Walk past 50 E. Olentangy Street on a Wednesday around 8 p.m. and you'll notice something that didn't used to happen in downtown Powell: the lights are still on, and the people at the tables don't look like they're heading home in twenty minutes. That's the rooftop at COhatch's new Powell campus, and until this spring, there was no version of downtown Powell that stayed occupied past dinner on a weeknight unless there was a festival on the calendar.
Something has shifted, and it isn't just that a few new restaurants opened. The city itself has been telling a consistent story in public meetings for almost a year, and it explains why the businesses arriving downtown right now look different from the ones that came before them.
The Number the City Keeps Repeating
In a presentation to Powell City Council's Development Committee on November 5, 2025, the city's economic development administrator, Sean Hughes, laid out a figure that should reframe how residents think about their own downtown: Powell sees roughly 48,000 overnight trips a year. Hughes asked the obvious follow-up question out loud: where are those people staying right now?
The honest answer is mostly not in Powell. That gap is why a local developer, Transform Construction, has proposed a two-story restaurant at 147 W. Olentangy Street and a three-story building at 173 W. Olentangy Street combining a second restaurant, retail space, and a 16-room boutique hotel. The combined investment runs about $7.8 million, and the city is weighing a 75% property tax abatement over 15 years on both sites, which would save the developer roughly $190,000 on the restaurant and about $1.5 million on the hotel. City estimates put the projects at more than 70 full-time jobs and about $1.95 million in new downtown payroll.
The hotel piece matters more than it sounds. If it fills close to capacity, the development team estimates it could generate close to $1.9 million a year in visitor spending, based on the Ohio Department of Development's estimate that an overnight guest spends around $327 a day. Over 15 years, that's projected at $28.7 million moving through downtown businesses that didn't exist five years ago.
None of that money is hypothetical tourists from somewhere else. It's the same 48,000 people who already come to Powell and currently leave to sleep somewhere else. The city isn't trying to attract new visitors so much as keep the ones it already has for another twelve hours, and every new business opening downtown this year is a piece of that same bet.
What Actually Opened This Spring
The clearest evidence is the COhatch campus itself, which opened to members on March 2, 2026, at 50 and 60 E. Olentangy Street. It's a 14,000-square-foot mass timber building, the company's 38th building restoration project nationally and its 11th location in the Columbus area. The Lani Rooftop Lounge, a Hawaiian-inspired cocktail bar developed with chef Quichocho Lingo and mixologist Alex Johnson, opened to the public later that month on the building's top floor. Next door, the restored 100-plus-year-old Middlebury Member House opened to members in May, designed as a lodge-style space for private events, meetings, and weddings.
That last detail is the one worth sitting with. A wedding venue inside downtown Powell means out-of-town guests who need somewhere to stay for a weekend, catering staff working a Friday night that used to be quiet, and foot traffic on evenings that have nothing to do with the Saturday morning market crowd. COhatch's founder, Matt Davis, has lived in Powell for more than two decades, and the company has said the project is part of the city's broader push to extend Scioto Street eastward and add new public parking, infrastructure that only makes sense if you're planning for more people staying downtown longer, not just passing through.
What's Still on the Way
Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar, which already operates a location in Bexley, announced plans earlier this year for a new spot at 230 W. Olentangy Street, with a grand opening originally targeted for spring and an exact date still unconfirmed as of the announcement. The restaurant is positioning itself around date-night and celebration dinners rather than quick lunches, which fits the same pattern: it's built for an evening crowd, not a daytime one.
The Transform Construction restaurant-and-hotel project at 147 and 173 W. Olentangy Street is still working through the city's approval and incentive process as of this writing, so residents shouldn't expect ribbon-cuttings this year. But the fact that a developer is willing to put $7.8 million behind two restaurants and a boutique hotel in a downtown that already has plenty of places to eat tells you the bet isn't on more restaurants for their own sake. It's on restaurants and rooms that keep people downtown after dark.
The Calendar Has Filled In the Gaps Too
Community programming has started to lean the same direction. The Powell Street Market & Business Expo returns Sunday, September 13, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with more than 60 local vendors and proceeds benefiting the Powell-Liberty Historical Society. That's still a daytime, weekend event, the kind downtown Powell has always done well.
What's newer is the weeknight programming. Village Green Amphitheater has kept its free Movie Night on the Green series running, supported by sponsors including Niehaus Insurance and the Powell Development Corporation. And Nocterra Brewing's run club now meets every Thursday at 6:15 p.m., drawing runners of every pace back to the taproom afterward. Neither of those existed as a recurring weeknight habit in downtown Powell a few years ago. Now they're part of the rhythm.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
For years, if you wanted dinner downtown on a Tuesday, your options were essentially Kraft House No. 5 at the corner of Powell and Liberty Road, or Novella Osteria, both excellent, both quiet reliable regulars. That hasn't changed. What's changed is that they now have company on nights that used to belong entirely to them.
The city isn't building a bigger version of the Saturday downtown Powell already had. It's building a version of downtown that works on a Wednesday, because the data it collected said thousands of people were already showing up and leaving with nowhere to stay. If you live here, that means your own weeknight options are quietly expanding in real time, not because Powell decided it needed more restaurants, but because the numbers said the visitors were already here.
Keep an eye on West Olentangy Street over the next year. The hotel and second restaurant project isn't approved yet, but if it moves forward the way COhatch's campus did, downtown Powell's evenings are going to look different again before this time next year.
Whether these changes shift how downtown Powell fits into the broader Central Ohio market is a separate question, one Angelina Fox-Smith & Company keeps a close eye on for clients thinking about buying or selling in Powell, Delaware County, and the rest of Central Ohio. If you're curious what a changing downtown means for your own street, reach out and we're glad to talk through it.
