. They purchased property and they have been building homes in the southern portion of the city. They completed a 40-home section about 18 months ahead of where they thought they would be in terms of sales. They started on a new section and they’re already negotiating to secure land for additional housing development. “To me, this is all an example of how you can start with some small investment in infrastructure to improve an area and, by working with different partners, really start seeing that snowball effect, in that we have those institutional partners and that is helping bring additional retail, and those two things are helping to bring additional housing.” But the snowball effect doesn’t end there. Brodsky explains, “Obviously, you also need base employment for people to live here and take advantage of the retail and to take advantage of these institutions. So, the city worked in partnership with the county and we have two pieces of property within the city that were recently certified as shovel-ready sites for industrial use. One is in the Xenia Industrial Park; the other is what’s known as the Greene Regional Business Park – a parcel that is actually owned by the county. DP&L, which is our electric utility here in the area, seeing that there was a need for certified sites, hired a nationally-known consultant, McCallum Sweeney. They created a program that allowed folks in the DP&L service territory to submit sites. It was a very lengthy process, but ultimately, what this means is that all of the due diligence has been done on these sites – the geo-technical reports are complete; the historic reports; the archeological; the environmental; we’ve been able to certify that utilities are onsite and available to meet the needs of most industries. So, if there is an industrial prospect that comes in, and we can redirect them to a site,