What Happens to Uptown Westerville Home Values Now That the 64 E. Walnut Plan Is Dead?

Westerville City Council spent 2 hours and 21 minutes on Tuesday night deciding not to decide. All 7 members told staff to come back with ways the city could sell the 5-acre site at 64 E. Walnut St., a direct sale, an auction, or a request for proposals with strings attached, and the chair said out loud that this does not mean the city is selling. The 247 apartments and the 81-room hotel are still dead. Nothing is on the September 15 agenda. Meanwhile the streets around the site kept doing what they have done for three years: 16 resale closings within a half mile so far in 2026, at a median $382,450 and $265 a square foot, against $227 citywide. If you own between State Street and the trail, Tuesday changed the timeline. It did not change your value.

What was on the table at 64 E. Walnut, and what killed it?

The city owns a 30,300-square-foot former office building at 64 E. Walnut Street, a block off State Street on the south edge of Uptown. In May, Continental Development Ventures offered $2.5 million for it and proposed 247 apartments, an 81-room boutique hotel, a 3,500-square-foot restaurant and a 400-space parking garage with 100 spaces reserved for the public.

Residents packed the May 19 meeting with signs, flyers and a petition. The objections on the record were density, traffic, safety, and the site's proximity to Whittier and Hanby elementary schools. On June 2 council rejected Ordinance 2026-11 unanimously, and the chair said the honest thing out loud: at this time it felt most appropriate to reject it entirely. The assistant city manager who carried the project resigned eleven days later after seventeen years with the city.

Council then told staff nothing about the site comes back until four things are presented publicly: the community's goals for the property, the city's development review process, the financial effect of a sale and redevelopment, and how the city prices publicly owned land. About 100 residents worked through the goals at an August 11 workshop, the comment period closed August 28, and the consultant's report went to council at the September 8 work session.

What did council decide on September 8?

Short version: staff made the case for selling, the public input said keep it, and council asked for a menu.

The administration spent most of the session tracing its recommendation to sell back through a decade of adopted plans. The 2016 Imagine Westerville Community Plan calls for selling the building at 64 E. Walnut for private redevelopment once city departments moved out. The 2018 campaign material for the Justice Center bond issue said the property would be sold, though the city manager acknowledged that language was not in the ballot itself. Other plans recommend higher-density mixed use, housing, a boutique hotel, more parking and trail connections somewhere in or around Uptown. No single plan requires all of that on this one parcel. Staff stacked them here because the city owns it and there are not many 5-acre sites a block off State Street. Asked whether selling was the clearest instruction in those documents, the city manager said, one hundred percent. She also said council can change that policy.

The public input pointed the other way, and the city's own report says so. The August 11 workshop drew more than 105 participants at 24 tables, the online survey drew 364 responses, and the petition against the original deal collected more than 1,600 signatures in under two days. Traffic was the top concern, named 49 times on the workshop worksheets, followed by general safety, parking, the three nearby schools, and density. Opposition to a hotel came up at nearly every table, which the report calls a strong, near-universal no-hotel sentiment. Asked what the site should be if it has to make money, the most common answer was a performing arts or cultural center, then housing, then retail and small offices, and 13 tables pushed back on the premise that it has to make money at all. A separate survey run by the resident group Uptown United drew 792 responses: about 80 percent opposed a hotel, 75 percent opposed apartments, and 84 percent wanted the city to keep the property. Neither survey is scientific, and the report says that in its second paragraph.

What council actually did, as reported by The Westerville News (the city had not posted minutes or video when this went up): no vote on anything. All 7 members gave the administration an informal go-ahead to come back with methods for a sale, meaning a direct sale, an auction, or a request for proposals with conditions attached. If council later picks one of those, it would discuss restrictions on the sale at yet another meeting before anything reaches an agenda. The chair's line was that this does not mean the city is selling or not selling, and that there is no movement happening on the property. The city manager's argument for selling was that a private project puts the land back on the tax rolls, and that the recurring tax production matters more than the one-time price.

So for anyone on the surrounding blocks: the site is still city-owned, the Continental deal is still rejected, no replacement project exists, and the next regular council meeting on September 15 has no Walnut legislation on it. What changed is that a sale is still the staff plan and council did not take it off the table. The neighborhood said no hotel and no apartments. Council said, show us the process. That gap is the story for the next several months, and it is a council story, not a housing-market one.

What do homes near the site actually sell for?

This is the part nobody at the podium had, so I pulled it. Every resale closing recorded in the Columbus REALTORS MLS within a half mile and within a mile of 64 E. Walnut, January 2024 through September 3, 2026. New construction excluded. Speed is the true clock, MLS entry to contract.

Resale closings within a half mile	2024	2025	2026
Closed sales	10	12	16
Median sale price	$282,500	$353,278	$382,450
Middle half	$260,000 to $392,000	$328,000 to $425,000	$335,000 to $440,500
Median price per square foot	$245	$236	$265
Median days to contract	8	12	17
Median year built	1940	1945	1952
Sold above original ask	50%	42%	56%

Resale closings within a mile	2024	2025	2026
Closed sales	41	51	65
Median sale price	$365,000	$368,500	$385,000
Median price per square foot	$250	$242	$247
Median days to contract	9	21	11
Sold above original ask	56%	24%	58%

Active listings on September 3: six within a half mile at a median ask of $329,900, fifteen within a mile at $394,000.

Three things to read out of that.

First, the Uptown blocks are the most expensive dirt in Westerville per foot and it is not close. The half-mile ring closed at $265 a square foot this year. The whole city's resale market closed at $227. You are paying a 17 percent premium per foot to be able to walk to State Street, on a house built in 1952 with a median of about 1,540 finished square feet.

Second, the fight did not dent anything. The half-mile median went $282,500, $353,278, $382,450 across the three years the site sat empty and the project was proposed, protested and killed. Fifty-six percent of this year's sales went over the original ask. Whatever buyers think of 247 apartments, they did not stop writing offers a block away.

Third, the sample is small. Sixteen closings is sixteen closings. The mile ring, with 65, tells the same story with less noise: a median up about $20,000 over two years and the per-foot figure flat, which means the houses that sold this year were a little bigger, not much pricier.

Does a project like this help or hurt the houses around it?

Nobody has the closed-sale evidence for this site, because nothing was built. So here is the construction read instead of a forecast.

What a five-acre city-owned parcel becomes matters to the sixteen houses a year that trade around it in three specific ways. Traffic on Walnut and State at school hours, which the residents named. Parking, which the 400-space garage was supposed to solve and which every Uptown business owner will tell you is the real constraint. And the retail and restaurant floor that any version of this site is likely to carry, which is the one piece that reliably lifts a walkable block's per-foot number.

A hotel and 247 apartments would have added several hundred residents and their cars to a street grid laid out long before anyone owned a car. A park and a civic use would add none of that and none of the revenue the city was counting. The four questions council asked are the right four, and the answer to the third one, what a sale does to the city's finances, is the one that decides whether your property tax bill quietly absorbs the difference.

What should you do if you own near Uptown?

1. Do not list into the headline. Sixteen sales at $265 a foot is the market. Council direction is a process, and buyers do not pay for a process.
2. Watch the September 15 meeting and the next RFP language. The words "residential density" and "public space" in that document are worth more to your value than anything said at a podium.
3. If you are selling in the next twelve months, sell the walk, not the site. The premium is for State Street, and it exists today regardless of what 64 E. Walnut becomes.
4. If you are buying, price the traffic pattern, not the rendering. Drive Walnut at 8:15 on a school morning before you write.

Send me your address if you are inside that mile and I will pull the closed comps on your block, the six listings you would compete with, and a read on how each realistic outcome for the site moves your specific street. That is a two-page sheet, and it is more useful than a council meeting.

Selling first? Start with a home value estimate. For the wider Uptown picture, I covered the Uptown redevelopment plan, the new city hall and the city's 2026 housing plan. The Westerville submarket page has current listings.

Thinking about buying or selling near Uptown Westerville? Let's talk. Contact Adam Geuy at Blacktree Realty, or book a call at calendly.com/adam-geuy.