As Lexington considers sprucing up its downtown streetscape, the city’s consultant is encouraging leaders to look past standard beautification. Kinzelman Kline Gossman (KKG) is advising Lexington to look north, 200 miles north in fact, to Ohio’s capital city for ideas on how to make streets and sidewalks both pretty and functional for downtown businesses and strolling residents.
“The new construction now is on the sidewalk, oriented to the sidewalk; it makes cars and parking secondary to pedestrian travel,” said Cleve Ricksecker, executive director of Columbus’ Capital Crossroads special improvement district (SID) and longtime urban-life activist.
The downtown area of Columbus hosts two separate SIDs, which are joint operations of area property owners that enforce a special pseudo-tax on themselves to fund the SID’s operations.
According to Ricksecker, Capital Crossroads and other SIDs perform duties similar to services provided at shopping centers, office parks and apartment communities.
“Safety services, common area maintenance, ... marketing and promotions are our three basic services,” he said, though under Ohio’s SID legislation, the duties can be anything the property owners desire aside from replacing or replicating governmental services — including floating bonds. “SIDs will, a lot of times, advocate for changes in public policy that are more downtown friendly or are more friendly for older commercial strips that they serve.”
In recent years, downtown Columbus has seen a boom in downtown development, mostly mixed use that has attracted retail commerce and residents to the city’s inner core.
“A decade ago, no one was living downtown; five years ago, nobody was living downtown. Now there are a few thousand units that have been developed,” said Kyle Katz, a downtown developer and member of the city’s Downtown Commission, which has created a one-stop shop for anyone interested in developing downtown by combining the services of the Board of Zoning Adjustment, Planning Commission and Graphics Commission. The answer, it turns out for Columbus, is less control and fewer hoops for potential developers to jump through.
“We’ve deregulated development downtown: no parking requirements, virtually no zoning … In theory, you could put a gas station at Broad and High (the city’s main downtown intersection) with 20 stories of housing above it and a nice store front. But in exchange for that, there are certain aesthetic requirements for the deregulation that (are) in place downtown,” Ricksecker said from his office near that intersection on the city’s Capitol Square.
Kenneth Cookson, downtown commissioner and founder of the city’s other SID, the Discovery District on the eastern edge of downtown, said a laid-back approach and cooperation with builders has lead to the revitalization of Columbus’s downtown.
“You can’t have central planning in everything; you’ve got to leave room for the market. In every essential area, you’ve got to have a lot of room for the little guys to come in and come up with some really neat things,” he said. “The Downtown Commission has raised the level of architectural design in the downtown. We get simply better designs.”
As a part of the process, the commission works with developers to approve developments instead of rejecting them. Katz said he only recalls twice saying no to a downtown project.
“We have a typical standard on destruction,” Cookson said. “You have to replace it with something better.”
Katz said he and other local developers saw the need for a new way after eight skyscrapers ranging from 350 to 530 feet went up between 1983 and the end of the decade.
“That was all lacking a central coordinator, and we fell asleep at the wheel, frankly. We were doing so well that we didn’t think we had to plan. We let things happen that probably shouldn’t have happened… We had no architectural standards. We were allowing demolition of buildings that should not have been demolished. We had no good urban planning taking place; vast amounts of land became open seas of parking, and a group of us came together and formed a commission to look at creating a downtown commission,” Katz said.
The buildings were well intentioned and had some good ideas, including first-floor retail with sidewalk access to the 37-floor Huntington Center, and two theaters included in the design of the 32-story Vern Riffe State Office Tower that was completed in 1988 to house the state’s legislative offices.
“You would never know a theater is in there,” Ricksecker said. “All the talk (now) is how do you retrofit that so the theater has some relation to the sidewalk?… That project would have benefited hugely from the downtown commission,” which would have addressed those issues before construction began.
Ricksecker feels there has been a change in approach from the end of the ’80s, which also saw the opening of City Center, a three-floor regional mall larger than Fayette Mall in the center of downtown.
“The biggest change in downtown, which has been good, is the influx of small independent investors,” Ricksecker said, “whether it has been housing or commercial building investors or retail tenants, and that makes a big difference in a community. Where you run into trouble is when you get big investments like City Center that work for while, but when they go south, they tend to drag everything down with it.”
Widely hailed as a jewel upon its opening in 1989, City Center was thrown in for free to a $2.8 million deal to the city (?) when it bought a vacant plot of land adjacent to one of the mall’s two parking garages. Now nearly 90 percent vacant, what was once filled with ultra-high-end retail hosts a handful of lunch-time restaurants, a dollar store and a Radio Shack as the city is flanked by three newer malls in wealthy suburbs.
Craig Gossman, a principal with KKG, said Columbus has been able to see many of these recent changes in the downtown area, such as building a retail cap on a bridge connecting the city’s Arena District to the Short North neighborhood. The intent was to overcome the perception that the neighborhoods are separated by an in-town freeway. Downtown Columbus also has experienced a boom in residential uses and public art is materializing around town, thanks to city incentives.
“Columbus really hasn’t gone back and done a powerful streetscape program. They have allowed land use adjustments, and those land uses, to start influencing what the streets and open public space will be,” Gossman said. “So you see a lot of entrepreneurial efforts going on in downtown Columbus right now, much because of the initiative Mayor (Michael) Coleman put out several years ago regarding trying to get (downtown) housing as a priority for the city.”
Since 2002, 1,872 new residential units have been constructed in the city’s inner core. Katz said that can be directly attributed to tax abatements allowing residents moving into buildings that had been converted into living space to completely forgo their real estate taxes for a decade. The program instituted under Coleman provides a 75 percent tax break on newly constructed units.
Katz recently completed the first of two phases in converting what is known as the Buggy Works into residences. He said he quickly sold out the 125,000-square-foot first phase that got underway in 2002 and should start later this year on the more than 300,000-square-foot second phase.
The Buggy Works, which has housed a music club and restaurants in the past decade, once sat in the middle of a rundown industrial section of the downtown’s Westside. Now it is on the edge of nearly a half billion dollars in recent development as the Arena District — a mix of office, retail, residential, entertainment and sports — shares Katz’s parking lot with the $56 million Huntington Park, which will house the city’s Triple A baseball team.
“Columbus has done a tremendous job empowering local development interests to come into downtown and develop it,” KKG’s Gossman said. “In our travels we find — and Columbus is no exception to this — density has to become your friend downtown in order to justify usually above-average land costs in a limited area.”
Katz said the change that has made the biggest difference in the downtown is shooting for greatness.
“Investments in excellence,” Katz called the new developments. “You look at the arena that was created (Nationwide Arena, home of the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets), voted best arena by ESPN for fan experience. They could have built it for $100 million; they built it for $150 million. They did it right, and that is a new attitude in Columbus. I grew up in a town that embraced and internalized the mediocrity that we perceived of ourselves, and to have things like that take place are incredible.”
The arena was constructed on the site of the former and long-abandoned Ohio State Penitentiary. It was built privately, using money from Nationwide Insurance, which is headquartered across the street, following the failure of a 1997 countywide vote to publicly fund the arena and a soccer stadium. Also located across the street from the arena is the parent company of the city’s daily newspaper, largest TV station and radio owner, the Dispatch Printing Company.
The lesson KKG’s Gossman hopes Lexington can take from Columbus is that it doesn’t take much to revive a city’s downtown when certain factors are in place.
“Lexington has set the stage for a real powerful urban center, and it really started with their smart growth strategy years ago to limit the growth into the agricultural and equestrian ground that surrounds Lexington,” Gossman said.
The city’s institution of the urban service boundary makes it uniquely positioned for the type of inner growth Columbus has seen, Gossman said. “I see Lexington having a distinct advantage over most Midwestern communities just because of the great planning that was put in to place to control that.”
But just as Columbus has had to wait as the city grows and improves incrementally, Gossman said Lexington must know it will take patience to see the changes it desires. “In America’s ‘we want it now’ kind of mentality to almost everything in our society, you can’t get there fast enough for the general public. (Lexington’s elected and civic leaders) are focused on trying to set the stage even more to look at the efforts that have gone on in other great cities and great places and trying to apply those models to Lexington,” he said. “The best is yet to come for Lexington, and that is where we see it going.”