17thState

I just think the real issue is ORR is a just not a good spot for BRT. I mean geographically it makes sense for the same reason 315 makes sense, but as far transporting people who'd walk to stops it's a no go. It's walkable to practically nothing. It's not even like it has good bones, it's hemmed in by rail road tracks, a river, a highway, a cemetery, a half mile of OSU athletic facilities, and then inner belt suburbs. I could maybe wrap my head around a shuttle between Ohio Health, Future OSU Innovation District, and downtown but what else? I also find it very hard to believe that BRT inspires development the same way that rail transit does.

I'm going to take the contrarian view here and say that I don't really have any issues with this development. It's all about context, I'm super opposed to the drive thru CVS on Neil, because that's along pedestrian sized roads in the middle of a very walkable dense area. Olentangy River Road from Goodale to Kinnear is a nice long slice of suburbia. Starts with an office park, ends with a Target, and has a ton of fast food options and gas stations in between. It's the suburbia that serves everyone who lives in VV and GV. It's also a 5 lane road sandwiched between an elevated highway, and railroad tracks. If you're expecting good urbanism you're delusional. If this was on Neil or 5th Ave, I'd be there with a pitchfork too, but it's not. All those people who live in the new dense apartments want Cane's or Wendy's or need gas and that's fine that's Olentangy River Rd.

This! It's the only reasonable way in and out of the Lowe's. That winding little driveway that the Aldi and NTB connect into is a mess

Meh, it's next to a Lowe's (and not even a nice one), a National Tire and Battery, an abandoned Big Boy, nondescript window less buildings, sandwiched between railroad tracks and a really kind of odd/confusing highway on ramp. In that context a car wash seems like a win.

Thanks for digging this up. This is so interesting to me that there's this heavily polluted site with ground water issues just dozens of feet from the park, a river, and a residential development. It's just hard to believe that something that polluted where it's seeped down into the ground water has also somehow not seeped downhill into the river/park. Based on the description it sounds like something that'd be buried away in an industrial zone surrounded by a huge fence with skull and cross bones signs all around. Let's hope this has already been addressed.

This makes a lot of sense, it definitely has that same stacked boxes feel

I was looking at that realtor.com listing and not to get all sideways, but how does a double lot in the Arena District that's asking $1.25M pay essentially half of what I do in Columbus property taxes?! We really have a broken system, if we taxed this and other property downtown at what it's actually worth we'd see see a lot more development and a lot fewer empty lots. Change the zoning, change the tax law, let's acknowledge we're the fastest growing city in the state and actually prepare for it. Anyway, hope they do something with the lot more interesting than the parking garage proposed in the listing.

I can understand having to bend over for CVS due to their existing lease, but why is the rest of the development still so underwhelming, particularly the other single story out building. This may an unpopular opinion, but I'd rather have a denser residential development than a single story grocery development. Also, speaking as someone who lived in Harrison West from 2015-2018 I don't get the grocery need, there's a Giant Eagle Market District on 3rd, they even finally completed the sidewalks under the railroad bridge. I get closer is always nicer, but any time I wanted to get anything more than a 6 Pack (there was Ziggys for that) I wanted my car, because how many blocks can you walk with a load of groceries? Plus, if you wanted some paper towels or a candy bar there's that CVS we all complained about.

Maybe that Liz Lessner petition finally worked....

Very cool idea. I didn't realize you could add roof top pools, I would figured you'd to have the structure designed for that from the beginning or else it'd be cost prohibitive.

Did they spray paint the dirt black? I thought it might have been mulch, but then there's just like a hard black line between the front yard and back but not a change in texture. Maybe it's just a weird gothic photoshop? Very odd.

I was thinking the same thing, I was even wondering how tall you could build unsupported elevator cores.

Interesting, so I guess this is actually true from an metropolitan statistical area, but just barely. I've always heard the stats from the combined statistical area and Cincy is third. Thanks Wikipedia. Anyway, I think you have to a major tenant to support public dollars for an arena. Even then it's not a guarantee, look at the funding mess that is Nationwide Arena.

Glad to finally see this, but I can't figure out why the site is positioned at that angle? And in the middle? If that reflects 2 fabs, if you copy and paste that 3 more times, I see how all 8 could fit (barely), but seems odd to start in the middle.

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/01/25/convention-center-look-name-sale-boost-revenue/9210927002/ "The Greater Columbus Convention Center will consider changing its name to make money off naming rights. " Yikes, not a fan of this. I'm sure the pandemic has squeezed finances, but this seems like a bad idea. At this point people expect stadiums to have some dumb brand name splashed across it. But the convention center is the intro to the city for a lot of people, I have to imagine that having your introduction at "The Greater Columbus Convention Center" leaves a better impression than the hypothetical "White Castle Convention Center of Columbus Brought to you by Encova Insurance"

A place gets one F5 tornado, 47 years ago, and it's all anybody remembers! X marks the spot, amiright? 😉 But going back to the original question, in the scheme of things, while not zero the risk of a tornado in central Ohio hitting that exact spot has to be of such a minimal risk as to be irrelevant. Like the Yellowstone super volcano could theoretically blanket the entire country in ash, but it's not something I lose sleep over.

I don't know, I thought they might be using a fully loaded figure as well, but in the business first article below they state "Factory positions will average salary of $135,000 per year, plus benefits." so maybe they will be making 6 figures? https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2022/01/21/residential-experts-weigh-in-on-intel-plant.html?ana=RSS&s=article_search

Are they just digging out old foundations at this point? Looks like they're pretty deep for a building that isn't going to have a basement?

No, it's a render. The bottom half of the picture is fairly accurate, but there are still some large lots down by Paul Brown Stadium that are still undeveloped. This is a fairly recent picture, as in it has the Icon music center in it (gray box by PBS), which opened summer 2021

Quote from the Ars article "Though the company will start with two fabs, the massive site gives Intel “optionality,” said Esfarjani, who oversees manufacturing, supply chain, and operations for the company worldwide. There’s room for up to eight fabs, “but we have space to do even more,” he said. If the entire site gets built out, Intel could spend as much as $100 billion on the Ohio site alone. " I interpreted that to say the existing 1000 acres has space for the 8 fabs on their road map plus future expansion. In regards to the ohio regulatory comments from Intel, In one of these articles I read that they referred to the fast tracking of permits, infrastructure improvements, and things like that. I doubt they're getting a free license to pollute. That said, even though these chips get made in clean rooms they still use a number of chemicals and solvents in the manufacturing processes, but I'd expect they'd have that they systems in place to mitigate any environmental impact. Lastly, Intel has said they intend to power this with 100% renewables, I think there'd have to be new power projects to meet that goal. It'll be interesting to see what comes from that aspect of this.

Demolishing any usable building to market an empty lot is bad policy. Way too easy for that lot to become parking. Glad the commission is against the demolition. It's a little misleading for the current owner to include a rendering a possible building that could eventually be built in the site.

So now I'm super curious how my French press is going to kill me. Any more context/details on why this is?

Since we're just speculating, maybe TSMC? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tsmc-profit-beats-estimates-thanks-053548721.html (Bloomberg) -- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. raised its growth projections and unveiled record spending plans for 2022, "TSMC has been running at near-full capacity over the past year and is now investing heavily in new fabs from its home island to Japan and the U.S. TSMC’s 2022 spending target is up at least $10 billion from last year and at least 43% higher than the $25 billion to $28 billion that Intel has set aside this year to regain its once-dominant position in the industry."

They should have moved south if they didn't want to deal with development. North was a bad call. 😁

I think the airport expansion has been in consideration for years, at least pre-covid they had a new terminal on the map purely based on the actual/planned passenger growth CAGR. So I think that's totally separate. I could see us getting a chip fab, geographically we're in a good spot, there's a push to in-source more chip production domestically (I think Washington passed a ton of subsidies to do so) , and climate change wise we're in a pretty good location (i.e. won't be unlivable in 20 years, important when you're investing billions). However, I don't buy 10,000 direct and 100,000 indirect jobs. That quote came from the CEO of Intel who was speaking broadly. Maybe a better example would be the recent Samsung facility in Texas that's 6M sq. ft., $17B investment, and 2,000 jobs. Not a small impact, but also not 100,000. There's actually a decent number of companies that it could be: Intel, Samsung, TSMC, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, etc. The smallest of which has a market cap of $200B+ so there's a few options. This would be an awesome get for Columbus, but I don't expect it to be world changing, as others have said it'd be another feather in our cap, but you don't hear the world fawning over Taylor, Texas because they landed a Samsung fab.