On Development: Of salad greens and sensible growth

Nationwide Realty Investors announced last week that its downtown office building at 280 N. High St. will be converted to 148 upscale residences located on 15 of the building’s 18 floors. It’s the latest example in a trend of 50-year-old skyscraper offices being redeveloped as housing. 

“We’ve developed 2,000 apartments between the Arena District and Grandview Yard, so we sort of know what the market wants to see,” Brian Ellis, COO of Nationwide Realty Investors, told Columbus Underground.

Ellis may well know what the market “wants to see,” but, really, this project focuses on one part of the market wants to see.

Don DeVere also is a downtown housing developer, but his housing – and his market – is very different from Nationwide’s. That’s not to say that he and Ellis are at odds. Actually, their very different initiatives may be complementary. And that’s good.

DeVere, of DeVere LLC, has adopted the views of a speaker he heard at a conference several years ago, who reflected on grocery shopping in decades when buying lettuce meant iceberg lettuce. Now the panoply of greens includes romaine, butterhead, red leaf, mesclun, arugula, and bibb, to name a few.

The variety emerged because “you can’t assume that the only thing on the market is what everybody wants,” DeVere said. Whether the topic is salad greens or housing, we need to ensure access to a whole range of tastes.

“We’ve lost so much great product,” DeVere said, noting that houses with lumber from dense, old-growth forests are razed to make way for new block-long, five-story apartments with wood from pine plantations. “A lot of people really like old buildings. We’ve done a lot of warehouse conversions. We benefit from it because there is demand for it. But it’s a niche kind of work – most developers aren’t interested in that.”

Consider the ongoing Library Park development. Columbus Metropolitan Library had long owned Grant Oaks, a seven-building complex of 130 small one-bedroom and studio apartments immediately north of the main library. Built in the 1940s, these rented in the $600 per month range in 2018. When the library expanded to the east instead of the north, it no longer needed the apartment complex and sold it for $1.26 million to Pizzuti Companies, which planned to raze the affordable housing in favor of new construction and higher rents.

There was considerable pushback over demolition of Grant Oaks. Other developers offered plans to keep the older housing. Ultimately, Pizzuti saved and renovated four of the seven buildings, and the area around the library and Topiary Park has become a dense, urban enclave.  

Likewise, Nationwide brought desirable urban density to Grandview Heights after the suburb lost its biggest employer, the 1 million-square-foot, 125-acre Big Bear grocery warehouse, 20 years ago. Grandview Yard has a laudable mix of building types: mid-rise apartments, condos, modern rowhouse variants, contemporary doubles, and throwback single-family houses on tree-lined streets (blending nicely into old Grandview Heights). All of these are mixed amid offices, hotels, restaurants, and retail in a walkable cluster across Third Avenue from a grocery and other shopping – potentially the most comprehensive, walkable, new mixed-use neighborhood in the state.

Still, a significant majority of central Ohioans don’t live in anything remotely similar to Grandview Yard or Library Park. A significant majority will never be able to afford to live there.

What we need are policies and resources to encourage and support the maintenance and rehabilitation of all types of existing homes in all of the region’s older neighborhoods. We need modern variants of century-old rowhouses, doubles, four-flats, apartment buildings and single-family houses.

Like the lettuce peddlers of yore, many developers and sellers confuse demand for a certain type of housing and a willingness to buy. There are hundreds of thousands of people in central Ohio who prefer older houses and apartments. 

A generation ago, the original plan for developing Jeffrey Park was to extend Italian Village across North Fourth Street – with a street grid, odd lots, neighborhood stores, single-family houses, four-flat apartments, rowhouses, churches, and parks.

A man living in Powell attended a public planning session, frustrated that developers were missing the nuances of the markets. Old meant small lots, urban grids, and houses and apartments in need of updates. New meant wide lots, big houses, attached double garages, cul de sacs, and auto dependency. But nobody would build new houses in a traditional style and traditional neighborhood.

Projects like Grandview Yard are a big step in the right direction. More of the DeVere-style repurposing of older buildings is another.

Some readers of this column may wonder why there are so many references to things that happened 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Many of the challenges we face today are issues we set aside in decades past. It’s about time we started facing them head-on.

Brian Williams is a semi-retired journalist and planner