Downtown with Michael Brown

Tim Fulton 00:09Welcome to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. We are a weekly Columbus-centric podcast focusing on the civics, lifestyle, entertainment, and people of our city. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. This week, we're exploring the evolution of downtown with Michael Brown. He has been a cornerstone in the city's development planning, and worked both in and outside city government to cheer on its growth. Columbus Underground editor Walker Evans and Mike delve into the city's challenges and triumphs, the synergy between projects, the balance between iconic and neighborhood-level public art investments, and the concerted efforts to address systemic issues like homelessness and affordable housing. Through anecdotes and insights, they highlight Columbus's young, creative energy and the dynamic urban policies that continue to drive its growth. You can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Enjoy the interview.

Walker Evans 01:16Sitting down here today with Mike Brown. Mike, thanks for joining us.

Michael Brown 01:22Good afternoon. It's always good to see both of you out and about.

Walker Evans 01:26So Mike, you are the chief of staff for City Council President Shannon Hardin. Known you for a very long time, though. Probably 20-ish years?

Michael Brown 01:35We're pushing, right, 22 at least.

Walker Evans 01:37Yeah. And I guess just to kind of kick things off, I stumbled upon an old interview that we did, and I looked at the date on it, and it was 2010. And it was a lot of fun — we'll link to it in the notes on this — but it's fun to go back and read the conversation we were having 14 years ago. And I'm like, you know what, we should update this. And we've talked since then, of course, obviously. But I guess let's rewind for folks who are unfamiliar with you. Can you give us the short version of your Columbus story, your Columbus history?

Michael Brown 02:10Oh, my. You know, I came here for a job, like so many people, in what I'll call the late 20th century — it was the 1900s then, kids. And I came in for a job, 22, 23 years old, had that kind of vision, like, I'm gonna be here for a couple years and move on. And I was very fortunate early to meet a lot of just interesting characters. And something I didn't expect when I first got here is I just started to fall in love with the town that, to me, just seemed so unfinished but had all this potential. All the right pieces were here. And one of those people was city council president at the time, Mike Coleman. And so job one leads to job two leads to job three, and I ended up working for then-Mayor Coleman for a decade. And through that role I got to work on all the early downtown stuff, the 2002 plan, the 2010 plan. I helped create both of them with the great teams we had, like Kathleen Murphy and Amy Taylor and everyone. And I really got to put my fingers into the clay of helping build a city, and all that engagement that we did, all these charrettes and town hall meetings and just all the input. Even the early days of Columbus Underground — we really had strong dialogue that came at you, at the bar, online, when you're paying your parking meter. And the things we were fighting about then, some of them are not that different than what we're fighting about now. And from there, I went on and worked at Experience Columbus for about eight years, just kind of being a cheerleader for the city, sharing the love, trying to get more national attention — which the older I get, the more I'm like, no, we don't need any more national attention, we're actually doing fine. But that was a great job, and it opened my eyes more to how we really do compete with other cities, sometimes in unexpected ways. But at the end of the day, a city is a home, it's a family, but it's also a major business. And you gotta be out there doing your best, or cities do fade. And it's kind of a thing, like, when you grow up with a Mike Coleman and then Andy Ginther and Shannon Hardin — we were all people who worked together at various levels before they were council presidents and mayors. And you just see that relentless, tenacious ability to fight for their city. I was speaking with Mayor Ginther just the other day, because he's doing a lot of things with the US Conference of Mayors right now. And talk about a competitive bunch of people. But then from Experience Columbus, we did a lot of things like the NHL All-Star Game, and we pitched the DNC to try to get them here, had a blast with all that. But when Shannon Hardin was becoming president of council, we did have a conversation, and he brought me back into the City Hall family, and it's been a really great adventure for the last six years.

Walker Evans 04:56Nice, nice. And I want to back up a little bit too, because I think it's pretty easy to take for granted how much things have changed, specifically with downtown, but Columbus as a whole. So, 1999, 2000, 2001, the population of downtown was a fraction of what it is today.

Michael Brown 05:14You know, 3,000 to 11,000. Yeah.

Walker Evans 05:17One of the major issues was that there wasn't a place to live downtown. And I know that Coleman and a lot of the 2002 downtown plan was about rebuilding that residential population, just to have a base to go from.

Michael Brown 05:29Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. And when you do these big plans, you got to include a little bit of that kitchen-sink mentality — you have to have this and this and this. But really, the two biggest goals out of the 2002 plan — and all the people who worked on it, including some local business leaders who were very powerful at the time, were like, don't even do this, it's too late, look at what's happening in Cleveland and Cincinnati. Downtowns are fading, downtown urban mall spaces are fading, people are moving to the suburbs, it's not worth the incredible investment that might be required to do big things. And fortunately, we also had a committee of the willing who loved downtown, or had great memories of a more active downtown back in the past. I mean, there were 30,000 residents downtown in 1950. So we're still only a third of the way back to that. And when we get to that density, we'll be truly successful. But at the end of the day, the plans come together with all that input, and you have to have a couple of focuses. And Coleman and the folks he was working with really focused in on housing. Great cities are about great neighborhoods, great neighborhoods are about the qualities of the people as a whole, how they all come together to be — you know, the Hilltop and Westgate right next to each other, but very different neighborhoods based on who chooses to live there over generations and time. Downtowns are the same thing. They are about people at the end of the day. And if you don't have human density, none of the other stuff is gonna work. Retail won't work, coffee shops won't work. Parking might be easier, but who cares? So that's why the first downtown plan wasn't about parking. It was about housing, really, at the end of the day. And that's probably the number one accomplishment we got out of it — we fundamentally built confidence that there is a market here, and that market can be successful for the private sector, if they can jump through some of the hoops that make it possible. It's harder to build downtown, right. But we were able to find a path. I think the current trajectory is very strong, and demand is still really strong. When we see interest rates come back down, we'll probably even see another beginning of the pop. We're kind of in a little bit of a gray zone, because this interest rate system right now is very difficult.

Walker Evans 07:36When you mentioned when you first arrived here and kind of got plugged in, one of the things that I've always said that I love most about the city is that it's very easy to get involved. You raise your hand, and before you know it, you'll be on like six committees and all of your free time will be sucked up. It's nice that it's a big city — there's plenty to do, no matter what you're into. But it's still a small city, in that you can get to know people pretty easily, pretty quickly. Did you find that that was the case 20 years ago, and it's still the case now?

Michael Brown 08:09Yeah, absolutely. You're one of the people that I found early, or maybe you found me, I'm not sure how exactly it worked. But you think about it, in this town, if you raise your hand and have an opinion on something, and you're willing to put some time in and make it just a little bit better, people are gonna keep calling you back. But you do have to step up, you have to sign up. And sometimes that means you got to acknowledge that this is gonna take a while, it ain't gonna be easy, and there's gonna be people out there who tell us that we're doing the worst thing ever, and it will destroy their business or their neighborhood. I jokingly keep going back — in my head, the major fight we had, I'm gonna guess it was '08, '09-ish, over parking meters. Fortunately, none of the dire predictions came true. Parking still works. It's not the best in any downtown or Short North, but those new electric meters and all this stuff, and the app — okay, the app is fine, people figured it out somehow. And we still have retail in the Short North, we still have all this other stuff. Now, did the city do some other big things, strategic parking garages in good locations? Yes. But all these things together do support higher density and better retail. Because you don't want to be driving block to block in an urban area to find that next parking space just so you can run and get a cup of coffee.

Walker Evans 09:28Yeah, get out and walk. And I think sometimes we're a little too quick to take feedback from people who — there's, in every city, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — I'm stereotyping, I'm generalizing — there's a contingent of suburbanites who will complain, like, well, I would go downtown if there was free parking and it was exactly where I wanted it, and you check all these boxes, and yes, I will go. Those people have no intention of ever going downtown. They're just complaining on Facebook. So you can't build a city for those people. You have to build an urban environment with urban tools. But once you try and start making every space parking, you tear down all your buildings, and then you have nothing but parking lots.

Michael Brown 10:11And over time, the other thing that people sometimes forget — yeah, we'll change the system, like, maybe every decade, when something like parking. Yes, city policy does matter, but if it's not working, we do change it, we do learn from it. That's one of the things I do love about Columbus, is not just that anybody can step up, but that we can constantly have this conversation. It's like the old idea of a moveable feast — it just keeps continuing on in a circle. And yeah, sometimes you realize we didn't do that right, or we didn't do it fast enough, and we got to alter course a little bit. But at the end of the day, is it getting better every day, and are you still having fun, and are you still engaged? But getting back to your thing, the people in this town are very welcoming. And it's a very young city, so that energy — what's the average age, 32?

Walker Evans 10:58That's below the national average. A couple of years.

Michael Brown 11:01That to me is one of the reasons that we're going to continue to be successful overall, because it's about people. And people are going to have fun, and younger people are fun, and they are looking for that creative outlet. They're looking for that next comedy club or backyard show. They're looking for that cool band. They help drive what I think is a more interesting economy, because the economy is not just money. It's about where people put their eyes and their attention.

Walker Evans 11:24Do you think that there's a downside to having such a young population and such a transient population — you know, there's always new people moving here from somewhere else — that they maybe take for granted some of the progress and change over the past couple of years? Because I'm sure there are people who have moved here within the past few years that think that the Scioto Mile has always looked like the Scioto Mile. And I show them a photo of what it looked like 10 years ago, and they're like, oh, wow, I didn't realize that this asset was something that people had to fight to get done.

Michael Brown 11:51Right. The big brown sludge pile through our downtown, yeah.

Walker Evans 11:55So do we — it's great to always be looking forward, but do you think we're missing something by overlooking some of the achievements, and not taking the time to say, oh, we're actually on the right path on a lot of things?

Michael Brown 12:10I mean, I believe we are on the right path, and I believe part of it is because we've got that young energy. Even someone like Mike Coleman moved here when he was in his 20s. It's part of our DNA as a city at this point. But it brings in a lot of creative people, also with great big ideas from something they saw somewhere else. Now, does it have some handicaps, in that you do have to context-set every now and then, you got to be able to have the patience to learn a little history before you maybe get a big idea done? Yeah. But it's energizing, at the end of the day. Like I said before about economies, energy is a thing. And human energy does drive great cities to do big things. And if you don't have it, you fade. And right now, Columbus is not fading.

Walker Evans 12:53One of the things that I'm most excited about right now — and it's super nerdy and super technical — is how many different plans there are right now. And a lot of times, I think people can look at a plan and say, oh, well, this isn't going to happen, or this will just get put on a shelf. But we've seen a lot of accomplishments through planning initiatives over the past 20 years. And when you start to add up how all these things intertwine, between Rapid 5, the LinkUS zone, and the updated downtown plan, the new Capital Line plan, and you start to think about how these things intersect and interact with each other, the way that these things are going to be built out over the next five to 10 years — that gets me really excited. And I know you're someone who plays a role pretty actively in coordinating with all these different groups.

Michael Brown 13:41There's magic in here with these things — synergy. There's really synergy. And it's not even that they exist in a separate universe. That's something I think that maybe Columbus wasn't good at 20, 30 years ago. You would have one-off projects, and that was the massive-project mentality — we're going to do this, and it's going to be amazing, we're going to build a convention center, they said in 1988, we're going to move COSI, we're going to build. And projects are important. You've got to have icons, just like a Confluence out here at Gay and High, that beautiful art piece — you have to have some iconic public art. But you also have to have public art that's spread through all the neighborhoods. And what we're doing better now is finding balance between the two, and making sure that as a city — and sometimes a county, or the state of Ohio, and the business community — we're investing in both levels, that both things can be true at once. It's kind of a — what's your impossibles? Yes, and how do I get more yeses in here? Jeff Edwards was a part of that last downtown planning process. He's had input in some of these other plans, but he's like, within all these truths and values and themes that we've identified for what we want to be, wouldn't this project be amazing? And he was right. It's really got people talking. And as it gets built, it will make some fundamental changes in the way we operate. For me, I look at it as, it's not how cool it is just of itself, but the park culture change it will help continue in this town, of getting more people out on their feet walking and more people on their bikes riding. Because this is still one of our failings — we're still too car-centric in Columbus. And so anything we can do to make it just more fun and interesting to get out and do the thing on your feet is important. And as you add more people, you want more and more of that. But at the end of it, isn't that why it's fun to walk down Michigan Avenue in Chicago? It's amazing people-watching, you feel that energy. We've got to figure out our versions of those great assets.

Walker Evans 15:39I'm glad you mentioned the public art component, because that's another plan, GCAC's public art plan, which I didn't mention as I was kind of rapid-fire listing them off. Do you think — planning is important, taking that 40,000-foot view and looking at things very holistically — how do you balance that with the controlled chaos of something from the grassroots that kind of bubbles up? Because some of the best art is the stuff that somebody did in the cover of dark overnight, you're like, oh, this spray painting. Not that I'm encouraging graffiti on every surface, but the Banksy type of stuff that just sort of appears.

Michael Brown 16:16You know, I'm not even gonna name names, but we all know some friends who are artists who may leave little artsy gems all over the city. But also, huge shout-out to Hakim, who painted my garage door in my little neighborhood just north of downtown — did a massive space boy mural right on my garage door. It's six foot by 12 foot. It's beautiful. And I love that kind of stuff. I believe that the best of public art is when you can walk around a corner not expecting it, and you come upon something. I love those hidden little nuggets. I was at a carryout the other day, picking up a bottle of wine, and I saw a little tiny piece of art over on a brick wall just around the side. And I love that kind of plein air, but made modern and punk. That's beautiful. You've got to have that. And that's part of the culture of Columbus. But if we're doing our job really well, within this public art planning process, we're also gonna be talking about how we take a Hakim or somebody else and give them the tools and training to do more stuff. Even, you know, look at Amanda Caskey and the scale of the project she's doing now. And then what is next? You start to go national, things start to go international. But these artists here who maybe did start with some street art, or maybe Urban Scrawl in Franklinton, or Independents' Day back in the day — they're still artists, and they're still trying to figure out how to make a living, and they would love to make a living doing their art. There has to be pathways for that. So we're not just buying the Confluence icons that may cost millions or whatever — that's gonna go on the prow someday on the Scioto Mile. One of my biggest frustrations, we still haven't answered that question — we've got a nice little grove of trees on a spot that was made for a massive piece of public art. When's that gonna get fixed over time? But you got to mix that with the pathway, so our local artists have a shot at actually getting good commissions that they can show their skill on. And hopefully they can learn enough from it over time that they can market that to other benefits. And it doesn't matter what it is — I mean, it can be statuary. But just because you start doing some small bronzes doesn't mean you know how to do a 30-foot piece. There's steps that an artist goes through as they grow their craft. And if we do this public art plan well, there'll be pathways within that to help bring folks up, as well as attract some of the big iconic stuff. But at the end of the day, I joke that I want to turn my alley into an alley gallery, and that every one of my neighbors also wants to put a painting on their garage door. Why not? Yeah, we can. It's not that hard.

Walker Evans 18:44Jim Sweeney can do it with music history, you can do it with art in your alley.

Michael Brown 18:48Hear, hear, for what's happened with Walnut Street. But a lot of stuff he does starts at the grassroots. And is that not where you find a lot of the joy too, a lot of the fun? It's your neighbors that you spend a lot of time with. And if you can all kind of join in on that joint love of having visual stimulus in your neighborhood — I love it when little kids walk down my alley, and I come around back, I'm taking out the garbage, something simple, domestic, and there's kids that are just looking at my garage door, like, who did that? And that's fine.

Walker Evans 19:19Have a QR code to scan.

Michael Brown 19:19Go to ADS — that's Art and Design and Stuff — great idea, follow them on Instagram.

Walker Evans 19:19One of the things that I will say that does frustrate me a little bit, as I have conversations in the community with all kinds of different people — people are really quick to look at a problem that our city is facing, and then internalize it as if we're doing something wrong. But if you take a step back and you look at what other cities are facing, a lot of these are America problems. So, like, the cost of housing is going up. And it's like, yeah, and that's everywhere. Gun violence is a problem — that's, unfortunately, everywhere in America. We have challenges with our transportation system, homelessness, our school system. Every big city has these problems. So I guess the question is, do we look for internal solutions, are we trying to figure these out on our own, do we look at our peer cities and see what they're doing? How do we face some of these things that we're really quick to blame upon ourselves, but really, it's larger systemic issues that are the root cause?

Michael Brown 20:23You know, you can have positive stress and negative stress, you can look at information positively or negatively. At the end of the day, it's how you look at it and how you deal with it. One of the benefits of working in City Hall for far too many years — it feels like 50 — is you have a lot of facts on who's doing what and why it is or is not working, and how much money it would take to make it better. And you may have seen that the council team this week worked with the mayor to announce $9 million in new funding for Community Shelter Board. That's really good. That is really gonna help them stabilize all the agencies they work with to deliver homeless services for this year. But we're not solving the root cause of homelessness, which is in part the eviction crisis, and part of the lingering effects of the COVID crisis, and in part the fact that not everyone is sharing in our prosperity. You mentioned earlier how we're a young city, and a lot of people do move on over time — but that means we have a lot more of a rental market, maybe, than some peer cities. And when you start jacking those rents up, it is going to be a pain point that a lot of people feel. So you get all this information in your head about it, and you're also constantly, like, how can we do this a little better? But also, we travel, and we do know homelessness is a problem everywhere. Every major city, especially in the warmer states, is really struggling with this right now. So it's an America problem, and we also think we need to be stacking hands and dealing with it on a national, state, and local level. If everyone just expects the City of Columbus to solve homelessness, well, I'll take that Nobel Prize, but I'm not confident that that is actually the answer. We've really got to put our hearts together as a community and say, this is unacceptable. There's always going to be some people who choose to live on the land — we do need to accept that some homelessness is partially natural, whether it's for mental health or lifestyle choices. But a mother with three kids who just got evicted did not choose to live in that car. That is tragic. And the longer you let that continue, the more likely it will be repeated. So we've got to figure out where we can have the biggest impact on humans, and sometimes that's one family at a time, to start breaking some of these cycles. I do not see an end zone yet, but I know that with our push to increase funding to the Community Shelter Board, we're also in conversations with the Franklin County commissioners, we're in conversations with suburban cities. We think there's a shared responsibility here. The City of Columbus has been the funder of homeless services for a couple of decades now, the key funder. Now, there's federal pass-through dollars, there's a lot of different ways that money comes into the system through the city and county. But we do believe that there's others who are affected by it, or maybe they have pushed it out into Columbus, and we think they all should be playing a role. This is humanitarian, but it's also, at the end of the day, the best for your economy. And so it goes back to our housing crisis, which I could talk about for about an hour. We have a supply problem. And, you know, sometimes people will bring a critique of the city doing this wrong — one of the biggest ones we will ever hear is incentives for development. And maybe 2% of the land in Columbus is incented right now, which to me is not a horrible number. If you're getting 98% productive, everything's working out, that's actually really good for a city. But the fact is, we have such a supply problem. Why are they not pulling those building permits? Because if they can't make the math work, they will not build. And if we don't get building right now, at all price points, we can't solve the problem. Because those who have means will simply buy all the cheaper product and make it more expensive, and in the end, the lower-income families are going to get squeezed no matter what. So anything the city can do to inspire more construction, I believe, is the philosophy of council right now. Let's go for it, let's fight for it. And that means sometimes going up against neighborhood commissions that are just like, this project is a monstrosity, it's a whale, I can't believe you're thinking about doing that in our historic and/or residential neighborhood. And a lot of times, it's like, we don't want those people living near us. That is a very quick way to make city council not really as interested in your case. We need every kind of housing for every kind of people. It needs to be balanced, and it needs to be spread. And we must do more density, period, in this community. We have pancaked out to 224 square miles in the city of Columbus. We have got to go up along these transit corridors that COTA, MORPC, and the city are all working on, to fundamentally change the way we move people. And also, if you are in a very, very residential neighborhood, you should super-support this. Why? Because the density is going to the corridors, that actually helps protect the intact neighborhoods, a lot of areas that maybe aren't appropriate for 10-story buildings. But to argue that you couldn't have a 10-story building on High Street doesn't really resonate.

Walker Evans 25:14Yeah. But you make a really good point about there's a lot of fear — the D word, density, strikes a lot of fear in people. And yet, we — right before we started recording, we were talking about ADUs a little bit. Adding an ADU to a property basically doubles the density, from a single-family house to two. So you've just increased the density of that unit twofold, without building a skyscraper, right? So allowing for duplexes, four-plexes, gentle density — a lot of urban planners are kind of referring to it as that — and just getting people to understand that it doesn't mean that a skyscraper is going to block out the sun next to your house. It could just mean that —

Michael Brown 25:55It's a real argument, though, because I've been growing tomatoes in my urban neighborhood for so many years, and this skyscraper will block out the sun and I won't be able to grow tomatoes anymore. Exactly. True stories. But no, you're right. And that's why we're not only changing the rules on ADUs — because our zoning is very antiquated right now. It's literally a last vestige of the redlining, racist days. That's bad. We must change our zoning to make it simpler to understand, to make it more user-friendly for everybody, and, in the end, to drive down the cost of developing new housing. Whether it's ADUs along alleys, over garages, whether it's higher density things along with the big transportation routes that LinkUS will provide — if we don't do these things, we can never reach our goals, and prices will continue to fly up. And I'm not foolish, and I don't think our councilors are foolish enough to think that we're ever going to be like, yes, this is going to radically drop rents. I've never seen a market where they radically dropped rents. It just doesn't happen. But we can slow down the growth. And it's what Council President Hardin talks about a lot — we are becoming a big city, but we still want to protect that hometown friendliness, the feel that we have, the congeniality that we can have, without just becoming polarized, like some cities get into, where politics become polarized. We've avoided that here so far. But big cities, as they grow into their stature, are going to face big problems. But the caveat is, bring me big solutions. We've got a team right now that is very open-minded. You've got a very progressive city council team, we've got three new members who are hitting the ground running right now, and they are passionate about these topics. They're willing to work with the community. The key is how you approach it, how you bring in your big ideas, and what are you fighting for. But right now, if you're fighting for affordability and housing and housing production and quality housing, you're probably gonna have a pretty open audience.

Walker Evans 27:43I'm glad you mentioned a second ago as well about kind of bringing our suburban partners along for the ride in solving things like homelessness, and gaps in the education systems, and the housing issues. Because the City of Columbus can only do what it can do within its municipal boundaries. A lot of our suburbs want to be workforce centers, have more jobs. But if an entry-level job exists in a suburb, and they're unwilling to build entry-level housing for that, then you're making a transportation problem for the region. You expect people to live in cheap housing in one neighborhood and drive across the city for a job?

Michael Brown 28:22Two hours on a bus, with a minimum-wage job.

Walker Evans 28:27Right. So how do we encourage them, incentivize them, get the right mindset behind carrying water for some of the problems? They can't just be like little islands where problems get pushed out.

Michael Brown 28:39I think you've probably — those who are really watching local governments are probably seeing more bully-pulpit use lately, especially by the mayor. There's a group of Central Ohio mayors and local officials who meet. Mayor Ginther and others have started to force these conversations a little more. But a bully pulpit can only go so far. What are the finances, and what is the market? And, you know, I'm one who might criticize any one of our suburban partners for some long-term decision they've made and held the line on, like it shall always be like this. When I hear communities literally having politicians doing advertisements saying, we must stop Columbus encroaching on us, agenda-style development — I saw that, like, that's really divisive, for one. It's not rational, for two. And it actually won't work for your community for the long term. It won't work. But then I see, like — I'll give kudos where people can give kudos. Dublin for many years was not really a participant in the density conversation. They were maybe one of the hardest places to develop. But with what they've done at Bridge Park, it's truly a new day. And it's super successful, because they're balancing out different kinds of housing densities, and they've created a whole new retail center that is very competitive in this market. And now everyone's trying to emulate them. So it does give me hope that people are listening. But within that, you can't just be like, and every apartment will start at $79. But we do have other partners. I gotta say, Whitehall has really, really started turning. I mean, they have a lot of challenges — every city's got a lot of challenges — but they have really been working very hard to build and attract more quality housing, and it's often at a much more affordable point, tied to some of the development we're seeing going east. And that's why I'm excited to see places like Dublin, Whitehall, Hilliard are all on these new transit routes that LinkUS will support. Because we do have to make sure people can get to the jobs, wherever their job is. You also gotta get to childcare. We're also talking to the schools. The schools, I believe, are not entirely convinced they need to be in the busing game. But if they're not, and you don't have true neighborhood schools, then your city busing system had better be high-class. And so one of the things here is, LinkUS doesn't just build these new routes for BRT and more express service for the long hauls, but also almost a doubling of the service area, the way we serve current routes. And those things have to all work together for density to actually work. Because then it gets to something else we talked about briefly earlier — parking. If a single parking space is going to cost you 30 grand here in the urban core, but you can maybe in the future build a quarter as many of them, because people can get around through other methods and modes, you just radically reduced the financial demands for that project. And at the end of the day, do that enough times, you reduce rents in those areas.

Walker Evans 31:30I think a lot of people don't even realize that we don't have a parking minimum for downtown. I think Columbus is kind of ahead of the game on eliminating that.

Michael Brown 31:38Fortunately, we have so many acres and acres of surface. But over time — I mean, just in the time that we've lived here, the change downtown, starting with Gay Street, and density moving throughout with new housing, is just really beautiful. I think that street should be a model for many streets in the city, as we slow down traffic, as we get those beautiful trees planted. And it shows that when you do develop those areas, people flock to it. Long Street now — I go to Roosevelt Coffee a lot — Long Street is night and day different than it used to be.

Walker Evans 32:13Oh, for sure. Well, I mean, 20 years ago, the Arena District was just getting started. It was still mostly parking lots around the arena.

Michael Brown 32:18Yeah. Dirt lots, gravel. And now it's almost all built out. And what did it take? It took the city and the private sector working together. At the end of the day, the city is really good at building sewer lines, we're pretty good at building roads, sidewalks, we'll get you some nice light posts. But we shouldn't be having to build all the housing and incentivize all the things that we do. If the market gets a little bit better, it takes off on its own. And it's really powerful to see — we put in that parking garage that will pay for itself, usually in 15 to 20 years, and then it's just pure benefit to the city. But we also get, you know, here's 400 cars that aren't needing street spaces. Those partnerships are key. And I think the Arena District is one of the best examples of where it actually worked.

Walker Evans 33:07I know we joked before we started that we don't have any peer cities — call Mr. Zaheer for cities. But I do think it's been interesting to talk with some of the folks behind the Zone In conversations about updating zoning, because other cities are going through eliminating single-family housing and looking at what other cities have done around some of these conversations. One of the concerns that I've heard is that we're trying to not have the exact same issues that places like Austin and Nashville are having. A lot of times when you talk density, people look at, like, New York or San Francisco. But really, like, some of our midsize cities in America that have had explosive job growth — I mean, Nashville is, what is it, the Vegas of the East? It's where every bachelorette party happens, it's a country music club, it's an entertainment destination. The cost of living has just shot through the roof, and we don't want to go down that road. So are there other cities that you've looked at or studied to see either things going well, things we should avoid?

Michael Brown 34:06We do look at more, depending on which study it is. There's 15 to 23 that we really do watch a lot. You've just named two of them, though — because Austin and Nashville are cool and funky, and there's still a lot of authentic, really good stuff in these cities. But they did not have a handle on the housing booms that they had, the job booms, and they did not plan their transportation along with them. We are still early enough — and if you listen to any of President Hardin's LinkUS speeches, because he's talking on this topic all the time, we're still early enough where we can still get a grasp on some of this growth and guide it along dense transit routes. That is what will define the next 20 years. And if we do it wrong, it will really get a lot worse here, and you'll have that horrible congestion and pockets of just absolute unaffordability throughout the city. And eventually, that then leads to another decline, because people — especially creative and artistic people, maybe earlier career — just will not be able to find their place. You know, Franklinton is awesome right now, but Franklinton's already developing fairly fast, and almost every property has been bought up. So what's going to happen now, south on High as you head towards the fort, and some of the new development going on down there? What does South Parsons's future look like? Livingston Avenue — if that becomes a route for LinkUS, which I think it should, or Main. That Livingston-Main corridor could be amazing, and we can really go a lot denser while still protecting a lot of the authentic neighborhood there. If you can find that balance, then that's the big thinking that actually helps you get it done. But Atlanta is one that just, many years ago, sprawled — they pancaked, like, worse than us. And we have to learn from that. San Francisco right now, you can't afford to live there. Everybody got driven out to Oakland over a decade ago, and now even that's becoming unaffordable. That will not work here if we just keep doing what they've done in the past. We need to fundamentally change transportation and density. And that is LinkUS on the ballot in November. We're hoping that people come out and support that. And also, get involved with the zoning conversation. Phase one of zoning is really just about the corridors, the high-traffic, high-density-potential corridors. If we do that well — and I think we will — it will make so many things easier to get done for the long term, and to keep it somewhat affordable. Because then we don't have every penny just to put into transportation and development. We've got to do all the other jobs that the city has. But I think the first hearing is actually this evening, and there's going to be three or four more hearings. They're actually going to create like a show-and-tell space over here on the city of Columbus campus, where people can come in and go through all the presentation materials and stuff and ask questions. We want people to be articulate. They can be critical, but don't just say leave it alone, because everyone knows the variance process is not good. The fact that you can't build a duplex, basically, in urban neighborhoods right now is silly. This is a way that actually our forefathers built great cities. There's a ton of duplexes in Harrison West, but under the modern code, it's almost impossible to get done. And why should you have to get lawyers and architects and do all this other stuff just to get a zoning variance? All that is is basically saying, you can build this despite what the code says. So why don't we clean the code up, so it's more fundamental and balanced and fair for everybody?

Walker Evans 37:33Yeah, it adds a lot of time lag to projects, and a lot of additional costs. And so if we're trying to speed things up, it makes a lot of sense.

Michael Brown 37:41But you also have to do it while still respecting — area commissions have a role. They are the voice of their neighborhood. I do think that's where some of the long-term pain will be. Once these things move, if we can get them all done, what does the new balance look like a year from now? And then we'll go into the neighborhood version of the zoning initiative, which will affect some neighborhoods more than others. But that will probably be even more fraught, because nobody wants to lose the character of their neighborhood, even though some of the stuff is archaic.

Walker Evans 38:09Right. Well, I think we plowed through a lot of topics in a pretty quick amount of time. As always with the Confluence Cast, we'd like to ask the same closing question to each of our guests. What is Columbus doing well, and what is Columbus doing not so well?

Michael Brown 38:24I think we're in a golden age of planning.

Walker Evans 38:29I agree.

Michael Brown 38:31There's a plan for a little bit of everything. We have to remember that we're also a city of doers, and we've got to finish some of the games. Even with the first downtown plan — it's revolutionary, it really was, in 2002. Grandpa Brown here thinking, we only got a couple of big things done, and the biggest one was, one, making people think differently about downtown, and two, a push for housing. Now, as you said, we went from 3,000 to 11,000 residents downtown. Net benefit. Overall, I think everybody argues that downtown's more fun, more interesting. But it's still gonna be a lot better. So the plans have to get done. And out of the second one, with the 2010 plan — my favorite thing, I'm beyond personally just proud of the work we were able to do to fundamentally change our riverfront downtown. 33 acres of new green space and parks, public art installations. It's just beautiful. When you're down there for a festival now, you see people on the river in kayaks, and you see people walking their dogs every day and kids playing. It just lights up my heart. I'm so proud of the work we did there. And again, total public-private partnership — the private sector came in with tens of millions of dollars to help get it done. And in the meantime, we rebuilt a couple of bridges. But what we don't do well is the same part of the same story. When we announced some of those plans, there were people literally going around screaming, why are you spending, whatever it was, $100 million on Uber — a road to nowhere, who's gonna pay for it, why would I want that, no one will ever go to Franklinton? We currently have like a billion dollars in new development in Franklinton. You do have to have faith and put the naysayers in a proper context. But you also have to have doers who are willing to put up with that, and the harassment that comes with it, to just be like, no, we believe this is the right thing to do for our city, but it's also a good business decision. At the end of the day, this will make us more sustainable long-term. And a lot of stuff we've been able to do with an eye towards green. That river was polluted, it was dirty, it was nasty, it did not function as a natural ecosystem. I have seen a beaver downtown now. We have fundamentally changed the life and health of that river. Is it perfect yet? Absolutely not. But from Ohio State's campus all the way down to the Greenlawn Dam, it is a much better experience.

Walker Evans 40:51That is nicer. Cool. Well, thanks so much, Mike, for spending the time today. Always fun to talk to you.

Michael Brown 40:56You have a way to get me going, Walker. Thank you for the time. Thank you, Tim, for all the help, and just let us know if we can be helpful.

Tim Fulton 41:13Thank you for listening to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. Again, you can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Please rate, subscribe, and share this episode of the Confluence Cast with your friends, family, contacts, enemies, your favorite public servant. If you're interested in sponsoring the Confluence Cast, get in touch with us. We can be reached by email at info@theconfluencecast.com. Our theme music was composed by Benji Robinson. Our producer is Phil Cogley. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. Have a great week.