Columbus rezones former Big Lots headquarters for possible OhioHealth hospital

Columbus has cleared the former Big Lots headquarters for a possible OhioHealth hospital, giving a new use to a 24.71-acre campus that once anchored the retailer’s corporate life in the Northland area.

The Columbus Development Commission approved the rezoning on Feb. 12 at a public hearing held at the Michael B. Coleman Government Center. OhioHealth sought to change the property at 4860-4900 E. Dublin-Granville Rd. from a commercial planned development district to the same district with hospital and accessory uses, a change needed if the health system moves beyond outpatient offices and into overnight inpatient care. The existing zoning already allowed medical office use, but not the kind of hospital operation that includes stays.

OhioHealth bought the campus for $36 million after Big Lots agreed to sell it in January 2025, and the sale closed in April 2025. Franklin County Auditor records and court filings show the retailer paid $69 million for the headquarters property in 2019, underscoring how sharply the asset lost value before the company’s collapse. Big Lots filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2024 and laid off hundreds of headquarters employees in December 2024, ending its Columbus corporate run and leaving behind one of the city’s most visible retail headquarters properties.

The campus itself is built for scale. It includes two 2017 buildings tied to the Hamilton Quarter development: a four-story, 273,000-square-foot office building and a 329,348-square-foot structure with distribution space and a parking garage. Other local reporting has put the site at about 25 acres with more than 1,000 parking spaces. That kind of footprint gives OhioHealth room to imagine a medical campus, but the company has said it is still studying possible uses and has not committed to a final project.

The site also sits in a growing medical corridor near OhioHealth’s New Albany Medical Campus, an urgent care center and a freestanding emergency department, with an Ohio State University medical complex on the east side of Hamilton Road. The Northland Community Council’s development committee voted 16-0 to recommend approval, with one condition: restore its list of prohibited non-medical uses in the CPD text. For Big Lots, the result is another sign that its old real estate is being absorbed into a different kind of economy, one that replaces corporate back office space with community infrastructure.