COhatch Hamilton set to open in February

The 1999 Miami University graduate and CEO and co-founder of COhatch was already familiar with Hamilton, and as he and other company leaders looked to find locations in “great communities and great towns.” He said the City of Sculpture was an easy choice.

“As we developed Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland, and we started looking at Dayton and some other places, Hamilton was came up as one of those places,” Davis said. “Our whole philosophy is to create this really strong network of locations in great, thriving communities, and that kind of helped them get to the next level.”

The company owner saw the former Second National Bank building as “truly iconic” and a building “you fall in love with right away.”

Davis said the redevelopment was daunting, and required a lot of work. Three years later, the $8 million project, which received $1.8 million in Ohio historic tax credits. This will be the 37th building restoration and transformation for COhatch.

“We want to find an active community with active leadership that has a vision for their city, and it’s clear that Hamilton had this,” he said. “We love sites like this because we want to be the iconic center of a town.”

That’s how COhatch started in 2016 in an abandoned building in Worthington, Ohio, where it breathed new life into the structure and added unique amenities. And that’s been a COhatch staple where each building has features unique to it.

COhatch Hamilton will be in the 1931 art deco former bank building, a 26,000-square-foot structure at 219 High St. The redevelopment began in late 2023. It has had the support of the city of Hamilton, Greater Hamilton Chamber of Commerce and JobsOhio.

In addition to the tax credits, the City Council in 2024 offered a 50% tax abatement for 10 years in exchange for hiring three full-time and 10 part-time employees.

The hope, Davis said, is the tax incentives COhatch receives will eventually benefit its clients. The company is piloting such a program at the Dublin COhatch.

“Instead of huge, large corporations getting benefits, we’re collectively negotiating for hundreds and hundreds of small businesses, and then we create all these jobs,” Davis said, which the hope is to get more people working in a town’s center.

Tyler McCleary, COhatch Hamilton’s director of operations, said when the building is up and running, that means a few hundred extra people will be in the Hamilton’s central business district. That foot traffic “is one of the biggest thing you can get” for businesses.

“It’s going to be monumental for Hamilton,” said McCleary about reactivating the former bank building.

Davis said what has happened in other cities when COhatch opened was “the broken-window effect.”

“We come in, restore something and you have other things popping up. You see all these new things and upgrades going across,” he said. “We’ve seen that in Springfield, we’ve seen it even in high-end thriving communities, like Dublin. People are upgrading their buildings around us.”

In addition to business clients, whether it’s a startup or an established organization, they’ll have nonprofits in the building on what’s called a GIVE Scholarship program for up to 50 nonprofits aligned with COhatch’s philanthropic goals. There are also boost scholarships designed to support local startups, with a specific focus on minority- and women-led businesses, by providing free access to coworking space and resources as they grow.

COhatch has awarded, to date, 978 nonprofits and 479 startup scholarships.

“With your nonprofit partners, startups, anybody that wants to come out and be a part of this thing, we’re going to have a lot of really cool resources, create space, and a lot of fun and conversation where people can network and intermingle,” he said, adding that around a quarter of the 39 of the office spaces are already rented before the opening in February.

Until they open, COhatch is offering a $150 a month founding full membership.