Does the Westerville Road Asphalt Plant Hurt Home Values? What 219 Homes Within a Mile and a Half Sold For in 2026

There is a smell on Westerville Road some afternoons, and the people who live near I-270 have been telling anyone who would listen about it for twenty years. This summer they got the thing they had been asking for. The Ohio EPA opened a public comment period on the Scioto Materials air permit, the comments came in, and the group that organized them says a public hearing is coming this fall with the comment period reopening. I sell houses on both sides of that interchange, so I pulled every 2026 sale in rings around the plant, 219 of them within a mile and a half, and compared them to the same kind of house farther away. If the plant costs you money on your house, it should show up there. It does not, at least not yet, and the reason the raw numbers look like it does is worth understanding before you argue either side.

What is the plant, and where exactly is it?

Scioto Materials runs a hot mix asphalt plant at the southwest corner of I-270 and Westerville Road, the industrial site you enter from Dempsey Road. Franklin County's parcel records put the company on three parcels there, listed as 6187 Westerville Road rear and 6187 Emrick Road, in the City of Columbus taxing district and inside Westerville City Schools. That matters for the politics. The plant is in Columbus. The people who smell it are mostly in Westerville and Blendon Township, which is why Westerville's council could only send Columbus a resolution in 2021 asking it to oppose the plant's expansion, and why the city's comment to the EPA this summer was a request, not a ruling.

Citizen Pollution Watch, the resident group that has tracked the site since 2015, describes the whole 109-acre industrial parcel as three sections: the asphalt plant, Anderson Concrete and part of a Kurtz Bros. yard-waste facility on the north end in Columbus, a Metro Materials concrete crushing operation in the middle, and Top Cat Concrete on the south end, both of those in Blendon Township. The asphalt plant is the one with the permit up.

What is the Ohio EPA actually deciding?

The plant's air permit, a federally enforceable permit to install and operate, comes up for renewal every five years. The draft permit would let the plant produce up to 600,000 tons of hot mix asphalt a year. Ohio EPA told ABC6 that renewals for facilities in compliance are usually routine and often skip public comment, and that it offered a comment period this time because residents asked. The agency said repeated inspections found the plant operating within its permit and that monitored emissions met state and federal standards. It also said it had logged 50 complaints about the site since May 2024.

The comment period closed August 1. Citizen Pollution Watch, which says it has about 60 members and hundreds of mapped complaints, asked for a public hearing and more time. Its site now says the hearing is coming this fall, exact date to be announced, and that the comment period will reopen with it. Westerville submitted a comment asking the state to weigh its residents' concerns. Scioto Materials' spokesman, Doug Flowers, told the stations the company is committed to operating in compliance and works with regulators and community groups on plant operations.

The complaints themselves are specific and unpleasant. Residents describe burning throats, headaches, nausea, dust and overnight truck noise. A 2021 Westerville resolution cited an ambient air quality study that found people nearby experienced offensive odors lasting hours, and recommended continued monitoring for volatile organic compounds. One Westerville resident wrote on the group's site that she put her Brook Run house up for sale over the air. That is the kind of sentence that makes a buyer's agent go pull the closings, so I did.

What did homes near the plant sell for in 2026?

Every closed resale in the Columbus REALTORS MLS, January 1 through September 3, 2026, measured from the plant parcels. New construction excluded. Speed is MLS entry to contract.

Distance from the plant	Closings	Median price	Price per sq ft	Days to contract	Over original ask	Median year built
Within a mile	115	$307,500	$204	16	36%	1974
Within 1.5 miles	219	$312,000	$212	13	41%	1972
Within 2 miles	388	$325,000	$211	13	39%	1974
1.5 to 3 miles	589	$340,000	$210	13	37%	1976
3 to 5 miles	1,113	$368,000	$226	16	38%	1989
Westerville, all	904	$437,950	$227	14	38%	1993
Westerville, beyond 3 miles	496	$476,000	$231	15	36%	2002

The nearest five sales to the plant are all condos on Harbour Pointe and Heron Pointe, $188,000 to $215,000, a quarter mile from the stacks. Thirty-three homes were for sale within a mile on September 3 at a median asking price of $232,900, so the near ring is heavier on condos and smaller houses than the rings outside it.

Read the table top to bottom and it looks like a smell discount. Every ring out is worth more. Westerville beyond three miles sells for $164,000 more than the mile-and-a-half ring. And every one of those steps is also a step from 1972 houses to 2002 houses and from 1,400 square feet to 2,050. This is the mix problem, and it is the mistake I hear at open houses every week: comparing a Huber Ridge split-level to a Highland Lakes two-story and calling the difference the neighborhood.

Does the plant lower prices once you compare the same kind of house?

So I held the house constant. Built 1960 to 1985, 1,200 to 2,400 square feet, the actual housing stock around the interchange, and compared rings.

Same-age homes (1960 to 1985, 1,200 to 2,400 sq ft)	Closings	Median price	Price per sq ft	Days to contract	Over original ask
Within 1 mile	73	$329,000	$213	13	47%
Within 1.5 miles	138	$328,500	$215	13	49%
1.5 to 3 miles	293	$325,000	$195	12	40%
3 to 6 miles, same ZIPs	197	$347,500	$227	15	47%
Westerville mailing, beyond 3 miles	23	$440,000	$260	21	35%

First, the ring within a mile and a half and the ring just outside it are the same market. $328,500 against $325,000, and the closer ring is $20 a foot higher. Whatever the plant does to a Tuesday afternoon, buyers in 2026 paid the same for a 1970s house at Dempsey and Paris as they did for one out toward Sunbury Road.

Second, the widest gap is about five to six percent, against same-age homes three to six miles out in the same ZIP codes. That is real money on a $330,000 house, roughly $19,000, but it is also within what location alone does in Columbus without any smokestack. The outer Westerville line is 23 sales, too few to hang a number on, and those 23 are inside the Westerville city limits with the schools premium attached.

Third, and this is the one that surprised me, the homes closest to the plant went over the original asking price 49 percent of the time. More than any group in the table. Thirteen days to contract. Whatever the complaints say, buyers are not walking away at the curb. They are bidding.

What should you do if you own or are buying near the interchange?

If you own within a mile and a half, the permit renewal is not a reason to sell and it is not a reason to hold out for a number the street has not produced. Your comps are $328,500 for a same-age house and they are moving in two weeks. If the hearing puts new conditions on the permit, hours, production limits, monitoring, the streets off Dempsey and Paris are the first to benefit, and that shows up in the 2027 closings, not this fall's.

If you are buying, do the thing the data cannot do for you. Stand in the yard on a warm afternoon with the wind out of the west, and go back a second time. The complaints are documented and the city took them seriously enough to pass a resolution. You are not getting a discount for living with it, which is what the table says, so the only question is whether you can. Ask the seller for the EPA complaint history on the address, and ask me for the two ring tables on the exact street.

If you want to weigh in, the hearing is the moment. Citizen Pollution Watch is collecting names and the comment period reopens when the date is set.

Send me an address anywhere inside three miles of the interchange and I will send back every 2026 closing on that street, its distance to the plant parcels, and the same-age comparison for just that block. Start with a home value estimate if you are thinking about selling, or a home search if you are looking north of 270, and I will run it myself. To talk it through, book a call.

Related reading: the Westerville submarket page, the Sunbury Road corridor and Blendon Township planning, 64 East Walnut and Uptown home values, and how long it takes to sell a Westerville house in 2026.

Adam Geuy, Realtor, Blacktree Realty. 937-239-2919.

Sources

• Plant location and ownership: Franklin County Auditor parcel layer, parcels 600-277648 (6187 Westerville Rd rear, 5.07 acres), 600-277649 (6187 Emrick Rd, 5.77 acres) and 010-231138, owner Scioto Materials LLC, taxing districts Columbus-Westerville CSD and City of Columbus, queried September 14, 2026 via gis.franklincountyohio.gov. Facility address 6189 Westerville Road per The Shelly Company.
• Permit, 600,000 tons, comment period, resident and company quotes: NBC4, "Westerville residents push back against asphalt plant"; ABC6, July 28, 2026; Yahoo News / The Cool Down, August 3, 2026. Permit P0140330 comment page: Ohio EPA, now closed.
• Hearing this fall, site description, resident statements: Citizen Pollution Watch and its site overview, read September 14, 2026.
• All sale prices, counts, price per square foot, days to contract, over-ask shares and the same-age comparison: Columbus REALTORS MLS closed and active residential listings, January 1 through September 3, 2026, distances computed from the parcel centroid, computed by Adam Geuy from MLS exports. New construction excluded.