Hart Michigan Community Center Plans for State Street
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
Drive down South State Street in Hart and you'll pass a building most residents have stopped noticing, the old Gale's IGA, dark windows, empty parking lot, the kind of vacancy that becomes part of the scenery after a couple of years. For a while the running guess was a new grocery chain, or maybe a Dollar General expansion, or nothing at all. None of that turned out to be right.
What's actually going into that building is not a grocery store reopening under new ownership. It's four separate organizations sharing one address, built around a fact that says more about Oceana County than the building itself: this county has no local access to college classes, workforce training, or a full-service food option that doesn't require a drive to Shelby or beyond. That gap is what the renovation at 710 S. State St. is actually built to close, and the way it's being built tells you the planning went further than "reopen the store."
West Shore Community College bought the roughly 25,000-square-foot building and is turning it into what the college is calling the Oceana County Education Center. West Shore, founded in 1967 and based in Scottville, already runs a satellite campus in Manistee that opened in 2021. The Hart location is set to be about 10,000 square feet larger, mostly because it needs room for something Manistee's campus doesn't carry: food storage for a full nonprofit grocery operation.
The project is backed by $7.5 million in federal New Markets Tax Credit allocation from Michigan Community Capital, a Lansing-based nonprofit that finances projects in underserved communities, with PNC Bank as the tax credit investor. The site itself sits in a census tract the CDFI Fund classifies as severely distressed, tied to a median family income at 77 percent of the area median. According to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, Oceana is one of the few counties in the state with no in-county access to post-secondary education, which means the nearest classroom for a lot of residents has historically meant a drive to Scottville, Muskegon, or farther. That's the hole this building is meant to fill, not by adding a satellite classroom quietly on the edge of town, but by putting it on the same block as the grocery store, the coffee counter, and the job center.
When it opens, the building will hold:
That's an unusual combination for one roof, and the building's floor plan was drawn around the friction of mixing them. During a November 2025 board presentation, West Shore's vice president of administrative services explained that the Food Club and Stella's Coffee share a separate entrance from the rest of the building, with its own vestibule built specifically to handle shopping carts coming in and out. Michigan Works! will staff its front desk with bilingual employees, and the interior signage throughout the building is being designed to be bilingual as well, a detail that matters in a county where a meaningful share of agricultural and service workers speak Spanish as a first language.
The most recent public update came out of West Shore's Board of Trustees meeting on Aug. 17, 2026, just a week before this was written. According to the college's vice president of administrative services, carpet installation is underway, the conference room and coffee house space are coming together, and a longstanding site problem has finally been fixed: a hump in the parking lot that used to cause flooding at the laundromat next door during heavy rain has now been graded properly.
"It's starting to feel warm. It's starting to feel like a building is going to be used soon."
That's not the language of a project still stuck in permitting. The same update described a stretch of green space being added to the site for people to gather, a detail the college's own staff reportedly said they were looking forward to mowing, which is as good a sign as any that this is close to done rather than years out.
The timeline holds up against everything reported earlier in the year. When Michigan Community Capital first announced its financing in February 2026, officials said the Hart facility was expected to open the following fall, meaning this fall. West Shore's broader 2025-26 annual report backs that up too, listing the Oceana County Education Center alongside a natatorium renovation as one of roughly $12 million in capital projects the college is completing in 2026.
It would be easy to read this as a single nonprofit real estate deal and move on, but the design choices point to something more deliberate. The building's plan reserves space on the right side of the lot as green space rather than filling every square foot, specifically so that a future housing developer, or the college itself, could use it later if needs change. Trustees have also discussed commissioning a mural for the building's exterior meant to reflect the cultural and historical highlights of Oceana County, which would put a piece of public art on a stretch of State Street that's been blank for years.
None of that is standard for a workforce training office. It reads more like a group trying to build something that outlasts its first use, on a site that's been sitting idle long enough that residents had mostly written it off.
State Street will still be State Street while all of this finishes. Rennhack Orchards Market out on West Polk Road keeps its own rhythm, family-run, seasonal produce, the kind of stop people make without thinking about it. Hart Pizza downtown has been a fixture for locals and cottage owners for years regardless of what's happening a few blocks over. The Hart-Montague Trail, Michigan's first paved rail-trail, still runs 22 miles south out of town for anyone biking or walking after work, and Hart Lake still draws people to John Gurney Park on its bluff the same way it always has.
What changes is what's available inside a five-minute walk of all of that. By the time the Oceana County Education Center opens, residents will have a coffee counter, a grocery option built for people the market has historically underserved, a job training office, and a family support agency, all in a building that used to be one more empty storefront on the drive through downtown.
That's the actual story here. Not a grocery store reopening, but a county quietly closing three gaps at once, in a building most people had stopped expecting anything from.
If you're watching Hart's downtown change and wondering what it means for property values, timing, or your own next move here, that's a longer conversation, and one Gaby Peterson has with Oceana County buyers and sellers regularly. Schedule your free consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
Gaby brings dedication, expertise, and a personal touch to every step of the process. With deep knowledge of the market and a passion for helping clients succeed, Gaby ensures your real estate journey is smooth, transparent, and stress-free.
