Last night, the Johnston City Council approved a site plan for development along Merle Hay Road between Northwest 62nd and Northwest 66th avenues. City leaders urged that the plan, which calls for mixed-use development including a commercial district, office space and high-density residential, is more of a vision for how the city would like that area developed and that it depends on developer and landowner support to make it happen.

“This is a concept that is being proposed to hopefully help property owners and the developers see what kind of potential this corridor has,” said Mayor Brian Laurenzo. “This is not something that the city is going to just embark on. It’s going to take the property owners and developers to get together and decide that this is something that they think they would like to pursue.”

Fritz Trost, who owns nearly an acre north of the Created in Johnston Inc. store on the west side of the Merle Hay corridor, said Johnston faces a huge challenge in getting the many landowners in that corridor onboard.

The plan, he said, “is very ambitious and it’s one that if it were able to [happen] would be incredible. … I have to say the biggest obstacle of all of this is the cooperation of all the property owners. I’ve tried very hard behind the scenes to get property owners next to me to try to sell at a reasonable price, to try to see if we make this happen, and it just hasn’t been possible. I’ve tried my best and I’ve been pretty frustrated and I’m pretty much ready to give up.”



Gene Martens, Johnston’s retiring community development director who has been heavily involved in the corridor study, said the City Council will have to consider its next steps in the near future, including whether to acquire and hold property to be sold to a developer and looking at tax increment financing and economic development incentives to encourage development. Demand for senior housing in Johnston, he said, could cause that part of the plan to be implemented first.

“I would be shocked five years from now to see it all implemented,” Martens said. “But there are some pieces of it that have stood vacant for a while or just have sparse houses in the development that we could see some interest on soon.”