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But you probably wouldn’t realize it by walking around the “campus area”.
As this Dispatch article pointed out on Sunday, the enrollment at Columbus State has grown to over 24,000 students per year. Many of those students attend classes at the school’s largest campus located in the Discovery District area within Downtown Columbus. The article goes on to do a pretty good job at explaining how CSCC is dealing with the growth, and what sort of plans that the school’s leadership has for the future, but what I’d like to know is what the city leadership can do to help this section of Downtown realize its full potential.
Columbus State has expanded their Downtown campus over the last five years and added several new buildings along Cleveland Avenue including the Center for Technology, Center for Workforce Development, and the Discovery Exchange Building.
Despite these additions and improvements, the campus is still very much designed less as a “community” college and more as a “commuter” college. It is a place to drive into, go to class, and drive out of. A quick look at a a campus map reveals how the massive amounts of parking dwarf the the centralized cluster of classroom buildings.
Essentially, the thousands of students that set foot Downtown every day have very few options when it comes to living, working, and playing (to use a cliche).
So what can the City of Columbus do? Perhaps not a lot directly, as the city doesn’t appear to own much land in this area. But taking a cue from the the new Lifestyle Communities development in RiverSouth, perhaps a developer can be incentivized to build a more concentrated cluster of affordable housing options aimed at students and young professionals who attend college in this area. A mixed-use development could provide ground floor retail that is practically non-existent in this part of Downtown. I have to imagine that the largest community college in the state is capable of supporting at least one off-campus coffee shop or one fast casual dining option, let alone several.
The City of Columbus can also incentivize development through streetscaping improvements. Currently, Spring Street serves as a one-way five-lane expressway running between the campus and its southern parking lots. A two-way configuration could help to make this stretch more pedestrian-friendly and help incentivize development on privately-owned property near the corner of Cleveland and Spring where CSCC and CCAD meet.
Of course, all of this is much easier said than done. It’s a topic that has been talked about several times here before, and the solutions are much more complex than the simplistic measure we sometimes discuss. But until some sort of plan is laid out and actions are taken, we’re going to have to continue to sit on one what is arguably the largest untapped resource in the Downtown area and watch as these students mimic their downtown workforce counterparts and continue to commute into the area with a single purpose and spend as little time as possible in the area while here.
I like this article. The city wants to bring life back to downtown but how can we when most of the condos are well over 200,000 and rents start at 1,000. There needs to be options downtown for rent in the 500 dollar range for studios and 600 for 1 bedrooms…I think that seems fare.
i keep hearing all these “changes” to make Columbus look like a real city downtown….but nothing ever happens and it’s maddening. I honestly do hate this lame town – and save your “Move” comments…
I was recently in Milwaukee (yes…Milwaukee) and Marquette University is downtown and it feels like a nice college atmosphere in that particular area and then a few blocks away is the downtown and it’s trendy, and has a lot of character – there is plenty of shopping downtown (not everything has to be in a goddamned mall!!) and plenty of hip bars and restaurants and different shopping areas and parks dotted within the city – yes…I was blown away and was wondering why we can’t adopt some of these traits?? It’s so awful to see cities so far ahead of us. We have no character and no culture and nothing but the “Short North” but come on, that’s one flavor and gets pretty boring night after night. I hate this town. And what Urbanboi said above makes perfect sense.
Don’t get me wrong. There is plenty going on throughout the city, and the Downtown area has improved quite a bit in the past 10 years. This is just one example of a specific opportunity that is being missed.
Ryan, I’m sorry that you’re unhappy with your location, and wish you all the best in Milwaukee. Any city can be as fun as you want to make it, and if you’re going to overlook the good things that Columbus has to offer then I hope you’re not going to also miss out on the good things that Milwaukee has to offer too.
@Urbanboi, Lifestyle Communities “The Annex at RiverSouth” is suppose to offer apartments starting in the $700′s. Not $600, but pretty close.
http://www.lifestylecommunities.com/the-annex-at-river-south/overview
Price estimate from here -
http://columbuslandmarks.org/events/city-hop/tour_stops.php
I think you guys are right.
I only go downtown to got to school.
I could count on both hands how many times I’ve gown downtown just for fun in the past 10 years.
I’m planning on staying here after I graduate(given I can find a good job), and I hope the downtown area will be gussied up
How about some dorms?
Not so much dorms, since it’s a commuter college, but high density, low cost rentals on that downtown east side would be great. $500-600 for a 1 bedroom? There are 1 bedrooms and studios renting for $300-400 on East Town.
Its going to be interesting to see how the new dorms at CCAD make an impact on the area.
I was wondering about that… do most community colleges offer dorms?
Lets get some developers on the move and let them see the market is there for people looking for cheaper rent! It can be done!! If you notice most of the condo projects under construction or already completed have already sold most of what they are going to sell for a while because of the market. Most of the unsold units are way to high..you can see right there that there is a higher demand for cheaper rent..Not everyone can afford 1,000 a month for rent.
@walker. no, there are examples, but it is a rarity. that said, a partnership btwn. CSCC, CCAD and Franklin to create some housing similar to what DePaul, Columbia and Roosevelt did in Chicago might be feasible.
—I was recently in Milwaukee (yes…Milwaukee) and Marquette University is downtown and it feels like a nice college atmosphere in that particular area and then a few blocks away is the downtown and it’s trendy, and has a lot of character – there is plenty of shopping downtown (not everything has to be in a goddamned mall!!) and plenty of hip bars and restaurants and different shopping areas and parks dotted within the city – yes
As a Marquette graduate, I can attest to the wonders of Milwaukee and its excellent almost weekly summer festivals. First some key differences. Marquette is a major university, not a comm. college like Columbus State, thus you have a majority of the 12,000 students living on/near campus in apartments or dorms. The Marquette Golden Eagles play their basketball games in the downtown Bradley Center Arena which is shared with the NBA Milwaukee Bucks. This helps draw the crowds to downtown. The arena is walking distance to campus. Univ Wisconsin-Milwaukee is about 3 miles north of downtown, which adds to the downtown community.
Milwaukee’s Grand Avenue could be called a mall since it had two department store anchors, but it was stung together as a mix of old and new buildings and not a concrete bunker like Columbus City Center. To this day, there remains one original anchor department store. Their original Marshall Fields was converted to condos/apartments and they now have a TJ Maxx.
I agree askmrlee…If you go to downtown Cincinnati it has mroe retail that downtown Columbus..If you dont work downtown during the day would you come here for other than to visit the library or Cosi which I dont really consider downtown.
Like I was suggesting over a year ago:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2296/2494480737_1a4765d9e8.jpg?v=0
I really don’t think it’s that hard, there’s just a lack of will to carry something like this out and a lack of uniformity in the city government’s approach. This is why you have streets like Gay Downtown or High in the Short North which serve as great examples of how maximize the potential on our roads for investment and then you have Morse Rd.
We’ve already seen that developers like it when the city changes the one-ways they want to develop on into two-ways, yet the city continues to boggle the mind as it never occurs to them to do this proactively. If they can change Front to two-way they can change Spring to two-way and it would most certainly be more than worth the investment. At the same time, I shudder at the thought of having South Campus Gateway Part II right Downtown. Hopefully, the CCAD influence would be strong enough to avoid that.
As for cheap rent Downtown, lifeontwowheels is correct. It’s already there, but people just don’t know about it. Town-Franklin, if it were publicized, would be the perfect alternative for more student housing with already inexpensive rental units available. I’d say the vast majority of CSCC students have never considered renting here (a decent number of CCAD students, on the other hand, reside here) because they don’t know this corner of Downtown exists. It’s probably the same reason that a former apartment building on the SE corner of the Topiary Park is not home to a new affordable apartment building, but a lumpy grass lot. The city has done a great job of hiding affordable rentals right Downtown, not to mention a section which should be seeing much more new development around what has already been gentrified.
A few reasons to go Downtown (depending on what you’re looking for and when): Cafe Brioso, El Arepazo, Tip Top, Indian Oven, Elevator, Zettler Hardware, Warehouse Cafe, Slammers, Main Bar, etc. That’s not even including the three theatres Downtown (not my thing, but it is for some).
lifeontwowheels: “Not so much dorms, since it’s a commuter college”
Why does it have to be a commuter school? I thought the point of the post was that it should be less of one:
Walker wrote: “Despite these additions and improvements, the campus is still very much designed less as a “community†college and more as a “commuter†college. It is a place to drive into, go to class, and drive out of. A quick look at a a campus map reveals how the massive amounts of parking dwarf the the centralized cluster of classroom buildings.”
If more of the students lived on or near campus, then they could devote some of that parking lot space to more buildings and people instead of storing cars. Why wait for the city to do something when they could do it themselves? They don’t even have to operate the dorms themselves. Cleveland State teamed up with a developer to renovate a building downtown into student housing.
Great article and total agreement. Should have used the $1.8 million for what was described above rather than giving it to the homeless shelter down the street that just broke ground.
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#16
mstimple Says:
June 17th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Should have used the $1.8 million for what was described above rather than giving it to the homeless shelter down the street that just broke ground.”
?!?! It is a low income/ affordable complex not a shelter….
anyway
I would think dorms or affordable apartments would be a nice option for sum .
could it be that we are overestimating the potential of these areas? Or are developers really missing the boat? We here at CU are pretty hopeful and have great ideas, but like was said above, NOTHING ever happens. Meanwhile young professionals leave in flocks, and I do not blame them. But in all honestly, I really think these ideas above would succeed. It’s too bad we all don’t have more money to make it happen.
Maybe it’s time for a CU downtown real estate investment trust (REIT)?
Seriously though, I don’t think the developers are stupid. If they could make a profit by building “affordable” downtown housing they would (and some are). Walker is trying to explain the difficulty of making a profit on affordable downtown housing here. New construction is expensive. To make money, the units have to be sold for fairly high prices. The problem is that even at a modest price of $200K most people (including myself) would rather have a four-bedroom house with a yard within a few miles of downtown than a two bedroom condo with assesments, even if the condo is in an ultra-cool downtown location.
That’s why I thought the dorm idea was more practical. CSCC already owns the land. They don’t need to make a profit, probably just need to break even – if that. I would guess that dorms are cheaper to build per resident too since they’re cramped, usually lack kitchens, and sometimes lack individual bathrooms. I would also guess that a lot of young students would consider living in a dorm when they may not be ready to live in an apartment on their own. Or perhaps their parents would be more willing to pay for them to live in a dorm than in a downtown apartment?
titleistcm Says: like was said above, NOTHING ever happens.
I question the reputableness of the source of that comment.
If you think that “nothing” has happened in Columbus in the past 10 years, then you’re wearing blinders.