Editorial

Early twenty-first century’s continuing contradictions

With Franklinton’s increasing geographic and structural isolation came population loss: from 36,000 to 26,500 in 1950, 15,000 in 2000, and 8,132 in 2017. Government policies at all levels had negative impact which the remaining residents struggled to combat or mitigate. Redevelopment is uneven, inequitable, and incomplete. Most residents lack high school diplomas and live below the artificially low poverty levels. Almost all public elementary school students are eligible for free or reduced lunch programs.

On the one hand, the Franklinton Floodwall, finally completed in 2004, protects the area from very high crests of more than 30 feet. This released part of the area from building restrictions. Some commercial and industrial businesses grow, prompting community plans and creation of an Area Commission. As with other Columbus neighborhoods, the Area Commission is as much window-dressing as a point of community collaboration, coordination, and democratic action.

Early Franklinton and Columbus’ forgotten beginnings

Dismissed, when even noticed by City government and city residents alike, Columbus’ historical, political, economic, social, and cultural origins lay in Franklinton. The district is now on the southeastern edge of downtown but it was long the center. Historians, geographers, archaeologists, and genealogists can read the signs on the ground and in the libraries. But they are unknown to most residents including the governing class and their inseparable developers. Among many reasons are Columbus’ lack of any traditions of professional self-study, the failings of its educational and cultural institutions, and the disinterestedness of its journalists. (See my essays on the City of Columbus and the University District in Columbus Free Press; contrast them, for example, with Ed Lentz’s Columbus Dispatch’s antiquarian vignettes always taken out of historical context and without consideration of significance. Franklinton is not in the index of only serious scholarly book on Columbus, Kevin Cox, Boomtown Columbus. Ohio State University Press, 2021)

Lost in the attention accorded to the flurry of right-wing Republican legislatures’ passing and governors’ signing blatantly partisan and extralegal redistricting bills—and, in a growing number of states, both state and federal courts ruling them unconstitutional—is “the great state of Ohio.” In North Carolina, for example, the State Supreme Court not only rule legislative redistricting unlawful, but instituted more constitutional maps. As I follow the incessant “shenanigans” (the much too soft and legally irrelevant word of the Columbus Dispatch [Editorial Board, “Our view: While your groceries go up”]) of the politically biased State Redistricting Commission. Not “shenanigans,” these are violations of the U.S. Constitution and state law. They constitute a unique and so far highly successful path of obfuscation and voter suppression.

The stage is set

Lessons from the City

My major lessons will be news to some and confirmation to others. Like many middle-size to large cities, Columbus claims special status and a unique identity when it actually has remarkably little of either.

Consider three powerful indicators. First, the 220-year-old state capital and home to one of the nation’s mega-universities, but without major league baseball, football, or basketball, has no accepted, well-founded, or documented identity. Columbus has far fewer serious, documented, scholarly or journalistic books and articles than any other U.S. city of its size or quest for recognition. The annual Arnold body-building display and OSU football do not constitute a firm foundation.

While adapting to retirement and finding conditions in the University District more intolerable than at any time in 18 years of homeownership in a historic district abandoned by its city and its adjacent mega-university, during the past 15 months I have become a student of Columbus and a democratic activist. In developer-dominated Columbus, the University District has been sold and bought with the unhesitant approval of the legal and public guardians. In the process, I am known as a “civic leader” in City Hall, I am told, and also told “your name is mud” in Ohio State University’s Bricker Hall administration building. I began writing my regular “Busting Myths” column for the Columbus Free Press. At the same time, I am banned from the Opinion page of the Columbus Dispatch for calling it “muddled and uninformed” on its readers’ comments website. I have the ears and eyes of some in Columbus city government and the media as well as across the community. I have made more new friends and acquaintances than enemies—so far.

Given the rhetorical prominence that right-wing Ohio Republican candidates for U.S. Senate and House districts gave to the 45th  president's erroneously titled "America First" agenda--not program or policy--in their election campaigns, it's time to revisit the absence of an actual platform and the "Agenda's" consequences.

J.D., or J.P aka J.D. Mandel according to 45, Vance should be asked by all, especially our media, to explain and justify the true content, contradictions, and failed results of "America First," which played out often as "America Last."

Here is my column “America First: An Excavation of Trumpism and the Trump Agenda,” Busting Myths, Columbus Free Press, Oct. 24, 2021 which was shared across the U.S.:

Surveying the terrain and scratching the surface 

My sad tales continue with new elements added every day. In chronological order, they are, so far:

First, leaders of other Columbus neighborhoods contact me. They first affirm that the analysis I presented for the University District parallels their area’s experience. They meet with me individually for cooperation, counsel, and conversation. So far, they include Weinland Park, Franklinton, and New Indianola. I encourage them to write their districts’ experiences for the Columbus Free Press.

Second, the court case of two long-time University District homeowners against NorthSteppe Realty was dismissed by the magistrate. After first court-ordered telephone “mediation” and then “in-person face-to-face conversation” without mediator or magistrate predictably failed, with no opportunity for discussion, presentation of our case, or a hearing, the magistrate dismissed the case. We learned about this accidentally days after the decision, later receiving a form letter with no explanation. For this, we had to pay a fee. I have filed a strenuous objection. I am advised, however, that the magistrate is within his rights to deny our rights.

Part Two

The bigger picture

NorthSteppe/Stickney is only the most egregious of the offending organizations among its peers. Almost as large and faulty is HomeTeam Properties, which has purchased property on false grounds (including the house next door to ours). It also claims in printed booklets that list all its properties that it is OSU Student Housing. As with NorthSteppe, it is not. Owner-occupiers receive these fraudulent mailings in our boxes addressed to “OSU student.” Simple record checking would prevent that. My direct inquiries to HomeTeam never result in an answer or an apology. OSU appears unwilling to protect its own interests.

Not only are HomeTeam houses typically in disrepair, they also refuse to provide sufficient trash and recycle containers or instruct their tenants on the law or their responsibilities. For example, the house beside ours—formerly home to a faculty family of five— has eight single residents. HomeTeam provides one trash and one recycle bin. My wife and I, a family of two, have the same number. (A small landlord across the street does not even arrange for a recycle bin.)

Part One

The shame of the city

What happened to the University District?

The area adjacent to The Ohio State University in the middle of Columbus, Ohio, was once a distinctive, mixed neighborhood of owner-occupiers and their boarders and renters in small, scattered, private rooming houses and single-family homes. Over several decades it was transformed into the dominance—numerically, culturally, socially, politically, and economically—of large, for-profit landlords with young-adult student tenants. For 18 years I’ve been co-owner of a 107-year-old, architect-designed house in the district whose history partly reflects this transformation; it morphed from dual-family to multiple student renters and back to single-family status. The 2021-22 period crystalizes the 40-year history of this landmark neighborhood’s decline.

Columbus searches in vain for an identity, bouncing ridiculously from Cowtown to Crop Town, Cap City, Arch City, Buckeyeville, Nationwide or Crew City, or Number 14 or 15 (in population rank among U.S. cities). None of those fit the city past or present. I propose another, more appropriate and accurate moniker: the lawless, wild-wild-Midwest. (See my “Columbus’ identity crisis and its media”; “Columbus searches for its Downtown with historical, urbanist, and developers’ blinders”; “Columbus, Ohio, searches to be a city: The myth of the Columbus Way”; “Is Columbus actually a City?”)