Retrofit city's 'inner-ring' areas, planner says

LOL! suburban sprawl sucks!

The city of Columbus has only itself to blame for the demise of the Brice-Tussing area. Original zoning of the area allowed inadequate access to the over-zoned commercial sites due to poor road layout and a badly designed I-70 interchange. The area will never be able to handle traffic adequately. And city of Columbus planners are doing the same thing to Gender Road. Over-zoned commercial and multi-family housing and badly planned roads have lead to the same mess as Brice-Tussing, just further south this time. Columbus just tries to cram as many businesses and renters into an area to maximize city income tax revenue and does not care about long-term consequences.

Funny a thoughtful article and almost nobody comments on it.....

Now if we could blame Obama (or Bush) we'd see a hundred coments by now!

This is an interesting problem but falls into the trap that surrounds most City and Regional Planning in teh States - how does a governmental agency direct development in a free economy without hacking off one side or the other. A Catch 22

M

I agree w/ Cols Native. Here on the North side, the City granted TIF money to Polaris while Morse Rd/ 161 dies. The city 'robbed Peter to pay Paul' when they gave the Polaris Developers tax incentives. Now they are 'robbing the taxpayer' to fix the up the declining areas that resulted.

Very interesting article that provides a glimmer of hope for the renewal of urban communities. Columbus and a tremendous opportunity to be a leader moving back to the concepts that made some of our declining neighborhoods vital and vibrant decades ago. The idea of a community made up of villages with access to services, shops, and entertainment is a model that went out of vogue in favor of commercial centers surrounded by high density housing. The idea of moving back to urban design that facilitates real neighborhoods is exciting.

Polaris didn't kill off teh Northland area - entirely. Easton pulled alot of teh traffic and businesses to thier new area.

One thing I have learned in teh last 10 years or so is that shopping areas both live and die. Northland died as a result of new shopping areas that had better access to regional traffic. An enclosed mall wouldn't work as a neighborhood shopping destination. The demographics also changed in teh area - not making any comments but when the most news from teh area is a local businessman who was shot in his store, near where I grew up and lived, it is not an attractive destination for people outside the neighborhood to shop.

The Northand area is a testing ground to see if a declining neighborhood can be turned around before it is too far gone. But blaming a single entity for a decline is too simplistic, lots of things drive a neighborhoods health.

M