January 23, 2005
City of Columbus Quit Claims deed for land at corners of Hamilton and Long despite pending judicial case filed against city by neighborhood residents.
Amazingly, Mayor’s Office, City Council, Gideon Partners et. al move forward despite injunction and against the community’s wishes and conventional wisdom in regard to elementary city planning.
January 20, 2005
Brown blasts city on Long-Hamilton project
By GILBERT PRICE
A $6.2 million office building that is designed to help revitalize
the near east side is being challenged by one of the groups the city
said it is trying to help.
Willis Brown, president of the King-Lincoln Bronzeville Association,
said that his group is vigorously opposing the plan to put an office
building at the corner of Long and Hamilton avenues. The new
building, approved for tax abatement and city subsidies at city
council last week, will become the new home of the police
department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.
“It’s wrong,” Brown said. “They can coat it and flavor it however
they want it, but it’s wrong.”
The onetime home of the Novelty Food Bar, which has sat vacant for
about 30 years, is the linchpin of a plan by Mayor Michael Coleman
and city officials to create a business and entertainment district
on the near-east side. The building, proposed by Gideon Development,
would house commercial tenants in addition to the Internal Affairs
Bureau.
The King-Lincoln Bronzeville Association had proposed a different
strategy.
According to Brown, they had endorsed a plan for 50 condominiums on
the site.
“Above all, we want to bring people back to our community.
Specifically, the middle class, Black or White. The middle-class
have disposable income,” Brown said. “You have the people fueling
the retail, and bringing life to the community.”
The city’s effort, pressing for commercial development as a means to
bring more people into the neighborhood, is “putting the cart before
the horse,” Brown said.
Council voted 7-0 to approve the proposal, which includes tax
abatement for the property and funding for improvements on the
property.
The vote on a lease for the Internal Affairs Bureau was 6-1, with
council member Charleta Tavares voting no.
She voted against the lease for IAB because she said that reflected
the sentiment of the community. “I had heard it when IAB was looked
at to go into the Model Neighborhoods Building,” Tavares said.
Tavares said that, in addition to the IAB offices, the city was
planning to build a new police substation on Taylor to go along with
a new facility on E. Main Street.
“I didn’t believe three units of the police department in a half a
mile radius was necessary. I don’t believe it’s going to bring the
kind of traffic to that retail establishment,” Tavares said.
Brown said that he was also opposed to the IAB unit being housed in
the new building.
“We don’t want to create a police state,” Brown said. “Why is it
that, in order to make a neighborhood safe, you’ve got to barricade
it with police substations?”
Tavares said she was not opposed to the city’s lease of 27,000
square feet of office space in the new building, only with the
client.
“We should put a unit of government that’s going to bring people
into the community, like Building Services,” Tavares said. That unit
of the Department of Development, which works with contractors and
residents for building permits, would add traffic to the
neighborhood.
“I’m looking at not only the businesses right there in the Gideon
Project, but I’m also looking at the rest of Long and Mt Vernon, to
bring people there so you have outside people coming to the
neighborhood that wouldn’t otherwise be there,” Tavares said.
“That’s part of what we want for that kind of a catalyst: we want
people who are going to draw people to it to the neighborhood.”
Tavares said that she found the King-Lincoln Bronzeville
Association’s plan for the site to be “a nice idea”. She wasn’t sure
the plan could work.
“You have to make sure that the numbers work,” Tavares said. “I
didn’t see the financial portfolio to see whether the numbers
worked. We had some people to say that wouldn’t work.”
Mike Brown, spokesperson for Mayor Michael Coleman, rejected
allegations that the city entered into a plan without sufficient
community input.
“We had more than 28 meetings on the whole project,” Brown said. “We
had multiple meetings on the IAB. We have the support of the Near
East Area Commission, the Long Street Business Association. This has
significant support from across the community.”
Brown said that the project would bring job growth to the near-east
side neighborhood, even beyond the Internal Affairs jobs.
We’ve had multiple conversations on the future of this area. We have
a private sector developer spending several million dollars on a
site that has been vacant for more than 30 years,” Brown said.
Brown said that he is not buying it.
“Every time you hear the mayor, and the city council, and Gideon
Group talk, they say, `it’s going to spark development’,” he said.
Brown likened their analogy to a car’s spark plugs.
“Spark plugs are good, but fuel is better,” Brown said. “They’re
going around the neighborhood creating sparks, but there’s no fuel.
The fuel is people; that drives the engine of commerce and
appropriate sustainable development.”
Brown said that the city’s record of creating strong communities is
poor, and points to the mayor’s much-touted “Four Corners” project
as a failure in that regard. The project, at the corner of Cleveland
and 11th Ave., included several businesses, including a restaurant,
a bank, and a transportation hub for the Central Ohio Transit
Authority.
According to Brown, the restaurant closes at 3 p.m., and there has
been little development around the site.
“If you go ask the people at Milo-Grogan, Rosewind or Southwind what
impact the [Four Corners] development had on their community, they
would tell you, `none,’” Brown said.
For Brown, the battle over the Long and Hamilton site is not
finished.
“We’re going to fight it with all the ability we have within the
law,” Brown said.
He said that the King-Lincoln Bronzeville Association was planning
to file suit over the project.
“We’re not going to let any steel come out of that ground for a
police building,” Brown said.
January 20, 2005
— KLBNA leaders are shocked and dismayed that City Council and The Mayor have chosen to move forward with the Gideon Partners wholly innapropriate building. . . . .
It wasn’t unusual to have Duke Ellington walk into the Novelty Food Bar on Long Street for a bite to eat before playing at one of the five nearby nightclubs.
It was the late 1950s, and the Near East Side area of Long Street around Hamilton Avenue would be crowded with people on their way to the movie theaters, shops and dry cleaners.
Otto Beatty Jr. said he remembers the likes of Ellington and other jazz legends such as Count Basie as regulars at his father’s 24-hour diner when they came into town.
People were drawn to the area, known as the heart of culture, the arts and retail in the black community for decades.
That, though, was before I-71 split the neighborhood, triggering a decline. Businesses left. Criminals came.
The area, now littered with vacant buildings, used to be home to about 68,000 people. Now there are 15,000, Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman said. Half of those residents live below the poverty level.
City officials, though, are aiming for a new start.
The Columbus police internal affairs and accident investigation units are to move into a $6.2 million building that will be constructed next year at the corner of Long and Hamilton.
“The linchpin of developing that area is this corner,” Coleman said.
Yesterday, City Council agreed to sell a lot at 742 E. Long St. to Gideon Development Partners LLC for $32,000 and signed a 15-year lease with Gideon for parts of the first floor and all of the second floor of a building to be built there.
Leasing the building and outfitting it for police are going to cost about $1.5 million, city records show.
Once the police units have moved in, the annual lease will be around $380,000, said Gary Holland, Columbus assistant safety director.
The first floor will have space for three to six businesses, including a restaurant, said A. Robert Hutchins, managing member of Gideon.
The council also unanimously approved a 10-year, 75 percent tax abatement for Gideon. Councilwoman Charleta Tavares voted for the abatement but against the land deal because she thinks the city can put another city department in the building instead of internal affairs, which some project opponents don’t want in their neighborhood.
Some in the area have repeatedly told city officials that police aren’t welcome.
“They haven’t done anything to solve any cases. We’ve had black men shot (by police) and every time (authorities say) they’ve been justified,” said Barry Edney, who lives behind the development and has lobbied against the move.
Edney said he had wanted to see the area revitalized with black businesses, not police.
But Beatty, a lawyer and former state legislator, said he welcomes the change.
“I understand his concerns, but you have to start somewhere,” Beatty said.
Using those offices has advantages, Development Director Mark Barbash said.
Both units are staffed around the clock, and both have plainclothes investigators who can provide a police presence.
“We have to bring people back into the neighborhood,” Barbash said. “They have to see it as a safe place.”
It’s hoped that the building will provide some stability in the King-Lincoln district, so that other businesses and restaurants can be built and the vacant Lincoln Theater renovated and reopened, Barbash said.
Gideon isn’t the first developer to propose a development at the corner, Barbash said. At least three others made plans but couldn’t get the financial backing.
Gideon already has invested $350,000 of its own money and is putting its name on the $6.2 million mortgage in hopes that the plan works, Hutchins said.
So it makes sense to base city offices there, Coleman said.
“It’s time,” he said. “That neighborhood is long overdue.”
Published: Tuesday, December 14, 2004
January 2, 2005
Columbus turning its back on neighborhood’s wishes
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Our community should be disheartened by the recent report in The
Dispatch that the Columbus City Council and Mayor Michael B. Coleman
had decided to fly in the face of a local neighborhood association.
It agreed to sell land for peanuts at the northeast corner of
Hamilton Avenue and E. Long Street for the development of an
unwanted and needless office building, at considerable expense to
Columbus taxpayers.
The King-Lincoln-Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, of which I am
a member, is opposed to the city’s sale of land at that corner for
$32,000 to the Gideon Development Partners. An office building is
the wrong idea.
This building seems to be a pet project of Coleman — he even showed
up at a City Council meeting on its behalf. An office building would
be a repetition of the bad news at the corner of Cleveland and 11 th
avenues, compliments of our city planners and some of our
politicians. A great deal of money was spent at that location to
build buildings, only to discover that the corner is a wasteland
after 5 p.m. This kind of development should not be repeated.
This sort of development is not the model for building a viable
neighborhood and raises the question of whether the city will ever
learn from its mistakes.
The neighborhood association has developed a proposal that would
advance the development of a vital urban environment in an area that
desperately needs it. Unfortunately, its ideas have been ignored by
the mayor and his staff.
The association has proposed a mixed-use project that includes,
first and foremost, residential units (condominiums), along with
retail and office components, based on its belief that what the
neighborhood needs first is people, not just bricks and mortar. When
you have people, you encourage the development of services people
need, such as coffee houses, restaurants, dry cleaners, florists,
entertainment venues and stores.
The mayor’s office does not appear to understand these concepts. If
it did, it would not insist on pushing an office building opposed by
the very people who will have to live with this bad idea for decades
to come.
It is not difficult to become suspicious of the mayor’s intentions
when considering other circumstances of the proposed Gideon group
project. For example, the city is proposing to lease 28,212 square
feet of space in the building at an annual escalating rent of
$383,000 (at $13.57 per square foot), plus utilities. Why would the
city agree to pay this much money when it could house the Internal
Affairs Bureau of the Division of Police nearby in an existing
building for far less money?
In fact, there are more than 50,000 square feet of vacant and
available office space within 1,000 feet of that intersection.
Further, at an alternative location, the city would not be required
to help finance the building’s leasehold improvements to the tune of
$675,000 and would not have to grant a 10-year, 75 percent real-
estate tax abatement to the detriment of our school system, both of
which the city has agreed to do for the Gideon project.
What in the world is the mayor, his administration and the council
thinking about?
Because of the misdirection coming from city government, I believe
the neighborhood association should do everything in its power to
serve the best interest of its neighborhood, as all neighborhoods
should do.
After all, wasn’t that one of the central planks in Coleman’s
platform? Hasn’t he been advocating the importance of neighborhoods,
including Downtown, “everyone’s neighborhood”?
If he were wise, he would work to harness, not to contradict, the
power that neighborhoods can bring to their own revitalization.
That, in the end, is what is really needed and is most effective and
efficient. Anything else is not only counterproductive but wasteful
and inefficient.
I would not be surprised to learn that the mayor has too much
political capital invested in the Gideon project to change course. I
urge the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville Neighborhood Association to use
all the legal means at its disposal to stop the Gideon project,
including filing an injunction to allow for a complete
reconsideration of what is truly in the best interest of the
neighborhood.
WILLIAM FULLARTON
Columbus
