2 hours ago, DTCL11 said:

That really was an epic failure

OH GOOD! WE CAN QUICKLY DRIVE IN AND GO TO OUR EVENT AND LEAVE THE CITY!

18 hours ago, ColDayMan said:

Commission Approves New Scioto Peninsula Building

The Downtown Commission this morning signed off on the latest design of a new mixed-use building at the southwest corner of West Broad and Belle Streets.

The 161-foot-tall building will hold a grocery store on its first floor, a three-story parking garage above that, and will be topped with 10 floors of apartments. One floor of the garage would be dedicated to parking for the grocery store, and would include oversized elevators to accommodate shopping carts.

The approved plans are similar to those presented to the board last fall. The garage will have space for 463 cars and the building will hold a total of 249 residential units. Tweaks to the design include changes to some of the materials used and the look of the parking garage facade – a colorful treatment was discarded in favor of more subtle vertical lines.

More below:

https://columbusunderground.com/commission-approves-new-scioto-peninsula-building-bw1/

If they could at least have two sides not expose the parking garage that would be great...

Phase 2 of The Peninsula moves forward after approval from Downtown Commission

Plans for a new 14-story residential tower with a ground-floor grocery store at The Peninsula were approved Tuesday by the Downtown Commission.

The new concept for phase two is a scaled-down version of a previous proposal, which had included an office building, hotel and a Pins Mechanical Co. location.

The single 307,000-square-foot building now proposed will have 249 apartment units with a ground-floor grocery store occupying 34,000 square feet.

More below:

https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2025/05/21/peninsula-phase-two-residential-tower-approved.html

This was the second rendering of phase 2. While I think it’s ugly along broad, the interior did so much more to activate the ground floor.

It goes to show the Downtown Commission will approve almost anything as long as it has enough parking. I would argue they are one of the worst commissions in the city, and they have some stiff competition. Just zero consistent standards and no pushback whatsoever on horrid design.

5 hours ago, DTCL11 said:

That really was an epic failure

Prime spot for a convention center hotel/parking but that's another topic.

On 5/21/2025 at 5:50 AM, DTCL11 said:

I'm really curious why its so hard to smoothly integrate a grocery story, specifically, in to a mixed used building. Even when they are, they are often either off set from the mixed use part or buffered with a parking deck. That buffer or separation seems to be the rule rather then the exception.

It’s not hard. Trader Joe’s, Harris Teeter, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Walmart in DC can do it. Where there’s political will to actually enforce good design it’s amazing what can be possible.

4 minutes ago, cityscapes said:

It’s not hard. Trader Joe’s, Harris Teeter, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Walmart in DC can do it. Where there’s political will to actually enforce good design it’s amazing what can be possible.

Even the new mixed used Costco development in LA is a great example

That Walmart closed over two years ago.

Also, you don't have to go to DC or Tempe. The campus Target functions well.

7 minutes ago, aderwent said:

That Walmart closed over two years ago.

Also, you don't have to go to DC or Tempe. The campus Target functions well.

I don’t see how the Walmart closing 2 years ago is relevant to having screened parking at the time it was built and occupied the building, other than tenants come and go buildings last for a very long time and it’s important to get it right the first time.

Edited May 22May 22 by cityscapes

1 minute ago, cityscapes said:

I don’t see how the Walmart closing 2 years ago is relevant to having screened parking at the time it was built and occupied the building.

You don't see how the world's largest retailer couldn't even last a decade might point to how difficult it is to survive in such circumstances? Even with magnitudes more density, public transit, and a large government office parking lot across the street Walmart couldn't make it work.

15 minutes ago, aderwent said:

You don't see how the world's largest retailer couldn't even last a decade might point to how difficult it is to survive in such circumstances? Even with magnitudes more density, public transit, and a large government office parking lot across the street Walmart couldn't make it work.

Does DC actually have good transit? Maybe for a mid-sized American city, but that's a very, very low bar. Americans drive because we simply do not prioritize anything else and haven't for 100 years. We just don't value density, walkability, transit, or other typically urban infrastructure in any way compared to much of the rest of the world. Walmart- or any business- not being able to survive in an American city has little to do with parking and everything to do with cultural expectations of the look, funcionality and accessitiblity of cities, especially and almost exclusively to the personal car. Columbus is no exception to that, as city leadership has spent decades doing everything possible to accommodate them. Even the BRT plans are just an avoidance of better transit options, IMO. Better than nothing, but ultimately not good enough and not conducive to the type of urban environment most people on this forum would seemingly want.

Edited May 22May 22 by jonoh81

2 hours ago, aderwent said:

You don't see how the world's largest retailer couldn't even last a decade might point to how difficult it is to survive in such circumstances? Even with magnitudes more density, public transit, and a large government office parking lot across the street Walmart couldn't make it work.

City folk don't like Walmart.

2 hours ago, aderwent said:

You don't see how the world's largest retailer couldn't even last a decade might point to how difficult it is to survive in such circumstances? Even with magnitudes more density, public transit, and a large government office parking lot across the street Walmart couldn't make it work.

It’s due to high theft, online ordering / amazon, low foot traffic during Covid, and high min wages in DC. Parking was not the issue, the neighborhood it’s in doesn’t actually have that much housing around it yet but there’s a ton of high density housing just far enough to not want to walk and carry your groceries home from this location, plus the Trader Joe’s and the Harris Teeter are closer to those people and the Walmart was also by a different Safeway, Giant, and Whole Foods that are doing well. Lots of competition, perhaps their model didn’t work well in DC.

2 hours ago, jonoh81 said:

Does DC actually have good transit?

LOL maybe not compared to Seoul or London but given that the ridership is typically second to NYC despite being much smaller than NYC I’d say it’s very good for American standards, plus the city is walkable and very bike friendly.

10 hours ago, cityscapes said:

LOL maybe not compared to Seoul or London but given that the ridership is typically second to NYC despite being much smaller than NYC I’d say it’s very good for American standards, plus the city is walkable and very bike friendly.

"Second to NYC" is doing some incredibly heavy lifting here. DC transit ridership is about 12% of NYC's, and every other US city is even worse. And if you think it's because the population is much less, that's just not the full picture. Let's take a random European city... say Vienna. It's metro area is about 2.9 million, while Washington's is over 6 million. Vienna's transit ridership is 3.5x that of Washington despite Washington being more than twice as large. And again, as you mentioned, DC is 2nd highest in the US.

Put another way, Vienna has just 650,000 more people in its metro than Columbus, but has more than 38x the transit ridership.

36 minutes ago, jonoh81 said:

"Second to NYC" is doing some incredibly heavy lifting here. DC transit ridership is about 12% of NYC's, and every other US city is even worse. And if you think it's because the population is much less, that's just not the full picture. Let's take a random European city... say Vienna. It's metro area is about 2.9 million, while Washington's is over 6 million. Vienna's transit ridership is 3.5x that of Washington despite Washington being more than twice as large. And again, as you mentioned, DC is 2nd highest in the US.

Put another way, Vienna has just 650,000 more people in its metro than Columbus, but has more than 38x the transit ridership.

Their transit is good but the ridership is not only high because it’s a good transit system it’s good because Vienna is significantly denser than Columbus and DC, was built way before either city, and as a result isn’t car friendly because new and old buildings both don’t have much off street parking if they have any at all. I don’t think that’s a far comparison. Canadian and Australian cities are a more fair comparison to US transit systems given the similar development patterns (we still lag way behind both).

1 minute ago, cityscapes said:

Their transit is good but the ridership is not only high because it’s a good transit system it’s good because Vienna is significantly denser than Columbus and DC, was built way before either city, and as a result isn’t car friendly because new and old buildings both don’t have much off street parking if they have any at all. I don’t think that’s a far comparison. Canadian and Australian cities are a more fair comparison to US transit systems given the similar development patterns (we still lag way behind both).

Yea, comparing Vienna to just about any American city is pretty ridiculous. It was largely built out to the degree it is now when almost every American cities were just being established. The Vienna area had about a million people by the end of the 1850s and was an established cultural and economic hub in Europe for hundreds of years by that point. They were developing plans for a subway system as early as the 1840s.

Some heavy machinery beginning to assemble on the Peninsula

They are in a hurry to build that ugly building.

5 hours ago, CbusG said:

They are in a hurry to build that ugly building.

Not that it's a gem either, but I assume that's for the smaller 7 story building

On 3/16/2025 at 8:43 PM, sono4315 said:

Edited May 30May 30 by NW24HX

On 5/23/2025 at 8:04 AM, cityscapes said:

Their transit is good but the ridership is not only high because it’s a good transit system it’s good because Vienna is significantly denser than Columbus and DC, was built way before either city, and as a result isn’t car friendly because new and old buildings both don’t have much off street parking if they have any at all. I don’t think that’s a far comparison. Canadian and Australian cities are a more fair comparison to US transit systems given the similar development patterns (we still lag way behind both).

These just seem like excuses to me. As we see repeatedly, we're also not willing to build with greater density even in prime locations like the SP. I've gotten the "good enough" routine countless times over the years, so if density was really a concern, half or more of the projects being built around the city wouldn't be getting approved.

Your last comment seems to agree with me. If even similarly-built places have much higher transit usage, it's really not that Vienna was built many years before or its inherent density because of it. In the US, transit and density simply aren't valued, pushed or funded in comparable ways.