Odle family branching out to Bowling Green, Ky.
The family that has made a name for itself developing the "Brookside" brand of student housing in downtown Columbia is looking to Bowling Green, Ky., and Western Kentucky University for its latest projects.
The Odle family, which has built more than 1,000 student housing beds in its Brookside Downtown and Brookside on College projects, is working on three projects in Bowling Green. One, a 474-bed student housing development on the edge of the WKU campus, will be similar to the Brookside development at College Avenue and Walnut Street, Jon Odle said in an email. That project is in a Tax Increment Financing district, the Bowling Green Daily News reported.
Like here, the Odles also are looking beyond the student housing market. Their company, Trittenbach Development, is working on a 14,000-square-foot "urban retail" building as well as 40 to 50 market-rate apartments built into a commercial wrap on a new public parking garage in downtown Bowling Green, Odle wrote.
Locally, Trittenbach has shifted from student housing. While it's finishing the last phase of development at College and Walnut, which will add another 230 beds to the roughly 500 at the complex, it also has started work on a regional retail, office and residential development at Discovery Parkway and Highway 63. It scrapped plans for a large student housing component on the site, citing worries that the market was being overbuilt.
Odle said they're looking to Bowling Green for the same reason: The company reckons the student housing market in Columbia is oversupplied by about 3,000 beds.