jonoh81

To me the amazing thing about Nashville is that the data shows it really isn't actually growing much at all. The most recent estimate released today has it up a paltry 0.42% y-o-y or around 2,800 people - and that's even less impressive considering they have a consolidated city-county government. Columbus was up 1.8% or 15,500, with all of Franklin County up 22,000. So what is it that's driving the national narrative and development boom that says Nashville is growing like crazy? I'm not sure where you saw that statistic. The metro area has grown by about 30,000 each year since 2015. 9,000 hotel rooms have been built in Davidson County since 2010 and 2,000 rooms are under construction as we speak in downtown Nashville. On some weekends, the cheapest hotel room in DT Nashville is over $500. There is a lot of construction in Columbus but what's going on in Nashville is crazy. It's not just the hotels and residential towers downtown, it's all of the tear-downs and infill in the neighborhoods. Columbus grew faster than Nashville... hell it grew faster than Austin last year, despite significantly smaller city limits. It was the 8th fastest-growing city in the country by numerical change last year. Regardless whether total construction is less than Nashville, the city is legitimately becoming a real boomtown. It seems those Southern cities mostly see their growth in the far-flung suburban sprawl rather than in their cores, where the opposite is true in Columbus. Franklin County sees almost 3/4s of the metro growth, and Columbus by itself about 50%. And of that 50%, a little more than 60% of it has occurred close to the core rather than the suburban fringe. I think people underestimate what's going on there. If we're judging an area or city where growth is actually occurring, Sun Belt cities are very weak. Remember in 2010 how Atlanta's city population was found to be significantly lower than estimated? It's because people are largely avoiding the cores in these cities.

Since the 2000 census, the state population has grown by ~305,000. The Columbus metro area alone has grown by well over 500,000 in that same time. I think it was in this thread that I went over the numbers, but Columbus only has a positive domestic migration due to in-migration from the rest of Ohio. Then you have births and foreign migration to boost that a bit, but the relationship with Ohio is clear: Columbus's gain is the rest of the state's loss. That's actually not true anymore. Columbus has received positive domestic migration from outside Ohio for several years now.

Maybe in the rest of the state, but out of the 102 cities, towns and villages in the 10-county Columbus metro, 83 of them posted growth 2016-2017, with another 8 maintaining population. I think that's pretty remarkable for Ohio.

Um... the Scioto Greenway?

It's better than the old site plan, but still kind of disappointing. Still too much surface parking, still no real interaction with the river. Still too much like a suburban office park. Still too short.

It's not a block, it's right next door. That's also why I referred to Houston in a previous post, but where those are built they're in master-planned communities not one that's a century+ old. And this thing looks like the hideous monstrosity on Columbus Commons, that Kaufman also built. Did Kauffman actually design those buildings? I thought that was, ironically, Carter from Atlanta? I'm also curious... let's say this gets built. What will actually change with Victorian Village, or even the homes next door? If anything, it would probably raise their property values, but the detrimental effects would be what? You brought up traffic concerns, but won't this project include parking? And we're talking about maybe a 100 cars for residents? In the bigger picture, would anyone even notice that additional amount? Besides, I think people in these neighborhoods just have to get used to the parking issues, because development is not stopping. If they can't, maybe they need to consider whether the neighborhood is right for them anymore. It's not like there wouldn't be a ton of people lined up to buy their houses or rent their apartments. Sometimes I think the people fighting this all thought... "Hey, let's create the best urban neighborhood in Ohio, but once it gets to the point we like, let's demand no more development!" The old people all sitting around on the porch in the video seem like those people, who have been there a long time, helped make the neighborhood attractive, and now they're upset a lot more people want to live there and still make changes.

A similar 1-year spike occurred in 1991 during that drug epidemic, followed by a much lower year in 1992. Personally, I hated the hype over last year. Even with slightly higher totals than 1991, the murder rate by population was much lower, so last year was significantly safer than the previous total peak. Guess that didn't make for good headlines, though. Nor did the fact that all other violent crimes were actually down last year vs. 2016. The murder total was specific and directly tied to the opioid crisis.

https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2018/04/23/low-inventory-continues-to-push-up-home-prices.html Just keeps going.

Why do you think urban neighborhoods should be built for suburbanites? That is my first question. There are park and rides all over the city, and taxis and ubers. If suburbanites really wanted to come to the Short North, they can, even without endless parking options. And why would you plan infrastructure in the city around an occasional visitor rather than people who actually live and work there? It's just incorrect to think that a popular, dense urban neighborhood can also have abundant, easy and cheap parking. It's just not going to happen, and trying to build with that expectation is only going to make the neighborhood have a bigger problem than the one you're trying to solve. The Short North doesn't need more infrastructure for more cars that will only lead to yet more traffic. It needs people to use every other means- walking, biking, taxis, buses. Not everyone is going to like that, but they can go to Hilliard-Rome Road if they need a free parking lot in front of everywhere they want to go.

Is that small donut shop or whatever it is "contributing"? https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9858744,-83.0050157,3a,75y,169.86h,85.2t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqYjOY1LGMf6HNNU5pAPx0w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 That used to be a very suburbanized, car-centric spot. Its current incarnation is much safer for pedestrians. The section of High which "Goody Boy" is located isn't as "tower" happy as the rest of the Short North outside of the Jackson. You have Skully's across the street, Standard and the new Food Hall as prime examples. The rest of the buildings are max 2-4 stories and as was previously mentioned "contributing" structures. What I would like to see happen is the city adding a 2-4 story parking deck on the flat lot next to Skully's. It is going to be needed for the future and would be a wise investment imo. This stems from the data provided at the parking summit which the parking director stated we are one of the cheapest cities in the nation to park. It could easily be fronted with retail and blend seamlessly into the neighborhood. A parking garage right on High is not going to happen, not unless the ground floor was retail space, and I suspect there would also be a push to build it so that apartments or other floors could be added on top at some point. But a standalone parking garage on High is very unlikely, as it would represent a dead zone, something the neighborhood standards frown upon. This section of High is also going to rapidly change over the next 5 years, I imagine. The Yoga on High building already has redevelopment plans, and the church across the street had a multi-story proposal not long ago (not the church itself, but immediately around it). There is still a lot of underutilized space between 3rd and 7th, including surface lots and single-story buildings. Some of them may be contributing, but I think we'll see proposals that might incorporate the facades, but otherwise new buildings will go into these spots as well. It would be a smart investment, that flat lot is what's contributing to the parking issues and it's not going to get better. You could offer hourly parking options in a garage and currently that is not the plan for the parking plan. Also they could build it with future plans for conversion along with retail frontage. We have no "public" garages outside of the Hub in Short North and IMO it would alleviate a ton of the congestion. Week days it could be used by construction workers and in the evening by patrons. There is virtually no future for the Short North in which parking is going to become any easier than it is right now, not without massive investment in public transit. No doubt the developer that would build it would make money on it, but that's not really the point. You're not going to build the neighborhood out of the parking problem by adding more car-centric infrastructure. It doesn't work. It just promotes more driving. And it still wouldn't be allowed to happen directly on High even if someone was proposing it.

Is that small donut shop or whatever it is "contributing"? https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9858744,-83.0050157,3a,75y,169.86h,85.2t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqYjOY1LGMf6HNNU5pAPx0w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 That used to be a very suburbanized, car-centric spot. Its current incarnation is much safer for pedestrians. The section of High which "Goody Boy" is located isn't as "tower" happy as the rest of the Short North outside of the Jackson. You have Skully's across the street, Standard and the new Food Hall as prime examples. The rest of the buildings are max 2-4 stories and as was previously mentioned "contributing" structures. What I would like to see happen is the city adding a 2-4 story parking deck on the flat lot next to Skully's. It is going to be needed for the future and would be a wise investment imo. This stems from the data provided at the parking summit which the parking director stated we are one of the cheapest cities in the nation to park. It could easily be fronted with retail and blend seamlessly into the neighborhood. A parking garage right on High is not going to happen, not unless the ground floor was retail space, and I suspect there would also be a push to build it so that apartments or other floors could be added on top at some point. But a standalone parking garage on High is very unlikely, as it would represent a dead zone, something the neighborhood standards frown upon. This section of High is also going to rapidly change over the next 5 years, I imagine. The Yoga on High building already has redevelopment plans, and the church across the street had a multi-story proposal not long ago (not the church itself, but immediately around it). There is still a lot of underutilized space between 3rd and 7th, including surface lots and single-story buildings. Some of them may be contributing, but I think we'll see proposals that might incorporate the facades, but otherwise new buildings will go into these spots as well.

I've always thought that Columbus' best economic characteristic was not its status as a capital or having OSU or even a diversified economy, but rather leadership's ability to sell and expand upon its limited assets to maximum effect. It doesn't have the legacy cultural amenities, or the grand-scale development. It doesn't have the name recognition. It doesn't have the global pull. It doesn't have a lot of things. And instead of trying to become every other city, it simply quietly works to make its own fundamentals of economic and social life run as smoothly as possible. Livability isn't flashy, but it is attractive to a lot of people.

Eh, I think that depends. On the local level, where political differences aren't quite so exaggerated, this is much easier to do. On the national stage, I'm not sure if it'll ever be possible again, at least not without vastly different leadership in place on both sides that is willing work for the national good. That seems like mere fantasy. For Columbus, this collaboration works because there is a recognition that if Columbus is doing well as the core city, the suburbs are going to do well too. In other cities, the suburbs and the core city can have a them vs. us, contemptuous relationship, and that ends up hurting everyone the same that it does at the national level.

The fact is that the Midwest has many growing cities, so Columbus is hardly alone there. In fact, here are all the Midwest cities with populations of 100K or more that have seen growth since 2010. Chicago (though it has lost population in recent years, it's still technically ahead of 2010). Columbus Indianapolis Milwaukee Kansas City, MO Omaha Minneapolis Wichita Saint Paul Cincinnati Lincoln Fort Wayne Madison Des Moines Aurora Grand Rapids Overland Park Springfield, MO Kansas City, KS Joliet Naperville Olathe Warren Cedar Rapids That City Up North Fargo Columbia, MO Evansville Independence, MO Lansing Rochester, MN Elgin Green Bay Davenport South Bend Clinton, MI While Columbus is growing fastest, we need to move past the idea that the Midwest doesn't have growth in many areas. The large Midwestern cities that are NOT growing are the exceptions, not the rule. So instead of asking what Columbus is doing right, maybe the question should be directed at the cities losing population as to what they're doing wrong. Some of these cities are old and with small boundaries. Most are not state capitals or have flagship universities. So there are clear differences from Columbus, and yet they still grow.

MORPC and COTA came out with a list of 8 potential "high capacity" transit corridors last year. I haven't heard anything since, but it was mentioned that they could be anything from BRT to rail.

It's hard to do a comparison to a city like Dallas versus Columbus. We're an older town, but unique in that we have infill opportunities and open land still within the city limits unlike cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland and Detroit. Those cities were built out when "white flight" occurred and don't have that open land. They're also historically industrial communities where Columbus really wasn't "known" for anything. Cincinnati had its food processing and livestock trade, which brought spinoff industries. Cleveland and Detroit had heavy industry and shipping. Columbus had large swaths of land and farms until very recently within actual city limits. Getting back to my point is that you've seen the larger developments here that you see in places Plano. Dublin has Bridge Street, Westerville has the Altair area with hotels and office developments, New Albany has their "uptown" which is more like something you would see in the Northern Indy suburbs. If you include that I would say Hilliard, Grove City and Gahanna are all similar in the midwest versions of a Plano/McKinney developments. That is what I think is so unique about central Ohio is that we're growing similar(with the infill development) to several different areas and with Easton, German Village and the Arena District have inspired growth elsewhere. I think people only tend to think of infill as building on vacant lots, but density can be added in a lot of ways. Look at Linden for example. It is a huge area, within Columbus' city limits and is made up of mostly undesirable post-war housing. Entire corridors, like Cleveland, Innis, Hudson, EN Broadway, Cooke, Karl and Weber can see tons of multi-story mixed-use go up, and the neighborhoods themselves can be see massive rebuilding to an even greater density, something we will probably start to see over time. Most urban neighborhoods still have a lot of vacant property left over from Urban Renewal, like OTE, King-Lincoln, the South Side, Franklinton, Hilltop, Weinland Park, etc. The truth is that even if Columbus didn't add a single acre of additional land to its limits, there are near endless opportunities to keep adding more people. It wouldn't be as easy as greenfield development, but much of what's going on now is already not that kind.

It's a pretty big deal when all those downsized projects are added together. Suddenly 2 stories in 10 projects is a 20-story building and potentially hundreds of residential units. If Columbus wants to keep housing prices reasonable, it has to push for more housing everywhere, but especially in the most desirable areas. The problem is that we are stuck with the shorter buildings for decades into the future. That's not thinking long-term.

Yeah, that is a crazy proposal: https://www.columbusunderground.com/proposal-would-demolish-south-high-building-for-drive-thru-restaurant-bw1 What makes it even more crazy is that it has zero chance of happening. Not only does it requires Brewery District Commission approval, but it also goes against every major standard of the city's Urban Commercial Overlay that governs this property. https://www.columbus.gov/planning/commercialoverlays/ Yeah, I hope they reject the proposal with extreme prejudice and then laugh the developer out of the room.

Here were the 2016 estimates of Columbus' suburbs and metro area cities with at least 5,000 people. 1. Newark: 49,134 2. Dublin: 45,568 3. Lancaster: 39,848 4. Grove City: 39,721 5. Westerville: 38,985 6. Delaware: 38,643 7. Reynoldsburg: 37,449 8. Upper Arlington: 34,997 9. Gahanna: 34,956 10. Hilliard: 34,905 11. Marysville: 23,406 12. Pickerington: 20,069 13. Whitehall: 18,736 14. Pataskala: 15,458 15. Worthington: 14,528 16. Circleville: 13,902 17. Bexley: 13,669 18. Powell: 12,810 19. Heath: 10,625 20. New Albany: 10,360 21. London: 10,158 22. Canal Winchester: 7,905 23. Grandview Heights: 7,628 24. Logan: 7,085 25. Granville: 5,771 26. Groveport: 5,552 27. Sunbury: 5,216 Here they were by how much they grew 2015-2016. 1. Hilliard: 1,255 2. Delaware: 615 3. Marysville: 575 4. Grove City: 509 5. Dublin: 473 6. New Albany: 459 7. Westerville: 450 8. Newark: 392 9. Gahanna: 372 10. Grandview Heights: 361 11. Pickerington: 337 12. Reynoldsburg: 258 13. Powell: 174 14. Pataskala: 134 15. Lancaster: 123 16. Sunbury: 114 17. Upper Arlington: 100 18. Heath: 89 19. Canal Winchester: 79 20. Granville: 62 21. Circleville: 56 22. Whitehall: 46 23. Worthington: 39 24. London: 17 25. Bexley: 16 26. Groveport: 13 27. Logan: -19 Based on this, Newark has likely already passed 50,000, the first place in the metro to do so, and Lancaster, Grove City, Delaware and Westerville are either over 40,000 or very close to passing it.

Why would they limit the highest level to such a tiny area of Downtown? Any explanation for that?

What they could've done is built a garage there with ground-level retail. At least that would've activated the street. It's just too much empty space all around.

Agreed. 5th doesn't get much pedestrian activity. Was hoping they were done putting parking lots next to the street in that area. It's not like Waggenbrenner doesn't know how to do urban development right. It's just that something seems to always get lost in translation when developers move to these larger-scale developments. They tend to fall back into more suburban layouts, likely because that's what they're used to doing at that scale.

If anything, they actually changed this to be more suburban than urban. More surface parking, less apartments... the opposite direction they should've gone, but far too common with Columbus development. Honestly not that impressed.

There are 4 really obvious problems with that post. 1. The Brookings numbers ONLY use % growth rate. That's really problematic. A core county of any metro, due to its already much larger population, does not typically have higher growth % rates even if it's adding far more people than suburban counties. For example, Delaware County consistently has higher % growth than Franklin County, but Franklin has added almost 5x more total people this decade alone. Yet if we were to only look at percentage rates like they do, Delaware, a suburban county, would be growing faster. It's nonsense and intentionally misleading. The same manipulated statistics are found with Cox's graph. How many 10 million metros are there in the US? 2. And there are only 9 total above 5 million, making the sample sizes far too small to come to any reliable conclusions about their attractiveness with domestic migration. And it still uses % change only. 2. Wendall Cox and others like him are extremely anti-city, pro-suburb. The numbers are misleading for a reason, because people like him are selling an agenda. 3. Studies like this always fail to address the question of supply and demand. Urban areas are always going to be harder to add more housing to than greenfield areas. That's why there's the perception of faster growth in the suburbs. A developer can put up 1000 single-family homes over 800 acres within a year or so, but most infill development takes longer and covers much smaller individual lots. It's also more expensive to build in urban areas, cutting into profit margins that developers want, meaning urban housing prices tend to be higher, at least in nicer areas. Even if 1 million people wanted to move into an urban core at any given time, there is just no feasible way to accommodate them. So a lot of people go with suburban areas due to price and availability, even if they would prefer a more urban, walkable core area. 4. Which brings me to the final problem- not all suburban areas are created equal. Even in suburban areas, there has been some increased push to provide walkability and urban planning to new development. You can see that in the Bridge Park development in Dublin. That's not traditional suburbia, but it's still technically in a suburb. Simply assuming that an increase in population % growth in suburban counties means that everyone is moving to the same crappy subdivisions is not the safe bet it once was. I know you have a ton of data on your site. Do you data for the last few years regarding not only how many housing units are being built in Franklin County, but where they are being built? As in broken down into census unit or zip code? I would just really like to know where are these housing units for all of these people being built? It seems that in the suburban areas within city limits, up near Polaris, north of Hamilton road, around that Lifestyles community area near New Albany and the similar one in that outside wedge between Hilliard and Dublin, there does not seem to be much going on that is largescale. Just some scattered smaller stuff here and there and that has been the case for several years it seems. I don't see numerous thousand house tracts popping up every year in the greenfields that are left within Columbus City limits. The Census gives estimated total housing units right down to the census block level. However, they are just estimates, and they tend to follow the population estimates, which can be WAY off at that lower area level. For example, the census tract estimates since 2010 have the Short North losing population while parts of Linden growing quickly, which of course is the exact opposite of reality. The population estimates at those levels are simply a somewhat random distribution of the overall city/county estimated growth. To answer your question, from 2010-2016, the supposed estimated change for the entire area inside of I-270 was +2,201 units. For perspective, that's about how many units have been recently built or under construction in just the RiverSouth section of Downtown the last 2-3 years alone, so obviously there's some severe underestimating going on. Meanwhile, the areas outside of 270 are estimated to have grown by 15,015 units. Of course this doesn't match up with city population growth at all. So overall, pretty questionable stuff. We won't really know the true growth until the 2020 census. Also, actual housing construction is still less than half the pace it was before the recession, so that's definitely part of the reason you're not seeing that much going on out in the suburbs.

There are 4 really obvious problems with that post. 1. The Brookings numbers ONLY use % growth rate. That's really problematic. A core county of any metro, due to its already much larger population, does not typically have higher growth % rates even if it's adding far more people than suburban counties. For example, Delaware County consistently has higher % growth than Franklin County, but Franklin has added almost 5x more total people this decade alone. Yet if we were to only look at percentage rates like they do, Delaware, a suburban county, would be growing faster. It's nonsense and intentionally misleading. The same manipulated statistics are found with Cox's graph. How many 10 million metros are there in the US? 2. And there are only 9 total above 5 million, making the sample sizes far too small to come to any reliable conclusions about their attractiveness with domestic migration. And it still uses % change only. 2. Wendall Cox and others like him are extremely anti-city, pro-suburb. The numbers are misleading for a reason, because people like him are selling an agenda. 3. Studies like this always fail to address the question of supply and demand. Urban areas are always going to be harder to add more housing to than greenfield areas. That's why there's the perception of faster growth in the suburbs. A developer can put up 1000 single-family homes over 800 acres within a year or so, but most infill development takes longer and covers much smaller individual lots. It's also more expensive to build in urban areas, cutting into profit margins that developers want, meaning urban housing prices tend to be higher, at least in nicer areas. Even if 1 million people wanted to move into an urban core at any given time, there is just no feasible way to accommodate them. So a lot of people go with suburban areas due to price and availability, even if they would prefer a more urban, walkable core area. 4. Which brings me to the final problem- not all suburban areas are created equal. Even in suburban areas, there has been some increased push to provide walkability and urban planning to new development. You can see that in the Bridge Park development in Dublin. That's not traditional suburbia, but it's still technically in a suburb. Simply assuming that an increase in population % growth in suburban counties means that everyone is moving to the same crappy subdivisions is not the safe bet it once was.