WEDG, local companies collaborate moving home to Washington

WASHINGTON — The Washington Economic Development Group is working on a project to pick up a cottage formerly at Kalona’s Pleasantview Home, and move it to an empty lot in Washington.

WEDG Executive Director Mary Audia said the plan was hatched after another cottage from the retirement community was relocated by Goodwin House Moving, a local business that specializes in transporting intact structures. When that home sold recently at a reasonable rate, she said WEDG got an idea to repeat the project on its own.

“We have this housing group that meets on a quarterly basis or whenever something’s coming up, and housing is one of the pillars for WEDG, one of our strategic planning goals that’s really important to us,” Audia said. “We started looking at this cottage and thought, ‘The city has a lot available, maybe we could collaborate with the city and see if we could bring some more achievable housing into Washington.”

City council members recently signed off on a deal to sell the empty lot to WEDG for a dollar. Goodwin picked up the building and moved it out of Kalona in August.

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Connie Larsen, a Washington-based real estate agent and WEDG investor, said the group planned to dig out a basement on the property before moving the house there, hopefully sometime this spring.

They’ve hired a handful of local contractors for utility hookups and planned modifications to the house like new paint, air conditioning, and carpeting. When the dust settles, WEDG hopes to put the home on the market for around $200,000, ideally with options for down payment assistance from the East Central Iowa Housing Trust Fund.

While the home’s market rate would likely be higher under other circumstances, WEDG members said they were looking to break even in their endeavor to bring affordable housing to town.

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“We’re cutting a lot of stuff off, we don’t want to make a profit on this, we want housing,” Audia said. “And we will income-qualify buyers, not just anybody’s going to be able to buy this, that’s not the point.”

It helps that the decades-old cottage was built before recent spikes in construction materials due to COVID-19, disrupted supply chains, and, more recently, tariffs.

“You wouldn’t be able to get new construction for the price we’re doing this,” Larsen said. “And why not reuse something like that? It’s in good shape.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com