jbcmh81

Me neither. I can empathize with certain concerns and frustrations regarding Columbus, but in regards to Keith, it seems that he has his own personal vision for the city and because the city is not following it lock-step, it's apparently incompetent, corrupt, racist and lightyears behind other similarly-sized cities. We all have our own ideas of what makes a place great, and we all have ideas on what we'd like to see improved. I really think, however, that most people just don't get how long this process takes. My take on High is that we're lucky to have it. As long as the Downtown area continues to improve, it shows overall health and continues to attract people. The more people Downtown, the more likely it will be to see even more significant changes, including mass transit. Besides, it's not as if High is the only place seeing improvements. I see posts and threads all around about projects and discussions on what's happening outside of the Downtown core. Again, it may not be to the whims of everyone, but we are improving as a city overall. It has far less of that "cowtown" feel than ever to me.

I'm a lifelong resident and the city is still clearly behind the curve, which is precisely why I'm moving (and why I deleted my Columbus urbanism blog of 4-5 years). Improvements have been made, but looking at Columbus in a vacuum or just comparing it only to other Ohio cities and Indianapolis is pointless. With 300,000ish urban residents you most certainly have the demand for streetcar lines. Back in the teens, Columbus only consisted of around 200,000 residents, yet supported several streetcar lines passing through numerous urban business districts which attracted the development you can still see today. Just rebuilding a few of these lines where needed (not N High) would clearly work and be a boon to struggling districts, but residents are not at all well-versed in the effects of what a streetcar line would do. I merely included Clintonville as one of the healthy stretches of N High because it is an old urban neighborhood (South Clintonville, that is). In the end, given the same amount of time and fewer obstacles than other cities in the region, Columbus falls well behind the best. Who cares what the middle-of-the-road ones are doing. Our (while I'm still here) city government is spending the vast majority of money on sprawl, not urban neighborhoods. Take the $3.5 million to be spent citywide on bike infrastructure vs. any one of the single road widening projects that cost at least 3x that just for one stretch of one arterial road out in the boonies. Accommodating motorists who want to drive to Applebees and back to their apartment complex cul-de-sac is a much bigger priority for the city of Columbus than providing safe roads in the inner city for peds and cyclists. There is no debate: that is what is actually happening right now, yet you expect me to stick around and wait for city leaders to have a magical change of heart. We could be where Minneapolis or Pittsburgh is today if we wanted that, but locals are apathetic and this city has a pro-sprawl agenda: where do you expect any real change to occur in this scenario? Are you going to start contacting the city about this? Because I grew tired of doing that and just getting bunch of bunch bullsh!t responses, such as councilman Craig stating that there was more demand for road-widening projects up in sprawling NW Columbus, when the reality is that residents from that area don't need to show up to city council meetings (they don't) because the city spends money on these places by default. You want to say that Minneapolis is an unfair comparison, and you're free to think so, but then explain how a beaten-up rust belt city like Pittsburgh also offers more revitalized urban neighborhoods than Columbus, which never had to overcome the difficulties of being a rust belt city, and when their urban population is virtually identical. You can go ahead say how much progress Columbus has made, but go ahead and head to W Broad east of Hague and spend your evening there if we've made so much progress. Meanwhile, I can go to Pittsburgh and actually go to their version of W Broad and find places I'd want to spend time in. I've done High St plenty of times: it's old. I guess I should just be happy that more overpriced, mediocre restaurants are making inroads into the Short North instead of being able to have a decent selection of quality off-High options. As a Hilltop resident, you should be very aware of the antagonistic position the city takes against off-the-radar urban neighborhoods, like when they wanted to remove all on-street parking along W Broad's urban business district. Talk about kicking someone when they're already down. You're seriously comparing the city now to the 1920s? You didn't have the highway system and cars were not NEARLY as prevalent as they are now. All cities nationwide were vastly more dense and compact. That 200,000 people did not live out in the suburbs. They were Downtown. That is not the reality for the vast majority of cities in this country now. You keep trying to hold Columbus to standards that either don't exist, or aren't comparable. And you keep saying that I'm talking about Ohio cities. I'm not. I'm talking about Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Indy, Austin, and Charlotte. Those are all comparable in city proper populations, but in some cases have much larger metro populations, which, like it or not, can make a HUGE difference in how a Downtown area functions. Frankly, I'm sick to death of the comparsions to places like Pittsburg and Cleveland, both of which peaked 60 damn years ago with much larger populations than Columbus has now. Of course their infrastructure is going to be a step ahead. Light rail has been around long enough that those places got it during their peaks and still maintain it now. The fact is that it is NOT difficult to travel around this city, not at all. While I absolutely want to see more options, you are not going to see a citywide movement for that while it remains easy to travel. Residents here are practical, and they're not going to push for change until they see a real need for it, and given the overall economy, you can't really blame them from shying away from expensive projects that they don't yet buy into. I think it is realistic to expect that light rail will not only be back on the table, but in planning stages if not further within the next 5 years. And I LIVE east of Hague off of Broad. I know how much work remains to be done. I get that. BTW, they listened to residents about the on-street parking issue and moved the bike lanes off of Broad. Anyway, I'm also not going to sit here all day long and complain just because the city is not bowing to my every urban wet dream. I see progress, a lot of it, and that's good enough for me. I am able to put this into perspective vs other cities (which btw, have plenty of issues themselves). You speak of Pittsburg being so great, yet it's own residents continue to evacuate the city left and right. Same with Cleveland. Even Minneapolis has gone through periods of decline. All cities have unique challenges. Columbus has it's own, I recognize that. But clearly I believe that good things are in the future and you don't. Frankly, if you can no longer support it, then it probably is a good idea you're leaving. We have enough negative people already. And honestly, I don't really get your attitude. For someone who proclaimed to have spent so much time fighting, giving up seems really lame to me. Oh well.

Reworking 70/71 IS possible. Getting rid of them is not. Again, the city of Columbus is not the final decision maker on this. ODOT is, and they didn't even want us to get caps on the overpasses.

So why not run for city gov't? Clearly you believe that almost everything the city has done is either wrong or not good enough, so why not stop complaining and run on a platform of correcting these issues? BTW, Columbus does not run ODOT. ODOT didn't want a single cap on any of the bridges and just wanted a wider highway canyon, and Columbus wanted just about all of them done, at the very least. They saw that the 670 cap was a success and it did make the neighborhood more cohesive even if it did not restore it to 1950. ODOT has far more power on this issue than the city does. I'm sorry, but as much as you or I would like it, we can't turn back the clock and erase two of the biggest highways in the nation through our Downtown areas. The OT's quoted story is great, but that highway was clearly not a national artery like 70 or 71. You can't just get rid of them. I don't think this is a conspiracy against any particular neighborhood. Our mayor is black, most of the city council is black. Why would they intentionally try to keep a historic black neighborhood isolated? Answer: they wouldn't. Coleman has put a lot of focus on King-Lincoln and OTE trying to revitalize the area. Not everything they want to happen is going to happen... yet. ODOT, honestly, is full of *ssholes and, by nature, is going to be car-centric. Again, I think you're getting yourself way too worked up here. There's only so much the city can do about this. Minimizing the damage is about as much as is possible.

Probably, but again, there's not enough demand to get it built, whether or not it would be used right now. You have the have the demand present to make that step.

Keith... I'm sorry, but maybe you are not a native and have no idea what the city was like prior to the late 1990s, but there have been drastic changes. Almost all of the major projects and gentrification of High, especially the closer you get to Downtown, have come in the last 10-15 years. And if you want to include Clintonville, why not Worthington, why not all the way up to Delaware County? Not all of High is going to be developed the same way, and it's a little strange to suggest that since Clintonville exists, that that kind of development should have spread city-wide now. Even near OSU, which also has seen a developed corridor on High for decades, has also improved markedly lately, and the university has become much more involved in neighborhood revitalization. The area between the Short North and OSU is probably the least developed and most run down section of the corridor, save for maybe 270 to the edges of Merion Village on the south end. There has been a real push for infill in those areas. Regarding mass transit, here is basically why we don't have it yet: We don't yet have the overall demand for it. Highways were not mentioned as a sign of progress, but as a reason why the deman for rail, etc may not be as high as in some other cities. But again, in the closest cities to our size (which are not local, but around the country), most of them still have nothing, either, so it's hardly something unusual. Clearly a city our size just doesn't have the population yet to support that demand, and throw in the highways and there may even be less demand than usual. Even so, the point is that the city is not behind the curve on this. It may not be ahead of the game, but certainly in the ballpark. I do fully believe, however, that mass transit is inevitable and I fully support it. As long as the city continues to grow, the demand for more options will also go up. And again, the comparisons are unfair. Minneapolis' central core is very small in area and therefore has a higher density than Columbus. Also, there are over 3.5 million people in the metro area, many of them obviously working, shopping, etc in the area. So there is clearly a higher demand for mass transit, etc. That's also a lot more people investing in the city, as well as there being several more Fortune 500 companies located within the city limits. The city has been larger than Columbus for decades, regardless of what the city proper population is. Every city is different, some are in better shape, some worse. Columbus has made mistakes, for sure, but you act as if nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen. I couldn't disagree more. I have seen it.

First, what part of N. High has been done for years? I've seen tons of photos of the Short North up through campus from the '80s and '90s (and remember it growing up) and it wasn't pretty. They even have those information signs in the area showing old photos and how run down it was. There was no Arena District before 2000. On South High, the Brewery District was still mostly abandoned. The only thing Downtown was City Center, and that died after Tuttle, Easton and Polaris, which all were all built between 1997 and 2001. These improvements are not decades old. And I don't see Cincy and Cleveland or Indy well ahead of us in this regard. As for public transportation, I don't think the bus system is bad here. As for the streetcar/light rail, out of the 5 cities closest in population, 3 have nothing and 2 have a limited amount, and we have a hugely better highway system than either of them. Again, if you actually look at the facts, Columbus has made huge improvements and it continues to move forward. I think you expect things to change overnight or even over the course of a few years, and it doesn't happen that way. Believe me, as a resident of a forgotten neighborhood (Hilltop), I share your frustration, but that doesn't negate all that has been done so far. Columbus, by all accounts, continues to grow strongly, and all of these demands will ultimately be met. I'm not sure what else to say on that. BTW, you keep comparing Columbus to cities that reached their peaks LONG before Columbus, which has not even reached Cleveland's historical population high. Minneapolis' MSA is 2x the size of Columbus. The comparisons are not really fair.

That will help possibly help repopulate those areas, but I was talking about why those houses went empty to begin with. If you consider that those were probably low-income people, they would've been the first to be hit by the economy. Gentrifciation is a whole different animal.

I'm not sure that I would agree that this is the city's fault. I think it has far more to do with one of the worst economies in decades. This kind of thing hit every city in the country, not just Columbus. People who were already struggling are usually first to be hit. And given that Columbus has such a large area, people who left certain neighborhoods may not have necessarily left the city limits, so I doubt this plays too much in population. Especially considering that Columbus has had most of its growth from international immigration and not domestic, but even domestic, people came from areas that have been doing far worse than we have. Northeast Ohio is one of Columbus' biggest feeder areas. Guess we'll find out by April 1st. I don't buy the economy argument for the simple reason that the city is spending money that could be directed to these areas, but instead is spent out in the sprawling 270 region. Over $16 million is being spent on one stretch of Hilliard-Rome road to add traffic lanes and is in progress. These lanes are not going to add development since the area has already been developed in typical strip-mall fashion. Contrast that to February of 2010 where the city gave the entire neighborhood of Linden a mere $28,000 towards revitalization efforts. Money is not the issue with Columbus, but priorities. The city government does not want to do their part to help stabilize these forgotten urban neighborhoods and officials will give you BS responses about the glaring disparity between investment in already heavily invested areas vs. areas that haven't seen anything comparable for several decades. It's no wonder that while the city leaves these neighborhoods to rot that more and more people who can move out do. I'm hoping the census will show what the city of Columbus likes to ignore by always citing the population within city limits, which is a huge area that is all suburban. Unless you are giving money directly to pay their mortgages, I'm not sure that I understand how spending money on revitalization translates directly to people staying employed or keeping their homes. The city may or may not have all their priorities right, but I just don't see the increase in vacant housing as a Columbus-specific issue, or how the economy is not largely responsible. And didn't they just announce a plan to spend millions on this very issue? And aren't all cities listed by population in their incorporated limits? The average land area of the top 50 largest cities in the US is about 200 square miles. The land area of Columbus is about 210 sq/miles, so the city is pretty much average in size. Some, of course, are much smaller, particularly older Eastern cities like Boston that were unable to annex. But then some, like Houston, are 3x the size of Columbus.

Don't they have higher unemployment there than in Ohio?

I think you're being way too hard on the city. After all, who even went down to High in 1995? I can remember it looking like Livingston or Sullivant back in the 1980s and early 1990s. The vast majority of revitalization has occured only in the last decade or so. I always thought that the focus SHOULD be on High considering it is the main artery in the Downtown area, with Broad being the secondary. Broad is slowly getting more attention, but again, I think we are still in the early stages of all of this. The city has done a tremendous amount of work. I know that you're frustrated that it hasn't spread further than it has, but I tend to see a lot more accomplishments overall than failures.

I kind of agree, I found it always strange that only a few mins away from High Street by car around the university were roads without sidewalks and strip malls. Here you have this incredibly vibrant street, and in cities that usually have streets this vibrant you expect more city. Its a cool thing in a sense, but its kind of disappointing, as I'm used to Cincinnati where the real urban area is much larger even if it doesn't have a street like High Street. Chicago has both lively streets and tons of urbanity, then again its Chicago... ;) I think the main difference in urban area comes from the fact that Cincinnati is older and reached its peak long before Columbus. It has has different topography so the downtown area is closer together than it ever was in Columbus. Columbus didn't even really have High Street until the last 10-15 years. It's gentrifying, but it's going to take time to build off the success of High.

Well, I hope you're wrong, but I suspect that's true.

I'm not sure that I would agree that this is the city's fault. I think it has far more to do with one of the worst economies in decades. This kind of thing hit every city in the country, not just Columbus. People who were already struggling are usually first to be hit. And given that Columbus has such a large area, people who left certain neighborhoods may not have necessarily left the city limits, so I doubt this plays too much in population. Especially considering that Columbus has had most of its growth from international immigration and not domestic, but even domestic, people came from areas that have been doing far worse than we have. Northeast Ohio is one of Columbus' biggest feeder areas. Guess we'll find out by April 1st.

Yeah, but besides Chicago and St. Louis, those are the only two that have come out so far for major cities. I guess some would include KC, but I consider it to be more Plains. Plus, Chicago, St. Louis, and KC's estimates all had them growing, but only KC actually grew, and not as much as the estimates had. So really, estimates have been pretty terrible. That's why it's a little hard to predict how Ohio will go. I'd be concerned that Cleveland, Dayton, etc are losing people faster, and Columbus maybe not growing as fast as estimates have. Then again, it could be the opposite and Cleveland has stopped the loss and Columbus is growing faster than estimates.

Not all Midwest cities have come in under estimates. Indianapolis 2009 Estimate: 807,584 2010 Census: 829,718 Des Moines 2009 Estimate: 200,538 2010 Census: 203,433 Most of the Midwest has not been released yet, so it's hard to come up with conclusions as to how the rest will turn out.

MSAs, I believe, are comprised of areas that have significant interaction and commutes. There are specific standards to be counted as one MSA, and Cleveland/Akron have not met those standards, so they remain separate.

Well, so far most estimates have been off, sometimes way off, but most of them are off at least in the trend that the estimates had. If the estimates showed gains, usually there were gains. If losses were shown, that's typically what came up. There have been exceptions, but not many. For Ohio, if one just follows the estimate trends, here would be the obvious conclusions: Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, Youngstown and Canton all continue to see population declines. Cincinnati and Akron maintain or grow slightly. Columbus continues to grow strongly. But that's only if the estimate trends end up being reality.

Honestly, Penn National has been shady from the beginning. It was a good idea to keep it out of the arena district, but I no longer think that it will do much for the West Broad/Georgesville corridor in terms of overall improvement. They seem to be more interested in playing games and trying to weasel out of past promises.

The best thing going for neighborhoods like Hilltop and Franklinton is that Columbus continues to grow at a strong pace. I don't think these central urban neighborhoods will remain the way they are for too many more years. I'm a native of Columbus and have seen HUGE changes within the city over the last 10-15 years in particular, but to me, Franklinton and Hilltop have basically been "bad" for decades. That may be starting to change finally, but it's going to take some time. From everything I have heard, these groups have had big plans for this neighborhood for a LONG time, with very little to show for it. I'm not convinced that anything is different now. Crime is a big issue. I've lived here for 4 years, and in that time I've had my lawnmower stolen, had 2 homes raided by the police across the street, had a shooting on the corner, a large fight break out at my intersection, had an arson fire in the alley behind my house, etc. Generally, it's pretty quiet, but that is just way too much in that short time. There are far too many people who rent the houses and clearly don't give a crap about them. There's trash everywhere with burned and boarded up homes on just about every street. It's a real shame because these houses are generally 75 to 100+ years old, and many of them have a lot of character if anyone would take care of them. My own house has 5 original stained glass windows, original hardwood floors that are diagonal instead of straight, a beautiful mantel with original tiles and carved pillars, a 3rd floor level, etc., but all of that is just not enough if the neighborhood is bad. My property values suck and to put more money into it now would be a waste. I would be happy to live in an up and coming neighborhood that is rough around the edges but has positive momentum. So far, I just haven't seen that here. I don't think things have gotten WORSE, but they sure haven't gotten better.

As a resident of the Hilltop, I can pretty much guarantee that the area will continue to be largely ignored. If Franklinton, which is far closer to Downtown than we are can't see real changes, then I don't hold out much hope for us. There is a lot of potential along the Broad corridor, and I wish the people luck involved in trying to make these plans a reality, but it will be too late for me as I will have already moved out.

I'm actually fairly certain that that lot now has development on it. The last time I was at the restaurant on the right, it was being prepped for construction, and this was last summer/early fall.