jonoh81

They'll then just take another Florida lead by trying to punish them in some way.

Republicans have yet to meet an issue they don't want to be on the wrong side of history on. Just terrible, cruel people.

https://allcolumbusdata.com/columbus-crime-statistics/ 2020 data is out fully finally. Columbus saw a relatively modest increase in violent crime during the year, almost entirely due to murders and assaults, but the year remained below almost all of those of decades past. Property crime was universally down, which somewhat defies expectations given the protests and assumptions about all the property crime taking place. 2021 should be interesting with the record murder year. I wonder if, like 2020, it doesn't really translate much to overall crime rates beyond that category.

Considered better by whom, though, and why? Everyone has different wants and needs. I personally would never want to live in places like Texas or Florida, but other people do. Plenty of people enjoy living in Columbus, plenty of people move there. Almost none of my Columbus friends were born there, and half of them are from other countries. My anecdote doesn't prove anything more than yours does, though, that's why we go with the available hard data. Vacancy rates are not rising, housing is in record demand, large companies are moving to the region, the local economy is diverse and strong, and whatever slowdown the pandemic may have caused is ending. When the city finally updates its zoning codes, it should also help to encourage more density throughout the city, which would at least help address increasing demand. You're wrong about Intel. We know at least one other state offered more incentives, so it didn't come down to money alone. There was a specific list of things they needed, and the site they picked met all of them. Given that the investment will likely exceed $100 billion by Intel alone, a $2 billion incentive is a hell of a good deal for the region and state. And it's already paying off in other ways, as not only are other support companies going to build and invest locally for Intel, but there are strong rumors that other tech companies are now looking at either expanding their market presense significantly, or entering the market for the first time with new investments. I still think people are vastly underestimating the local impact this will have on the economy and population.

Yep. For all the people who are supposedly moving away, did their homes and apartments stay empty after they left? Vacancy rates remain pretty low.

No. Not even close. The irony of your statement is that 2 of the places you mention friends moving to are much more expensive than Columbus. I keep hearing how people may be moving because of housing costs, but the majority of places elsewhere in the nation have an even higher cost of living and housing costs have been going up rapidly everywhere. Austin has ridiculous housing costs far higher than Columbus, and it doesn't struggle for growth. The Sun Belt is NOT cheaper in most cases, and most of it has a lower quality of life for the price. In general, the places that are cheaper than Columbus are rural with few overall economic opportunities and few amenities. That will only appeal to so many people. Furthermore, we need to stop using anecdotes as evidence of any trends. Columbus- and Franklin County- just saw their fastest-growing decade of all-time, and yet even during that time, ther were also people who moved away. Columbus and the county are nowhere near peak population, and with all the major companies moving to the region, it'll be fine. As I've said before, it's highly unlikely that the census estimates were even accurate to begin with. The area is growing and will continue to grow long into the future.

Estimates are always retroactively adjusted every subsequent year, and in Ohio, the Census has tried over and over and over again to show the state- and urban areas- with population losses only to have numbers end up higher. I fully expect Franklin and likely Hamilton's supposed losses to be adjusted back to gains over the next couple of estimate cycles. The whole 2020 Census and Covid-era estimates have been a major clusterf***. While the Census has argued that their errors are not statistically significant for recent numbers, it's hard to imagine that being true with everything that occurred politically, socially and societally the last 2 years.

"Something really special" is like a death knell to anything actually special. Developers who say stuff like that tend to almost never deliver. CH's portfolio is certainly not special in any way. Something like 800 N. High will be the absolute maximum I can see them doing.

My question is why none of these business owners just do a simple search on how bike lanes affect local businesses. If they did, they'd see that bike lanes are neutral factors at worst, but often end up helping businesses by bringing in more walkins/bikers. Is it that they just think Indianola is somehow a vastly different situation than in all other roadway configurations across the planet where bike lanes don't hurt businesses? Why is it consistently so hard to convince people of basic facts?

So they can't cut down trees during specific months due to bats using them for breeding... but no comment on the destruction of their breeding habitat... the trees?

More to the story with Rhodes... While I haven't found anything yet specifically about it being proposed at a greater height, a Dispatch article from 1969 has an early proposal that was actually much smaller, at 20-24 stories, so the final built version was not the only proposal it ever had. Perhaps at one time there was a taller proposal before the height was reduced to the final version, which is where the idea came from, but that version never made it into media sources? One thing to note is that earlier articles around 1970-1971 list 42 stories, but later ones list 41 stories, so it may have actually lost a floor at some point, again indicating multiple versions. The tower seemed to be pretty controversial overall, and there was massive infighting about space. There was near universal agreement that there wasn't enough room for everyone who wanted to move into it. That may have also fed into the idea that it was supposed to be taller. Regardless, the idea that it was supposed to be taller has been around many, many years, and not just something from Wiki. One final possibility is that a larger tower, closer to 50 stories, was proposed at the corner of High and Broad in the mid to late 1960s right around the time the original Rhodes proposal came about, and I wonder if some people confused the two over time.

I pretty much never believe when a developer says an old building can't be saved. It's not a question of can. When they say something is too far gone, it's almost always more along the lines of "It's beyond our monetary interest to save it."

Franklin did not lose population last year and the supposed out migration from those major urban centers was likely vastly overblown if it truly happened at all, just as it was all of the past decade. I'll go ahead and predict pretty large adjustments when the 2022 estimate comes out that wipes out that Franklin County loss, and possibly Hamilton's too. You don't go from the fastest-growing decade ever numerically immediately to losses the next. It would take some kind of disaster even bigger than Covid locally- such as a Katrina-New Orleans kind of thing. It's just bad data at this point.

But it's their fault nothing's there now. I'd be surprised if 5 years down the road, something's been built, to be honest.

Yes, it was supposed to be 150ft taller.

Brubaker/Brandt, Inc. Dalton, Dalton, Little, and Newport Neither are around anymore, but Brubaker was the architect for Motorists Mutual, the Continental Center, the Bricker federal building, One Nationwide and the Police HQ in Columbus, besides Rhodes. They all have... shall we say, a certain aesthetic. For Dalton, Rhodes was the only Columbus building they were involved in, but they did like half a dozen in Cleveland. The early 1970s wasn't a great time for architecture.

Couldn't agree more with what you're saying. Yes, the site is in a weird location, but there is connectivity in terms of being close to Downtown and what will be a vastly improved Franklinton over the next decade or so. I used to work very near this location in the strip center just to the west at Central Point and there's a ton of potential to remake that area. The massive car lots just to the west of the Cooper site could one day be redeveloped into a pretty dense mixed-use project, for example. The Arshot proposal is "better than what's there", but that's an extremely low bar and we shouldn't be going with only something to fill in the land, but something that can serve to move the entire neighborhood forward into the future. There's also the question whether the company can realistically get anything built when it's struggled to do so for years far beyond this one site.

The unregulated sprawl is going to be enormous.

Construction is going to eventually pollute the Big Darby without very strict guidelines. If it were up to developers, they would build sprawl right up to the river's edge.

But that is what's happening. The majority of these units end up in already low-income neighborhoods, so concentrating them there is certainly true. Look at Franklinton as an example. Outside of the hot areas east of 315, it's getting almost exclusively low-income and senior housing projects. Linden is largely the same thing with Homeport and the City building specifically for that target demographic. Lower income groups perform best and have the greatest chance at upward mobility being in mixed-income neighborhoods. More market rate for low income neighborhoods and more affordable units for high income neighborhoods should be the overall goal to produce the best outcomes, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Good question, but I would've thought a prefab like this would be easier to build, not more limiting. Maybe I'm wrong, though. Would it really cost significantly more to just change the overall layout to a grid?

Doing both of what? Whether a handful of token projects go in higher income neighborhoods doesn't change the reality that the vast majority of affordable units do not, if for no other reason than there is way more organized opposition to them in those areas. Ginther can call on Worthington to build more affordable, but how likely is that versus Cleveland Avenue? Land prices only explain so much.

That assumes that projects would be entirely affordable, but there are plenty of ways to incorporate affordable into mixed-income projects in more expensive neighborhoods. One way is to increase the overall density of the project so that developers can recoup some of the cost of affordable components with more market-rate units overall. It should also be basically a requirement that some level of affordable housing goes into every project regardless of location, and any tax incentives should be specifically tied to ensuring that happens. But that goes back into the problem with zoning and NIMBYism.

Exactly. It's a huge waste of space and opportunity. And anyone who has lived in this style of apartment complex knows that it creates zero sense of community and no one actually uses the "community center" buildings stuck all alone in the middle of the complex.

The only problem I have with this is how leaders like Ginther can't move past the idea of concentrating "affordable" housing in areas that are already low income. Why does it have to be in Linden and Hilltop and Eastland? It needs to be spread evenly across the city- including in high-income areas- to create mixed-income neighborhoods that have proven to be vastly more beneficial to all income levels than simply putting more low income people in already struggling neighborhoods. Put those projects in Clintonville, Short North, German Village, the NW side, etc. too, and ensure that upcoming zoning code changes don't allow NIMBYism to get them canceled.