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New housing for homeless
Charity plans second Downtown building
Friday, May 4, 2007 3:38 AM
By Debbie Gebolys
The nonprofit developer that built the Commons at Grant to house the formerly homeless is planning a second Downtown project.
National Church Residences weathered some controversy in 2002 when it opened the Commons at Grant at Grant Avenue and Fulton Street on the southern edge of Downtown. Now, the developer wants to build a similar facility on the northern edge.
The Commons at Buckingham would be a $14 million complex at 328 Buckingham St., northwest of Columbus State Community College between I-670 and Abbott Labs.
Like the Commons at Grant, it would include 100 efficiency apartments, half for formerly homeless people and half for low-income people.
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Charity plans second Downtown homeless building
By: Walker
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Tch. Right in that area I’ve been saying has been underserved and could have been a good target for a developer … but I had been thinking something a little higher-end than this. I doubt this is the most economically efficient use of that site.
The city shouldn’t let this happen unless the Commons have proven successful and could be replicated in this location. This looks like it’s too high of a concentration of low-income people and it’s sad to say, but you can see what happens when you lump all the poor people together, it seems they either just don’t know how to have a stable neighborhood on their own or they just give up. I’d rather the area was more built up before sticking a bunch of low-income people there all by themselves. At least on the south side of downtown there’s more of a balance.
I’m torn. I don’t like entitlement programs and don’t like tampering with the free market for housing, but this land isn’t all that great anyway. It’ll bring more people downtown, and I’m all for diversity. Now if someone proposes handout residences for people at the corner of High and Gay, or in RiverSouth then I’ll be up in arms.
I’m really pretty torn on this one.
Part of me wants to cheer on this effort. To make a truly diverse downtown, you need residencies for all income levels. It seems like the Commons at Grant has been worked into the neighborhood pretty well. It’s just a few blocks away from the Terrances at Grant, and it’s not like high-end developers are looking to build right next to the highway anyway. Might as well make that slightly less desirable location available for the people who aren’t going to complain about the noise because it’s better than living on the streets. The article says they do background checks on the applicants who live here, so it’s not the same sort of crew you’ll find living at the Y downtown. I’ve walked up and down Grant pretty frequently, and for a long time I didn’t even know this building was a low-income project. It looks nice and I never saw shady people milling around it or anything like that…
:)
Part of me wants to shed a tear because I’d rather see affordable student housing going into this spot and furthering the progress of the CCAD/CSCC downtown campus neighborhood. There is still quite a bit of unused land in that area left though, and I don’t think a single 100-unit low-income building is really going to hurt the area that much. I just wish we were seeing announcements for housing based for students instead.
:cry:
Part of me wants to just make a joke about how this place should fit the definition of affordable downtown housing.
:)
Is this really that bad of land?
If I were a Columbus State student, or someone in the local community, who wanted to build a real neighborhood around CSCC, I’d be up in arms about this. It’s not that far from the college itself, and right in the thick of parcels that would be prime redevelopment targets for bringing better residential and commercial options to that area.
The only big problem I can see with it is that it sits like 500 feet from I-670. I don’t know if a high-end residential building would work too well there because of the noise, but I doubt students would complain too much about it.
I guess it really depends on what you mean by proven successful, but in the article:
A 400 person waiting list sounds like a pretty high demand. Whether that means it’s successful or not is a whole different issue.
I’m honestly pretty shocked at the negative reactions here (in general, not Columbusite specifically). Isn’t getting homeless people off the street and providing low-income housing options a good thing?
Or is it more of a NIMBY reaction? Something that would be better received if it was out on the Eastside somewhere, or in one of the burbs? If so, hey – NIMBY is an honest response, and you KNOW people would be fighting tooth and nail if they were trying to put this into Hilliard or Worthington or New Albany.
I don’t know. look how close jeffrey place is on the other side of 670, those aren’t cheap and they are really close to 670. I would venture they would be the ones complaining about this.
I’m for it.
As I said, I have mixed reactions, but the negative side of mine was geared more towards reading a news announcement about residential development next to CSCC only to discover it’s homeless and low-income housing. It is a great thing to provide these people with a place to live, but I was hoping for news on student housing there first.
I think we do need a mix of development to make things diverse downtown, and the Commons at Grant is hardly an eyesore or a blight for that area. I applaud the effort to build more of these types of residences, but I’m waiting for bigger news on neighborhood development in that area as well. This building could be a nice addition to a neighborhood for diversity’s sake, but on it’s own it will do nothing for the empty neighborhood. We need about 2000 units in that area geared for student/yp living and the retail and commodities will start to fill in. I can’t see Starbucks opening a store next to this Commons building, can you?
True, but Jeffrey Place has laid out their master plan to place multi-story parking garages along the railroad and the highway to block some of the noise and then add trees and foliage to dampen more of it. I don’t think this single Commons building will have anything like that. Good luck to anyone who wants to sleep with their windows open there.
No, definitely not. And unfortunately, the reality is that a building like this will do more HARM to getting other folks to develop in that neighborhood, just because of common perception. But as of right now, it’s going into unused land, so that’s a positive. And (IMO at least) the initiative itself is a positive – and it has to go somewhere. Hopefully student housing and things along those lines will go in and spur on even more development in the area, that WILL keep things improving.
I don’t think it will be much of a problem. Have you seen the Commons at Grant? I walked by it probably 100 times before i ever found out what it was. The only photo I can find is this conceptual art, but the building looks pretty nice. I had just been assuming it was a regular condo development.
It’s less than a third of a mile (a few blocks) from the Terraces at Grant, so it didn’t stop that from getting built.
As I mentioned, it has a totally different vibe than the YMCA downtown, where you always see people milling around outside. And that place houses quite a few RSOs, which these Commons projects do not.
Here’s a photo from their website
http://www.take2visual.com/ncr/housing.php?id=218
I certainly agree that this is nicely interwoven into the surrounding area of the city. However, this came into an area that already had development and as mentioned here earlier I don’t know that this would be very conducive to starting a residential neighborhood. I’d rather see low-income housing dispersed among several developments in the area instead of entire buildings for this. Hell, if the Gold Coast could integrate Cabrini Green residents into pricy residential developments here there’s no reason that couldn’t be done here, especially since we have nothing close to that kind of very high-end urban neighborhood. It actually should be much easier here, I think we should look to the New Village Place development in IV as a local example.
That’s a good point.
oh i didn’t know you started a thread.
yes we got funded for Buckingham today. We have two similar projects, one is Commons at Grant, which you see above, the other is Commons at Chantry, which is near JC Penny’s outlet store.
I’ve been to Chantry and it is really nice, and I’ve met a few residents.
It’s a great project.
sorry this pisses me off. these are supportive housing buildings. it means we have mixed income units and supportive services on site. they are very high end, affordable and the residents are very highly screened. these are people that need and more importantly want help.
/endrant
according to the article the land is a “vacant industrial site formerly owned by electric company that has fallen into receivership”
**************
I have been saying this for a long time, if you want to gentrify downtown and move only middle class and up people in you will fail miserably, the people that benefit the most from density and proximity are those that don’t have a lot of money. The commons at grant has a waiting list 400 people deep according to that article, the apts and condos available downtown right now are not moving/selling very well right now are they? Carlyle’s watch found that out the hard way, so have some others.
Office buildings downtown have the same problem, the office space has lease rates that are astronomical and the vacancy rate shows this. The LeVeque, its not as bad as it was but it is still up around 40-50% VACANT. Same with most of the other high rent buildings, the sensible owners are at almost 100% occupancy, one of those buildings interestingly enough now belongs to riversouth and NAI Ohio Equities and is slated for demolition. It will not be replaced with reasonable priced office space right on high street even though it has been there almost 100 years and is a model of how to keep a building occupied. These developers and people involved with developing downtown, many of which I know, some are my clients keep setting their sights on the big $$ and it just is not there, the “build it and they will come” mantra is not working at the high end and what many consider the middle end. On top of that, our economy is about to really wallop the city, bond money is getting damn expensive, state and county govt are finding themselves crunched–these are the principal employers downtown.
It takes an enormous amount of plain old poor folk living around to work and support the upper strata, just the way things work, the upper strata can’t be an island to itself, this has been proven again and again and again. City center mall is dead, brought it on itself. The high rent office space sits 1/2 empty, been that way for years, this is not rocket science.
I’m sorry I don’t understand the point of your post. are you saying this won’t be filled and is pointless to build?
I know it’s harsh, but at fist was really against this, but if they build something like the Commons on Grant I guess I’m fine with it. Really I had no idea that place was for low income/formerly homeless people. I actually thought about looking to see what rent was there at one point.
no I saying build it, its about time someone built some more reasonably priced housing downtown, the demand is there, the demand for the upper range stuff IS NOT, should be quite obvious by now
lets look at some salaries shall we:
entry level govt work for the county=$10/hr
entry level govt work for the state=$12.50/hr and right now there is a wage increase freeze in effect, been that way for quite some time
work at nationwide arena, average pay is $7/hr part time, no benefits
convention center, same deal as the arena, its run by the same company,SMG based in philly
fast food, minimum wage or slightly better
secretarial work, 10-12$/hr
paralegals, $14-18/hr normally
attorneys, $200-$300 per billable hour, but for every one of them there’s like 5 low wage employees
the biggest employer downtown is the state of ohio followed by the county, public servants do not make great money, I knw quite a few that are forced to live far away and use the bus, even Magistrates :)
all across the board downtown the average pay stinks, these people are forced to commute to the suburbs and exurbs to live, why? cause housing downtown where they work is priced out of their reach and the schools suck, so does the shopping—take a look at what the remaining surviving stores are at city center mall, they are food places, why do you think that is? the high end shops had no customers, not enough to stay in business
demographically the poor outnumber the rich by a huge margin, if downtown wants to thrive its housing and business will reflect this as well—you take expensive property, build vertically creating density and chop it up into affordable housing and the owner/developer makes $$, OR you attempt the current model which is failing miserably, build mid to high end stuff and watch it sit half full losing $$ while everyone cries that downtown isn’t nice enough
historically owning property is a long long term very slow moving investment, we have buildings downtown that have stood for many decades that haven’t even kept pace with inflation, the get rich quick thing via development where people think they can build and recoup their investment in just a few years is not gonna fly long term, never does
The Commons at Grant is a very well maintained, nice looking, quiet, apartment building. As Walker pointed out, in many shelters/ transitional housing units you will see people hanging out on the street at all hours of the day and night – but not so here. You’d never guess it was anything other than another downtown condo development. I’d have to expect this new project will be the same.