By: Ryan Duey
Photo Courtesy of City of Marysville Facebook Page
The City of Marysville was awarded a Residential Opportunities on Main Street (ROOMS) grant for $50,000 for the addition of apartment lofts to be built on the upper floors of the historic Broadway Building downtown.
The ROOMS program aims to help rural communities create additional housing in the unused floors of historical buildings, further supporting economic growth and quality of life improvements.
Tyler Hollomon of Frontier Development Group is in charge of the preservation project for Marysville. He said this funding comes at a perfect time.
“The ROOMS grant is going to help with the residential component of the project on floors two and three. We will be adding 12 workforce housing units there for the community.”
“The funding comes at a perfect time because, like everyone, we’re experiencing high cost estimates coming back; labor’s up, and materials are up. So, this funding just kind of helps make the project feasible for us.”
“It’s just another piece of the funding stack.”
The Frontier Development Group specializes in preserving historical buildings, such as the Broadway Building, throughout Kansas. Holloman spoke of reasons why they work in building preservation.
“We like doing historic projects because often times these are really prominent buildings that were built 100 years ago or more that you could never recreate in today’s world.”
“We take a lot of pride in the fact that we’re able to reactivate these buildings for another 100 years.”
“Then, from an environmental standpoint, which most people don’t think about, there’s a lot of what we call captured carbon in these buildings.”
“If a historic building were to be torn down, think about the amount of fuel, emissions, and landfill space that it would take to demolish a building. Additionally, the extra carbon footprint added with adding a new building.”
Hollomon said the people of Marysville and the Chamber of Commerce have been great to work with, and he is excited to receive this grant, enabling them to move forward in bringing this project to the community.
