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Couple Lisa and Ralph McRae have begun the process of turning the longtime location of the family’s paintbrush handle factory in south Bay City into a mixed-use development.
Ralph and Lisa said that they wanted to honor the legacy of the family factory by promoting a sense of community, which they plan to achieve by keeping space for businesses while adding a mix of different housing types.
“That’s a great way to live, you know,” Ralph said, “the commute is awesome, walk to work, if your kids are nearby, you can spend some time with them at lunch, that’s the thing for me.”
Since then, the McRaes have opened a U-Haul business and offer storage space around the property for rent, and several locals have set up workshops in the main warehouse building. The couple also sold two nearby houses and moved into an apartment onsite, investing the proceeds from the sales into the property.
At the same time, the couple has been developing a vision for the property’s future.
Lisa said that early on the couple identified housing as a good use for the property but that they had also quickly determined the property’s size and history meant it should not be their sole focus.
“We need housing, we get that,” Lisa said, “however, there’s also a place for other things that the entire county needs. We need daycare, we need senior care or, you know, there’s so many things that we need and so is there a way that we can affect that and that’s what we’ve been attempting to do.”
So far, that has meant that the couple has taken the lead on the project, eschewing outside developers to avoid potential conflicts over maximizing profits by dedicating the whole site to housing.
Beyond that, there are three other areas of the property that the McRaes hope to dedicate to housing in the future. One, on the property’s south end sporting beautiful views of the coast range, would be for senior-focused housing, another on the property’s east side would target young families with an affordable ownership model for single-family homes and the last, behind the apartment building site, might have market rate townhouses.
Ralph has a lifelong connection to the property, on which his grandfather and father built the paintbrush handle factory in 1957. The pair began the business after asking the local paintbrush factory about their handle supply and being offered a contract for 1,000 handles, which they filled by building the factory, using their machining skills to set up production.
The business employed up to 100 people at different points, and Ralph said that the remembers the community spirit fostered by events like overtime Saturdays, when workers would bring their families to the factory as they worked to complete an order.
By the 2010s, Ralph and Lisa were running the factory but after Sherwin Williams bought out the paintbrush factory, margins slimmed as the multinational demanded investments in costly new machinery and was sometimes slow on payments.
This led the couple to the hard decision to close the paintbrush handle operation in June 2019. The couple retooled the factory to work with a furniture company but after a year found that it wasn’t a good fit and shuttered the factory.
Those plans are still extremely preliminary, but Lisa said that she believed offering housing for different segments of the population would help to create a more vital and vibrant community that would foster interconnectedness and full lives for its residents.
“People feel more alive when they’re connected and so how do we do that,” Lisa said. “We are in a unique position where we can actually say, oh, okay, that what we want to have there.”
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