Woda to Rotary: Demand for Housing In Wheeling Is ‘Tremendous’

FROM: Wheeling News-Register: WHEELING (October 27, 2021) — Real estate developer Jeffrey Woda built a wildly successful company over the past three decades by filling a vital need in the local community and in neighborhoods across the country.

In the Wheeling area, that missing piece of the puzzle — the need for affordable housing — is “continuous,” according to Woda, who this week said the current demand in the Friendly City is virtually off the charts.

“We don’t have a unit available for lease — once it’s ready, it gets leased,” he said, noting that many of their properties in town continue to have a waiting list “a mile long” with names of people ready to rent. “It doesn’t matter if it’s senior housing, if it’s affordable housing, if it’s workforce … there’s just a tremendous need for more housing.”

Woda was the guest speaker Tuesday during this week’s meeting of the Wheeling Rotary Club, when the Powhatan Point native and Bethany College alumnus explained how he started a rental housing development company in 1990 and built it into a firm that today has more than 730 employees operating in 16 states, managing more than 16,000 housing units and boasting a development portfolio of $1.5 billion.

Partnering today with David Cooper Jr., Woda is president of the Woda Cooper Companies, and operates subsidiaries overseeing real estate and management, operations and development. They are the nation’s first and only “vertically-integrated affordable housing company in the nation to be owned by an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).”

Woda’s business model uses available tax credits and turns them into capital, spurring interest from investors and sparking many private-public partnerships that result in a “win-win” situation for everyone. Not only does the business reap the benefits of this proven formula, but the tenants of the rental properties and the community as a whole do, as well.

Many of Woda’s developments take a blighted area of a community and revitalize it by transforming it into an attractive, new affordable housing community. In Wheeling, Woda has a number of these developments completed, with more in the works.

Providence Greene I and II created senior living communities on what were brownfield spaces in North Wheeling. Capital Greene in Elm Grove followed with more senior housing units before RED: Regional Economic Development Partnership approached the company to create housing not for lower-income families, but for workforce or market-rate housing.

“That’s when we undertook doing the top floors of the old Stone Center building and also the Boury Lofts,” Woda said.

Affordable housing units came to South Wheeling around the site of the former LaBelle Nail plant with multiple phases of LaBelle Greene — where three phases are complete and one more is underway.

Also underway in South Wheeling are Hobbs Greene on Jacob Street — a four-story senior living facility currently being finished — and Owens Green, its twin which will be constructed just two blocks south of that location.

“There are some other developments that we’re working on that are not public knowledge, but one is,” Woda said of the new apartments that have been announced for the vacant Main Street site located at the city’s main entrance off of Interstate 70 and the Fort Henry Bridge. Originally planned as the Marsh-Wheeling Lofts, Woda said the name of the proposed four-story apartment complex has since been changed to avoid confusion with the neighboring Marsh Wheeling Stogies building.

“We renamed it, and it’s going to be called The Doris on Main,” Woda said. “Doris is my mother, who passed away at the end of last year. It’s really special for me that I can do that in her honor. She was such an important part of my life, being my only parent since I was 13.”

Doris Woda had operated the Wigwam Restaurant in her hometown of Powhatan Point and later operated Dorelli’s on the south end of Centre Market in Wheeling. She helped her son become an entrepreneur, help him establish his company and continued working with the business until her retirement. She died last year on Nov. 10.

With the promise of more housing projects coming to downtown Wheeling with The Doris on Main and Access Infrastructure’s Historic Wheeling-Pitt Lofts, Jeffrey Woda said he hoped to see more public-private partnerships come to fruition in Wheeling. He added that he hoped their success can even pave the way for other investments that help revitalize the city and fill the continuous need for affordable housing.

“The demand is amazing,” he said. “It’s been a great success, and we look forward to having our developments as a model that we can use as other developers — other than us — continue to develop in the downtown.”