Meet the 27-Year-Old Who’s Trying To Bring Housing Back to Rural Ohio

When it comes to the hottest locations that attract young 20-somethings, Mansfield, OH, probably isn't the first place that comes to mind. 

For years, Mansfield’s nickname was “The Fun Center of Ohio” because of its family-friendly attractions and its status in the 1970s as a mini-bike manufacturing hub.

More recently, the town of 47,000, located halfway between Columbus and Cleveland, earned the local nickname of “Danger City” after the Westinghouse electric plant left in 1990 and the town fell into deep economic decline. 

That didn’t stop Ben Goehner.

The 27-year-old serial entrepreneur, who started a painting and landscaping business as a teenager, relocated to Mansfield from Seattle a year ago, hoping to revitalize rural housing through his vertically integrated housing development company, Western Dominion Land.

Vertical integration is a development model in which a single company controls the full life cycle of a housing project.

“In other countries, they’ve figured out that vertically integrating construction means you’re not paying a margin out to every single step," Goehner explains. "If you own the system—from a lumberyard, to producing panels or modular, to buying the land, to developing the land, to building the homes—you're not paying everyone’s markup along the way, and you can actually deliver that home at a reasonable price.”

Goehner is building a factory in Mansfield to produce structured panels that he says will cut single-family home construction from months to weeks and allow him to charge much less than other builders. The first panels are expected to roll off the production line in early 2027.

Currently, it takes 8.8 months to construct a home from start to finish, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Goehner says his process allows a home to be built and move-in-ready in 40 days.  

Western Dominion has already built about 500 housing units across Ohio, starting at $200,000 for a single-family home.

Western Dominion focuses on what it calls "attainable housing"—homes priced below what the median household income in the area can afford but not income-limited, meaning they work for the vast majority of families and buyers.

In Mansfield, where the median listing price is $229,000, he says, "single-family homes at $215,000 sold instantly. At $260,000, they sat for months."

As he sees it, 25% of the homes on the market are priced for 60% to 70% of buyers, while the rest of what’s being built is at the top end of the market. Furthermore, only 8% of construction happens in rural areas, despite 20% of the population living there.

"The government is too focused on low-income housing" and low-income housing tax credits, he says. “And the last few housing bills they passed were only structured to deliver essentially more urban multifamily units and incentivize builders to build more low-income housing with tax credits."

In rural communities, he adds, “We have a terrible amount of aged housing inventory. Most of our homes are from before 1970, which would be fine if it didn't cost so much to remodel.

“From the '90s to the 2000s, we’re building a good amount of homes. As a country, we were doing about 1.6 million a year. And then in rural America, we were doing about 220,000 homes a year. And then 2008 hits, and that drops down to about 60,000 homes a year in rural America." 

Along the way, smaller builders disappeared, and larger builders were disincentivized from building in rural areas because of the red tape involved.

"If you want to build in rural America and you go to a bank, unless you have all the cash, you have to show comps," he says. "You've got to be, like, ‘All right, we think these homes are going to sell for this much because these guys sold for this much.' And if no one's built for five to 50 years, which is the case in a lot of these communities, that can be difficult."

The added costs of building in rural areas, like having to pull utilities, "mean you're spending $25,000 to $50,000 per lot before you can even start putting a house on it or connecting your utilities to the lot."

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, home prices in rural communities have risen sharply. A Realtor.com® housing analysis of home prices from November 2019 to November 2025 found that median listing prices increased more than 70% in rural counties while in-metro counties saw home prices increase around 30% during the same time period.

"A lot of the politicians we talk to, they go, 'I didn't know that that county needed housing. I didn't know rural needed housing because the population is shrinking.' But then when you look at why the population is shrinking, it's because they haven't gotten any new homes for 20 to 40 years."

"You've got this huge demand. But on paper, on the surface, it looks like there's no demand because the population's declining," he continues. "And that's how you get cities like Holiday City."

Holiday City, near the Ohio border with Indiana and Michigan, has a population of just 48 people, but it is home to three large businesses—Chase Brass & Copper Co., 20/20 Custom Molded Products, and a Menards Distribution Center—which draw around 1,500 commuters from out of state. 

"Let's put up, you know, 300 homes, and a portion of the workforce can actually stop commuting an hour or two every day," Goehner says.

Goehner hopes Ohio's new slate of elected officials will help advance rural building by offsetting some of the infrastructure-related costs of building in rural areas. In exchange, he would sell homes at his “attainable” housing rates. 

"The government needs to stop spending thousands of dollars a month per unit to subsidize rents when they could simply spend a little bit upfront to make it viable to build at a reasonable price point again," he says.