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Notes from the Columbus Growth and Density Training with Michael Wilkos of United Way

  1. About the presentation
  2. Slides link
  3. Notes on what was said in the presentation
    1. Linden
    2. Northland, Intel
    3. Near East Side, Black population shifts
    4. Displacement, Gentrification, Choice, and Demographic Shifts
    5. The scope of the housing shortage: worse than San Francisco
    6. The future of Columbus
    7. Question and Answer session
  4. Next Sessions

On February 25, the City of Columbus held a training session for members of its Area Commissions, zoning committee members, and members of the public. I was invited as the Zoning Co-Chair of the North Linden Area Commission. The presentation was a lot of stuff I've heard from YIMBYs, from urbanists, and from the City before, but Michael Wilkos wrapped it up in a nice presentation, putting everything in context and explaining the demographic changes that result from, and drive, our city's housing market.

About the presentation

From the email which was sent out to Area Commissioners announcing the training opportunity:

The Department of Neighborhoods will host an interactive training to discuss our city’s recent record growth and change. This session will be facilitated by Michael Wilkos, Senior Vice President, United Way of Central Ohio.

The training session will be held in person at the Reeb Center, 280 Reeb Avenue on Saturday, February 25th from 10:00 - 11:30 AM. Free parking is available in parking lots adjacent to the Reeb Center or on Reeb Avenue.

The training is open to the community and city staff, is first come, first serve, and limited to 75 participants.

Since 2010, Columbus started on an accelerated growth trajectory that would be the envy of most communities in the Midwest. Between 2010 and 2021, our metropolitan region added 250,000 residents while the rest of Ohio lost 5,500. The last decennial census revealed the City of Columbus grew at the fastest pace in 70 years and numerically, it was the largest increase in people in a 10 year period in our city’s history. This fast paced presentation takes a deep dive into the past 10 years with use of maps, charts, and data to bring the participants to a common understanding of the city we now share. We will look into the history of redlining, highway building, urban renewal and busing to provide a template for how the city continues to evolve and suggest that while history does not repeat itself, it does rhyme.

For more information, please contact David Hooie at 614-645-7343 or via email at dehooie@columbus.gov.

Download the slides for this talk (56.9 MB PDF)

Note that these slides have a lot of pretty pictures, but no speaker notes, and little text on them. If you need speaker notes, or have questions about the content of the presentation, you're best off asking Michael Wilkos directly.

Some of what Wilkos talked about in this presentation can be found in a 2021 article in The Columbus Dispatch.

Notes on what was said in the presentation

Common refrain in this presentation: growing up and not out.

3 things impacting the nonprofits that UWCO works with:

Columbus is growing; the rest of the state is shrinking. Rate of growth in metro region is steady but growth is moving into Franklin County. Neighboring counties demand large houses on large lots. Columbus added 905k in 2010-2021. Columbus is fastest-growing city in country.

Columbus will not let any two suburbs touch. Morse road is 50' wide, and separates New Albany from Gahanna. But Columbus is not expanding much anymore.

Why must we build up? Land costs.

What drives demand for land in urban areas? Convenience and lifestyle. Demographic shifts.

We're living in rural brain drain decades.

Everywhere with schools is getting more New American families, and the old empty-nester White families are moving out. 16k new people per year in Columbus, but only 10k more houses per year.

Drivers of decreases of specific demographics:

The number of New Americans in Franklin County is larger than entire pop of Dayton.

If you're a major employer, who doesn't have a racially inclusive workplace, by 2030 you will be shutting out half of the workforce. Columbus is still segregated. Bexley, German Village, Grandview, Upper Arlington, Clintonville: these are the most-racially-homogeneous parts of the city. Dublin and New Albany are economically homogeneous, but racially diverse. They were built after racial covenants. It matters.

The fastest-growing tracts in county are all within the city of Columbus.

Linden

Linden shows 11/12 tracts growing in the 2020 Census data. The area is growing for first time in 60 years. Population is up 7%, but still losing housing stock. Housing stock is down by 4%. Trends without precedent. Fewer people per unit trend has reversed itself: people are living doubled-up because of cost. Doubling-up is not occurring in the richer neighborhoods, but in the poorer neighborhoods. There is much less vacant housing in Linden than in richer areas.

Vacancy has dropped because of demolitions and renovations. 1100 structure decrease in vacancies: 400 demolitions, but 700 renovations. Real-estate companies do renovations to make profits, yes, but they're also bringing uninhabitable housing back onto the market. Linden is more diverse than it was, but it's also growing. Even the White population has increased.

Northland, Intel

Every Census tract in Northland had growth, all 22 tracts. The area added one whole Bexley in population, but only 484 units of growth to accommodate 13k more people. Occupancy increased without new construction: vacancies are down as a result. Densities up. Morse Road is the #1 retail destination in Franklin County. Most of new business permits there are issued to immigrants.

Linden and Northland are surrounded by jobs. Wilcos calls this "bookending". The South Side doesn't have that. The new Intel plant in New Albany by 2033 may be responsible for 33k new jobs between Intel and its suppliers; Wilcos expects that Intel workers will begin driving out renters in Northland. Construction workers are the first wave of that: construction will drive out the renters. He's heard that the worker shortage in Columbus is such that folks from across the state are being hired at 12h pay for 8h work. He expects workers sharing apartments in Northland Monday-Friday, driving back to other Ohio communities on weekend. Massive housing crunch.

Near East Side, Black population shifts

The Near East Side is experiencing a dramatic racial shift. From Broad to 670 is the heart of Franklin County's Black community, but they're dispersing.

The new version of the historical redlining, racial covenants, urban renewal, busing, and highways: it's the new housing market dynamics.

The Near East side is losing retail because the population has halved in recent decades.

Housing in Columbus is still 1/3 cheaper than in the rest of the country, but people moving here have a lot of cash to buy crappy houses and renovate them to suit their tastes. This is especially true with the tech-company work-from-home shift, as folks earning Silicon Valley or Seattle wages move to Ohio. Sure, their locality pay adjustment decreases, but they're still earning significantly more money than the former residents that they are now outbidding.

Black pop is rising in the suburbs: the suburbs are cheaper, from 2010 onwards. White middle-class is moving out of suburbs, moving into Downtown: Black population is swapping with them. Black pop is epicenter of a great migration that is moving to a neighborhood called "Far West Albany". They're making the same choice that every middle-class family makes: move to New Albany.

Displacement, Gentrification, Choice, and Demographic Shifts

No one really knows the difference between displacement, gentrification, and choice, in terms of what drives people to move. But we know that incomes are dropping relative to inflation, as housing prices rise. Low-income families are increasingly competing against moderate-income people, as moderate-income people lower their standards to achieve affordability, as a result, the low-income families are being driven out.

I-71 is the race demarcation line in Columbus, but that's beginning to change in Oakland Park. Middle-income White families are crossing I-71 because of the cost of acquiring housing in Clintonville, SoHud, Beechwold. Black middle-class moves to areas that aren't new, aren't old, and aren't architecturally interesting, which is where the white middle class moves out.

At the rate that population demographics are changing in Columbus, there will not be a racial minority in Columbus by 2030.

White population is near the King Arts complex. Black households with children moving to north, northeast. White families without kids are moving in in the Near East Side, South of Main, Downtown. This population demographic change is not reflected in school demographics because the new neighbors don't have new kids. Seniors moving out, kids not present. Neighborhoods are responding to housing prices, kicking out people who don't monetarily contribute to the housing market.

Columbus has the largest and most diverse Asian population in the state. Large concentrations in New Albany and Dublin, but note that "Asian" is a Census category which conflates several distinct populations: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Southeast Asian.

The Hispanic population has increased in almost every Census tract in the county, with a couple tracts' exception. I think one of the tracts is in Bexley.

Wilcos pulls up the Kirwin Opportunity Maps: most determining factors of success. From Parsons Avenue to Bexley is a channel of low opportunity. Famed cartoonist Billy Ireland predicted the later developments in the Short North: it's bookended by big money and lots of employers. As people move up from low-income jobs, they move out of low-opportunity housing tracts.

Reynoldsburg and Canal Winchester are increasingly diverse, but they're not keeping up with appreciation in home prices. This is because people say that divere neighborhoods are lower-value. Race is encoded in geography, says Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility, but don't take her word for it: the proposition is reflected in decades of housing policy. Observe redlining, where the desirability of a neighborhood, and therefore the Federal Housing Administration' willingness to insure a mortgage, was calculated based on the proportion of ethnic minorities present in the neighborhood.

The scope of the housing shortage: worse than San Francisco

Columbus has been chronically under-building housing. 2021 showed the most new housing in decades, at 12k units constructed, but that is not enough. We ned to reach 14k. Building 1 housing unit per 3 jobs leads to a huge scarcity of available housing. Where we are constructing new housing, and what sort of housing is being constructed, doesn't align with the demographics that are increasing, in terms of household size and income levels. Why is this? It's zoning, even in areas outside the City of Columbus.

The racial wealth gap centres on housing equity and costs.

There are no naturally-occurring affordable housing units anymore, thanks to demand. Rents are up 56% since 2016 due to scarcity. Eviction filings are up, red-tag writs of restitution up, set-outs flat. Wilcos says that the flat rate of set-outs is because of successful interventions made by housing charities to help people keep their places.

NLAC Commissioner and Zoning Co-chair Michelle Dranichak remarks that the flatness is not from a diversion from set-outs thanks to funding of housing nonprofits, as Wilcos said. Dranichak believes that it's because people move out before eviction proceedings are completed, which means that the displacement and eviction numbers are worse than Wilkos believes.

As an example of how bad it can get: Honolulu has legalized homeless camps because they can't do anything else. Columbus doesn't yet have significant numbers of people driven homeless because of affordability, yet. San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles, and other bigger cities do. When rents go up, their shelter population goes up. Dwell time in shelters increases from 24 to 72 days on average. As rents increase, the cost to re-house families goes up. Franklin County now has a lower housing vacancy rate than San Francisco. We are in a quantifiably worse situation than 2010.

The future of Columbus

The City of Columbus is reinventing itself, and people are pushing back. But we have to take this change, or lose affordability. Columbus and the surrounding areas are anticipated to gain another million people by 2050. High Street is absorbing a lot of the density increase in Columbus now, but we have to do that all over the city if we want to actually accommodate those million people. Every neighborhood has to build more housing, or else the population will be out in the farmlands, commuting by car, making traffic jams worse. By building locally, we can utilize existing sewer and water and power and road infrastructure, so the City will not have to make expensive capital investments.

"If we don't build cities worthy of human affection, we will have cities no one cares about," says Wilcos, and repeats it. Poverty is being driven out of Columbus and that isn't going to be sustainable for the neighboring communities. They don't have the infrastructure to deal with homeless people, don't have the charities to support the shelters, and don't have the people to staff the charities or shelters. Columbus is subsidizing these communities by taking on the duty and responsibility of caring for the region's homeless people. Suburbs around healthy communities will do better than suburbs around a sick city.

Lowering density accelerates gentrification. A scarcity of units means everything gets more expensive for everyone, especially the poor. If we don't increase density, then we will push the poor out of Columbus into the suburbs.

Upcoming positive changes:

Question and Answer session

Clintonville Area Commissioner says that city needs to stop giving communities the option to reject improvements to housing and zoning. Rejecting C2P2 was an option, and that was a mistake.

Wilcos: "A home is where a job goes at night." If you want jobs, you need housing.

Audience Question: how do you build city worthy of affection if there is no human connection?

Answer: Americans live in condensed isolation. We chose not to communicate even when we can, like when we're riding buses. Wilkos emphasizes the need to build social places: walkable neighborhoods, houses with porches, and third places. What makes American streets safe is people. You've got to have porches facing the streets, not garages. And this plays into "asset-based community development": find the people who actually care about the thing, not just people who have opinions. Invite those people to live in your community. Wilkos says that Area Commissions are spending way too much time litigating setbacks and parking and height, when they should be building communities.

Comment: Shout-out to Locke's second treatise of original government: if you don't know your original position, you'll be better at designing a community. Transportation and housing are actively preferred in our communities, and we downplay options that aren't nuclear families with two cars, two families, two kids, a commute. We need to support other options.

Next Sessions

Understanding Growth & Housing Trends in Columbus

Tues., March 21st, 6:30pm @ Bishop Hartley High School Cafeteria

Greater South East Coalition invites everyone to hear: Michael Wilkos (United Way), Erin Prosser Assistant Director Development, Anthony Celebrezze, Director of Building and Zoning Services, City Councilmember Favor, and Tiara Ross, Assistant City Atty., Zone Initiative Cols., City Atty. Zach Klein

All Residents are invited.

Notes from the Columbus Growth and Density Training with Michael Wilkos of United Way - February 25, 2023 - Ben Keith