Apartments driving Columbus rebound

Developers filling in spaces near Downtown

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Rising numbers of new-building permits and zoning applications in Columbus bode well for two things: the local economy and controversy.

Development has been rebounding since the end of the recession, officials, developers and neighborhood leaders agree, although it hasn’t come close to the boom times of the 1990s and early 2000s.

In 2001, for example, Columbus annexed 1,230 acres, nearly 2 square miles. Annexations reached a low of 19.4 acres in 2009 and in 2011 edged up to 146 acres, including 108 acres for the Hollywood Casino on the West Side.

“They were taking in, back in the heyday, plots of a couple hundred lots at a time,” said Chris Presutti, the city’s chief zoning official, “and they were building the houses before they were even sold.”

Today, he said, most development is infill development — meaning it typically occurs inside the city, not at the edges, and in smaller batches to fill in empty spaces.

Single-family homes and large shopping centers once were king, but today’s projects are smaller and more likely to be rentals.

“If you look at where the residential is being built, it’s infill development in Franklinton or the Near East Side and places like that,” Presutti said.

Becky Obester, chairwoman of the 5th by Northwest Area Commission, said she’s seeing a burst of such development in her neighborhood, which is tucked between Upper Arlington and Grandview Heights.

The Columbus City Council just signed off on zoning changes for 16 new rental units, a request that also has her group’s approval.

There’s also plenty more development in the parts of Nationwide Realty’s Grandview Yard development that are in Columbus.

“Our liaison with the city of Columbus told our zoning chair we’re one of the busiest areas in the city,” Obester said. “Our zoning committee works really hard. We try not to have a lot of controversies. We try to keep it moving forward and ask, ask, ask, ask.”

That’s not to say that controversy — which was common in the days when residents frequently packed City Council meetings to fight new subdivisions, malls and drugstores — won’t come in with the current tide of infill development.

Last month, residents of two neighborhoods — one in Clintonville and the other in Harrison West — filled the council chamber to fight separate infill developments.

One of those was a 108-unit apartment complex proposed by Wagenbrenner Development in Harrison West. The City Council approved the project despite residents’ concern that it would place too many apartments in the space.

It’s the type of project that’s becoming more common as developers realize that the rental market is robust. In the core city, said Mark Wagenbrenner, president of the development company, apartment complexes are 97 percent full, and one-bedroom apartments are almost impossible to find.

Wagenbrenner has infill projects, including hundreds of apartments, in the works in several neighborhoods, many of them on reclaimed industrial land. It doesn’t make sense, he said, for plots that were originally planned for owner-occupied housing to stay that way.

“What you see is people reworking multifamily condo ground for apartments,” Wagenbrenner said.

“That’s going to create tensions. There’s a perception that rental always tends to impact value. That’s true in the suburbs. But in an urban area, we’ve always had a mix of owner-occupied and rental. From a demographic standpoint, we just don’t see any difference.”

In other words, the young professional who was buying a condominium with little credit checking in 2005 is the same person who wants to rent an apartment in today’s tougher credit and housing markets.

“When you’ve gone through the housing crisis we’ve just gone through, people aren’t interested in ownership,” Wagenbrenner said.