jonoh81

Finally a classy place for Easton.

Actually, the reports I've read have suggested that Columbus' rate of building is poor even compared to its national peers, let alone cities as big as LA. Other cities may not be meeting demand, either, but the situation is particularly bad in Columbus. Your own links support that. All 3 of the cities compared in the Vogt are larger area wise than Columbus, but Columbus grew faster in 2017 compared to Austin or Nashville (and only 32 people slower than Charlotte). In Nashville's case, Columbus has been growing faster pretty much always. If you refer to the greater metro, Austin and Charlotte have been growing faster, but this discussion, at least from my perspective, is related to what's going on in the city itself. This is important given that Columbus' boundaries capture 70% of Franklin County's growth and about 52% of the entire metro's growth. This is higher than any of its national peers, and higher than almost any city in the nation. I know this because I've run the numbers. In any case, it's clear that Columbus has hit a Sun Belt-level growth rate. It should also be noted that the study used the fastest-growing national peers as a comparison, but Columbus is behind even those cities growing much more slowly than it is. Housing has traditionally been one of the safest investments, actually. Perhaps that has changed since the Great Recession, but I disagree that it's historically been a risky investment. And that shouldn't be the case at all in a market that is severely underbuilt. The Vogt report is already outdated in terms of metro population, with it being about 70K+ below official Census estimates for 2017. The many reasons listed is why I have said that it's not just about vacant land. There are much more complicated reasons at play that are holding the area back. No one is advocating mass demolition to rebuild everything. There are plenty of places to add real density now, and plenty of non-historic, single-story buildings that could be easily replaced, even along major corridors. This has mostly to do with outdated zoning. Local developers have been complaining about this for years, and NIMBYs have been given far too much sway with the backing of these poor codes. Columbus has been very slow to update them.

We don't know that's the actual reason, though. Clearly they thought it had enough a return to do it on part of the old landfill.

Okay, but it's a lot different to say they can't rather than just not wanting to spend the money to do so. Also, they spent a bunch of money already remediating the entire site, so I'm not sure that's really the story, either.

This is just not true at all. Nashville, Austin, Charlotte, etc. all have larger city boundaries with far more open land and with lower overall densities. They get towers. Columbus is NOT building to even meet existing demand, let alone building for the future. It would have to build several times more units per year just to meet it, so this idea that it has tons of activity compared to peers is totally false. Beyond this, we know demand is very high. We know that because vacancy rates are very low and prices across the area are rising rapidly. The amount of surface lots Downtown has very little or nothing to do with not getting taller buildings.

That doesn't say that the southern half of the site couldn't take larger. In fact, comparing the old renderings with the new, some of the bigger mixed-use buildings are sitting on spots that were within the 1-story strip center, so clearly not all of this is going on new land. A while back, I thought that the landfill couldn't allow it, but now that doesn't seem to be entirely true.

That wouldn't stop fronting Dublin with the office/retail parts of the development while sitting any restaurant/residential stuff further back.

I don't think it's true that they're unable to build anything major where the planned surface lots are.

Shouldn't access to clean water be a right? I would think that is far more important than an individual farmer's right to pollute. Farmers should be no different than any other industry- adapt or die. All that said, the current political environment is as toxic as Lake Erie is to environmental concerns, so one way or another, this law is going to be struck down.

I've said before that it's a LOT better than the first proposal that was just a big strip center. And there is certainly room to infill those surface lots down the line. I still don't understand why they ignored the main road, though. Maybe it's not the most pretty at the moment, but that will change over time with more development. Overall, it's a poor layout considering. They could've concentrated everything along Dublin Road and left the back of the site by the railroad tracks as surface parking that was filled in over time. This all seems very backwards. I kind of disagree that the Columbus side is worse. More of the site on the Grandview side is left for parking than the Columbus side, I think. Overall, just a very mixed bag layout that doesn't make any sense.

North of Weber, it's just a mix of older single-family homes, strip malls and commercial buildings. Aside from some of the older housing, churches, etc, there is really nothing there worth protecting from updated zoning. And as you say, north of Oakland Park, Cleveland reverts back entirely to commercial and retail in Hilliard-Rome Road style suburban layouts. I'm not really sure why any of that should be left as is. And I'm not making the case that 0' setback is a panacea. It's just one aspect of creating better urban zoning for an actual urban corridor that's been left to rot or chopped up with a multitude of bad development.

I think that's wishful thinking. The NIMBYs are not going to just fade into the night. Increased development pressure there is only going to get them to double their efforts. And as it stands, they have the backing of both the existing zoning and the neighborhood commission that continues to allow them to set the future for the area. And even if updated zoning was proposed, public input would present the exact same problem. The most outspoken people who resist change in any form are often given the most deference, which means that new zoning would still likely end up being watered down to compromise with them. I know this is not a problem unique to Columbus. It happens everywhere. I just don't understand why so many communities allow their futures to be held hostage. It's not like this stuff is even being voted on by the overall community. It's being manipulated by small groups of vocal people who happen to show up at meetings. History has shown that people who are happy with something are much less likely to be directly engaged. Those people, and the people who don't care either way, tend to be the majority rather than those who are angry and vocal. We often don't see that accurate representation during the proposal process, though. This argues that more people should be engaged, but barring that, maybe we should just stop letting angry people decide the future.

Not entirely, but it wasn't that long ago that every block had a lot more surface lots and single-story outlet buildings than it does now. And certainly in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a wasteland of those things, in addition to most of the existing buildings being either abandoned or in poor condition. The parts of Cleveland Avenue that used to be walkable are much like that today. In any case, why would we want a major corridor like Cleveland to continue to be suburbanized when there is a better way? The city keeps allowing this instead of being forward-thinking and getting to work on vastly improving area zoning. The city is not building well behind existing demand for no reason. Among other things, It's because of zoning that continues to either actively promote limited-scale, suburbanized development, or block development altogether.

Cleveland Avenue is a major corridor with the city's only existing BRT-ish line. Any new buildings should have zero setback.

https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2019/03/05/homeport-gets-approval-for-affordable-linden.html Homeport is disappointing the crap out of me lately. With its desire to tear down the Franklinton church and now this... ugh... I wanted to like this project, I really did. It'll be in an area and along a corridor- Cleveland Avenue- that desperately needs development. But this design is just bad. It's a suburban design with the large setback from the street and no mixed-use elements. I know it's affordable housing, but that doesn't mean it has to be a bad design. They can do better than this, and have.

I made a map but have been very lax in updating it recently. The only thing I try to keep updated is the list: http://allcolumbusdata.com/?page_id=4618

For some reason it reminds me of the Ibiza on High sign in the Short North. It was there for years promising something that was never going to happen, slowly decaying over time.

One counter would be just updating zoning codes to allow for larger projects without a bunch of variances. Needing a variance of any kind for a 5 story, mixed-use building anywhere on High is asinine.

Which is honestly the opposite of the way it needs to be. Of course there are legitimate concerns about development sometimes, but a 5-story mixed-use proposal on the High Street corridor was hardly one of them. The NIMBYers should've been laughed out of the meetings. People with ridiculous concerns should not be given so much power over the future of the city.

That may be because Clintonville has a population with one of the oldest average median ages. It's 10-15 years older on average than the rest of the city. Older people are more likely to resist change.

So fully 2/3rds of the site will be nothing but parking.

But almost every quality of life metric is actually worse for all demographics in the South, so if people are moving there for that reason, it's a bad move. Obviously it won't be universal, but Northern cities are much better for the black population overall, despite ongoing economic and locational segregation. Also, I think the whole "reverse Great Migration" is VASTLY overblown. Most Northern cities, especially in the Midwest, continue to see their Black populations rising, Chicago notwithstanding.

The comment about Clintonville not deserving its anti-development reputation is laughable. A prime site like this sits for 9 years with only 2 proposals at a time when Columbus- and High Street- are booming. Sure, whatever you say, Clintonville. Now they get the most mediocre, shortest proposal possible and it's the one that will get built. It's the one urban neighborhood in the city I would actively avoid living in.

Before 1960, everything west of Neil and south of Buttles was a full neighborhood with dense, single family houses and rowhomes all dating back to the late 19th-very early 20th Century. It was all demolished in a single year, and was one of the largest mass demolitions the city ever did. It was part of the "slum clearance" initiative as, back then before 670, Goodale and that part of the city was considered a ghetto. The "urban renewal" people had zero vision, but we still see individual demolitions that use the same poor reasoning. Incidentally, the city had proposed demolishing everything west of High Street all the way to OSU at one time.

All the way back in 2004, a developer had a proposal for a $120 million "market district" for the empty lots north of Vine in the Arena District. They had a letter of intent to build a Whole Foods store there, along with other retail and commercial buildings back to North Market. I can't remember the exact reason it didn't work out, but I think it was because Whole Foods decided there wasn't enough site access or nearby population, especially with the Neil Avenue Giant Eagle, the Short North Kroger and the Brewery District Kroger.