WILMINGTON — A residential subdivision development is being proposed for 28.6 acres at the former Wilmington Drive-In Theater site.
The president of DDC Management, whose headquarters are in the Dayton area, gave a presentation Tuesday to the Wilmington City Planning Commission.
A conceptual plan for the residential subdivision shows a total of 92 building lots and two new access streets off North Lincoln Street.
Jonathan Bills, president of DDC Management, said the intent is for single-family homes.
“We’re just excited at what’s happening in Wilmington with additional job growth and opportunity. So we were drawn here and we looked at various sites and ultimately landed on this one,” said Bills after the City Planning Commission discussion.
He added, “We’ve been watching Wilmington and what’s going on in the market. And the residential market as a whole continues to develop and spread a little bit further out maybe from the core inner market of the downtown areas.”
The conceptual plan includes a proposed recreational trail that goes through the central corridor of the residential development.
New City Planning Commission member Sam Stratman said a trail would be a selling point.
Bills described DDC Management as primarily residential developers who look to partner with cities and locate vacant ground to be able to take through the entitlement and engineering process and build subdivisions to then sell to regional homebuilders.
At the current stage of the process, there will be several more months of working with the city to obtain the necessary approvals before there can be construction of houses, said Bills. Among the steps involved are rezoning, the final engineering and actual design of the subdivision.
Bills said because DDC is not the builder, he can’t speak definitively on anticipated prices of the new houses. He said if he had to guess, it would be somewhere in the mid- to upper $200Ks, though the current market can push that up into the low to mid $300Ks, he said.
Linda Mead is an adjacent property owner and attended the Planning Commission meeting. Afterward, she said she wished there was not going to be a new street alongside her property, and wished there was a little more buffer space, and that the building lots were a little larger, but she said she knew some kind of development would take place at the site sooner or later.
She also said the plan is well thought-out, and “as long as whatever goes in is well thought-out and well maintained, that’ll be good.”
According to the DDC Management website, the DDC team has developed over 4,200 lots in the last 20 years.
During the meeting, Bills said some of the active development projects in the Dayton area include Winding Creek, plus Lexington Place in Huber Heights, Waterford Landing in Fairborn, and Sawyer’s Mill in Middletown.
For Sawyer’s Mill, the homebuilder is Ryan Homes, Bills said.
“We do a lot with them, but not exclusively,” he added.
Reach Gary Huffenberger at 937-556-5768.
