Plans to build rental housing on former Bixby Hospital site continue

ADRIAN — A rental housing project that is being considered on the site of the former ProMedica Bixby Hospital continues to move along.

Additional steps in the process of transforming the shuttered hospital in Adrian into a for-rent housing project that would include approximately 50 individual dwelling units in clusters will come before the Adrian Planning Commission during its scheduled monthly meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 7, inside Adrian City Chambers, 159 E. Maumee St.

The planning commission was engaged in a preliminary, preapplication meeting for the redevelopment of Bixby Hospital during its April 2 meeting to review and provide feedback on site plans for redeveloping the hospital site as a planned unit development.

“There will be a preliminary phase Planned Unit Development (PUD) plan considered by the planning commission at their May 7 meeting,” Adrian City Administrator Greg Elliott said in an email. “They (the planning commission) previously heard a conceptual presentation from the developers. This is the first step toward rezoning the property to PUD. The plan provides for individual dwelling units in clusters.”

The planning commission is responsible for establishing and enforcing regulations for public and private land use. A PUD, meanwhile, is a sort of parcel-specific zoning designation where a developer proposes a plan — within certain parameters — which, when approved, becomes the zoning designation for the property, Elliott explained.

“It is a process that is meant to afford an applicant with the ability to be creative in their site design,” he said.

Bixby Hospital on Riverside Avenue across from Adrian High School closed in September 2020 when ProMedica Charles and Virginia Hickman Hospital in Adrian Township opened. It opened on Riverside Avenue in June 1957 as the Emma L. Bixby Hospital, later going through an assortment of name changes. It replaced the original Emma L. Bixby Hospital which opened in 1911 at the corner of East Maumee and North Locust streets in Adrian.

In April 1999, the Lenawee Health Alliance signed a deal with ProMedica, bringing Bixby and Tecumseh’s Herrick Memorial Hospitals under the umbrella of the Toledo-based medical organization.

Plans to transform the site into for-rent housing units came before the Adrian City Commission in January when developer Michael Collier told the commission he has secured a contract with ProMedica to redevelop it, noting he understood such a project has been desired in the community since the hospital closed.

The front 7 acres of the Bixby site are part of the redevelopment agreement, Collier said. Unit rental prices, he said, are projected to be from $1,200 to $1,400 per month. The homes will be designed for single families with two or three bedrooms.

In March, Adrian’s Brownfield Redevelopment Authority (BRA), which appointed a new slate of members in February and had not met as a legislative body in almost five years, appropriated a loan fund through action taken by the city commission to move forward with predevelopment plans for rehabilitating the Bixby campus.

Because of time constraints and a project timeline moving forward, action needed to be taken on the part of the city if it wanted to allow the Bixby redevelopment to proceed, Elliott said at the time. The loan was in the amount of $900,000 that would allow for the developers to speed up their construction timeline.

The BRA is critical in helping revitalize, redevelop and reuse contaminated, blighted, functionally obsolete or historic resources.

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Demolition of the hospital itself — not the Grace Chrisman Medical Building, which includes the ProMedica Hickman Cancer Center — is still on target to start by mid-July. Collier originally told the city commission an anticipated date for demolition would be July 15.

— Contact reporter Brad Heineman at bheineman@lenconnect.com or follow him on X, formerly Twitter: twitter.com/LenaweeHeineman.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Plans for rental housing on Bixby Hospital site continue to move along