cbussoccer

I love Lancaster. It has amazing architecture, both with commercial and residential buildings. It has good pre-war housing density. It has many of its own amenities that most suburbs rely on parts of Columbus for. And to top it off, it has terrain that you simply don’t find in the rest of Central Ohio. Adding commuter rail to connect Lancaster to downtown Columbus would be incredible. I think you would see Lancaster really take off. The plan to make 33 into a true limited access highway will definitely help though.

Incredible video! I never appreciated the sheer scale of the project until I saw this video. And welcome to the site! Keep bringing content like this and you’ll be popular around these parts.

Once the new terminal is complete, I don't see how we don't immediately land an international route (outside of Toronto and weekly Cancun flights). It's definitely a priority for the airport and city, and there's too much growth happening here for it to not happen.

No, and we aren't happy about it!

The good news is, all you need is a few semi trucks and you can move most of it out of there, lol.

The only reason we were talking about a grocery store is because @amped91 already posted that CBF article in this thread.

If we get some sort of grocery store out of this, I'd say the whole thing would be worth it. I'm not going to get too caught up about losing a couple unremarkable small old-ish buildings if it means we get a 265' tower which contains a grocery store and commercial space lining both streets. If you put a grocery store in this spot, I think we'll see the other surface lots in the surrounding area start to vanish pretty quickly.

They aren't wiping out the entire block, but I agree. I'm not a fan of the demo plans. I would prefer to see them, at the very least, do something like the AC Hotel on Park Street and preserve the facades while building over top.

That wouldn't surprise me at all.

Yea it would obviously be better to see that surface lot developed, but the owner has to be willing to either sell or develop themselves. A developer would definitely prefer to build on that surface lot as opposed to demo and then build on these lots, but apparently that surface lot is not available.

It is unfortunate for sure. I've always liked that little stretch of buildings. I guess the positive it will be replaced with more commercial space. Maybe they'll get stay in the new spot if they want.

265' tall! That would put it just a few feet shorter than the North Bank Condo tower.

Yea that's what I'm saying. I don't mind the height, it's the lazy design that bothers me. And it's in issue all over the country, not just here in Columbus.

We were really good at tearing our good stuff down in massive quantities back in the 60s and 70s. We've actually become quite good at salvaging our good stuff over the last few decades. From my experience traveling around the country to metro areas that are experiencing a bigger boom than us, the bigger the boom, the more crappy architecture you get. I would definitely love to see us encourage more beautiful architecture though. You can build these 5 over 1s and make them look halfway decent, but nobody is incentivized to so they just take the cheapest way out.

This is not unique to Columbus. Every city in the country is building crap that looks exactly the same.

You can't really pick and choose surface lots to do this though, can you? That seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. I'm guessing the best course of action would be to pass a local tax law that charges an additional tax rate for any standalone surface lot.

Throw a rail line on High Street. That would take care of the width problem and encourage vehicles to use alternate routes (315, 71, Indianola, Summit, 4th, etc.). Put it underground once you get to Old North traveling south through Campus and the Short North due to the width of High Street through those areas. You could maybe bring it back to grade level through downtown, but it would be a tight squeeze. Obviously a pipe dream, but that would make High Street even more incredible than it already is.

Not only is it nice to have a mix of environments but it’s also not possible to line every street with commercial space. It’s not sustainable. You would end up with vacant commercial space all over the place. As has been mentioned, there is a decent amount commercial space in the area, but I think the nature of Long Street makes pedestrian activity pretty much impossible. It desperately needs to changed to a two way rather than urban highway it is right now.

Highly unlikely. Very few homes going up nowadays are built to last. “Affordable” homes definitely aren’t built to last. It’s quite sad. I live in a very simple 160 year old house, but the quality of construction is far better than the average new build today that sells for $500k+.

Can you link to some of the examples you have in mind? I wasn’t aware that developers were actually diving in to such quality architecture, but if that’s the case that’s quite exciting. We’ve been building ugly for so long. I’d love to see us get back to beauty. I completely agree about the importance of human scale architecture. I’m on record many times on this site stating that height (as in 250’+ towers) is relatively unimportant when it comes to creating a quality urban environment.

I would love it too, but there's absolutely no way they would build anything remotely as good as that. We just don't build like that anymore, unfortunately.

Not sure what you mean by that. Could you provide a picture or something? Or are you talking about the 1800s courthouse that was demolished in the mid-1970s?

What's the original?

What was the Hilton Tower? $250m? Seems like $150m could get you a decent size building depending on what kind of special infrastructure you need inside of it.

No.