Central Ohio is completely flat, leveled by a massive glacier some 20,000 years ago. Starting out from the state Capitol in Columbus, you can walk for many miles in any direction without gaining any noticeable elevation. The weather is humid year-round, leading to muggy summers and cold, often gray winters. “It’s not our mountains, our beaches or the ocean that’s driving success,” says Jason Hall, who leads the Columbus Partnership, a membership organization of the region’s leading corporate CEOs.
Despite its apparent lack of advantages, Columbus has quietly emerged as one of the great American success stories of the 21st century. Since 2000, the city’s population has grown by 28 percent, with even stronger growth in the suburbs. Last year, the metropolitan area’s population gain was 38 percent higher than the national average, on pace with metros such as Nashville and Raleigh. Such growth is practically unheard of in the contemporary Midwest. Over the past 25 years, both Cincinnati and Cleveland, by comparison, have continued their decadeslong slides.
So what’s bringing so many people to Columbus, if not the nonexistent beaches or the bleary weather? It’s the usual answer — jobs. Columbus boasts a healthy mix of employers, including major insurance, banking and utility companies, higher education, manufacturers and health systems. More recently, multibillion-dollar announcements of expansions and relocations have become routine. “Just this morning, we celebrated another $6 billion from Amazon Web Services,” Hall said one day in August. “You have right now in the region, shovels in the ground on the largest capital investment in the history of Ohio, the largest jobs project in the history of Ohio, the largest biotech expansion in the history of Ohio. They’re all happening right now.”
Pharmaceutical company Amgen, which arrived in central Ohio four years ago, announced an additional $900 million expansion back in April. By the end of this year, Honda and LG Energy Solution are set to begin production at a $3.5 billion battery plant, part of a larger manufacturing hub for Honda. Dwarfing them all, Intel has semiconductor facilities planned for suburban New Albany, with an initial estimated investment of $28 billion (although progress has been slow so far). Each of these deals was its own beast but they all have something in common, something known locally as “the Columbus Way.”
“It’s built into our culture, our way of doing things, our traditions and our values,” says Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther. “The question isn’t whether public-private partnerships are a good idea. It’s what’s next and what else can we do.”
This is not just talk. In Columbus, when there’s a project that wins buy-in from civic leaders — whether a business relocation or a scholarship program or an effort to revitalize a tainted river or a former scrapyard — there’s cooperation from all sides. In many regions, there may be silos within city agencies, or city and county officials might not get along. In Columbus, the city and other localities, along with the state, manage to work well with private companies, which in turn are often able to pull together. It’s not always 100 percent smooth but instead of spending months arguing about who gets credit or where a project should be located, the various institutional leaders quickly get on board and try to harmonize their efforts.
(David Kidd for Governing)
During a polarized time, Columbus is an unusual place, where a Democratic city and Republican state and non-political actors are able to work in concert. “We’re really excited about the ability to move fast in Ohio — we can do that because of the support we’re getting,” says Megan Milam, senior vice president for government relations for Anduril Industries, a defense contractor that at the beginning of the year announced construction of a billion-dollar factory in the Columbus area.
Government entities and other companies have helped Anduril not only with financial incentives but with infrastructure needs, permitting, talent and recruiting, as well as laying out a map for navigating unanticipated bumps that might be hiding up ahead. “It’s hard to find a community where you’re getting more of that 360-degree welcome,” Milam says. “They’ve built out that ecosystem where it feels like it’s the broader community trying to support one another and assist in growth.”
Almost a Regional Mayor
Ginther is the conductor leading this chorus of collaborative leadership. Any smart mayor acts as a convener, bringing nonprofit, philanthropic and corporate partners together to try to sell them on a plan. But Columbus has unusual roles to play in development. The city runs the water and sewer utilities for much of the region, making itself indispensable to major development deals. The city also helps oversee the airport, which is undergoing a $2 billion expansion set to increase passenger capacity by 40 percent by 2029. “People know we’re growing,” Ginther says. “That’s no longer up for debate. Everybody knows that we’ve got to do things differently.”
He’d probably reject the label but Ginther operates almost like a regional mayor, helping out on projects that are outside the city limits, knowing their success can only help his city. “There used to be battles between Columbus and the suburban communities over businesses moving back and forth,” says Mike Barbash, a former economic development director for both the city and the state. “That hasn’t existed for probably a good 20 years. You’ve got all the right people sitting down at the table together and it gets done very quietly.”
It’s obviously easier to play nice when there’s enough growth going around for everyone to get a taste. And of course Ginther’s primary concern is the city itself, which he’s reshaping not only through development projects — there’s lots of use of tax-increment financing in the city and lots of rebuilding on brownfields — but legislation as well. For the first time in more than half a century, Ginther has been rewriting the zoning code, a mundane but politically dicey endeavor that is meant at root to defeat NIMBYism and allow the denser development that will be inevitable with continuing growth.
In-fill projects are already evident all over town but making Columbus taller and more crowded, without making things inconvenient, will also require transit. Last year, Ginther helped persuade voters to pass a sales tax increase to fund an $8 billion transit expansion over the next 25 years, along with 500 miles of bike paths, trails and sidewalks. “It passed with 57 percent,” Ginther says, “which is a landslide when you’re asking people to raise their own taxes.”
Over the past year, transit has seen a 17 percent increase in ridership. Bus rapid transit (BRT) lines are being mapped out to service centers of development, while zoning changes will accommodate more growth. Just along the planned BRT lines, Ginther says, new zoning will allow for nearly 90,000 more residents, rather than around 6,000 under the old code. “Transit is not in our blood or in our DNA,” Ginther says at a meeting with Monica Téllez-Fowler, CEO of the Central Ohio Transit Authority, “but it’s certainly in our future.”
During the course of an average day, Ginther might utter the words “safety, transit and housing” together 10 times in public, almost as a kind of mantra, seeing them as the keys to the city’s continuing success and also as inextricably linked. It’s rare that Ginther will talk about one project, whether it’s a new office tower or an education facility, without mentioning how it’s related to some larger goal within that neighborhood or the city as a whole. He thinks not only about how the puzzle pieces fit together but what the emerging picture is going to look like over the course of the coming decades. Already in office for 10 years, he’s always thinking about the long term. “Mayors aren’t known for their patience,” he says, “but you’ve got to stay committed to that plan.”
(David Kidd for Governing)
Ginther: Gentle Giant
Ginther grew up in Columbus, the child of a social worker and a lawyer who’d served in Vietnam. While his father was in law school, his parents adopted a daughter and then proceeded to open up their home to dozens of foster children over the years. That background taught Ginther early on about disparities in opportunities. “They counted up at one point that 47 kids had come through our house over 30 years,” Ginther recalls. “Some just for a night, while some came just for the night and spent 10 years.”
Ginther, a “very average football player” in high school, played for Earlham College in Indiana, which at the time had the oxymoronic but fierce mascot name of “the Fighting Quakers.” Ginther was recruited as a tight end but quickly switched to linebacker, realizing he’d rather hit than be hit. But being at a Quaker-affiliated school meant his time studying abroad was spent in Northern Ireland, studying its peace process.
Still burly, Ginther’s manner is gentle. He’s not the kind of politician who immediately takes over a room, recognizing the folk wisdom about learning more by listening than by talking. He has a ready laugh and says hello to every receptionist and security guard he passes. While he’s reading to a group of preschool children at the Hilltop Learning Center, one kid shouts out that he has a wiggly tooth. The mayor asks if any of them has already lost a tooth. “I knew I was coming in to talk to the smartest and kindest kids,” Ginther tells them.
The city contributed $25 million to the construction of the learning center, which serves a neighborhood that previously had the lowest number of children in quality preschool programs of any section of the city. Ginther notes that other organizations kicked in funds while a non-city entity helped with the purchase of the land so that buyers wouldn’t know the city was involved. It was one among a number of transactions, including the Intel plant, where regional cooperation meant a party not directly involved was willing to serve as a front for the real buyers to keep purchase costs down.
At the grand opening of a 44-unit building offering supportive housing to people over 55 who have been homeless or struggled with drugs, Ginther is one of about a dozen speakers. The extensive lineup is testimony to the number of different entities — federal, state, local and nonprofit — that had to come together to fund the project. Ginther is always hyper-aware of the need to layer funding to get most ambitious projects done. “We need everyone to do their part,” he tells officials and residents at the gathering. “The city of Columbus can’t do it alone.”
Driving away from the event, Ginther points out a street where one of his foster sisters used to live.
Truly Long-Term Planning
Columbus has benefited from many decisions made decades and even centuries ago, such as the choice to designate it Ohio’s capital and home to the flagship public university. One of Ginther’s predecessors, M.E. “Jack” Sensenbrenner, served two separate stints as mayor between 1954 and 1972. It was Sensenbrenner who set up an annexation plan that caused Columbus to grow by 100 square miles, taking over neighborhoods that used the city’s water.
Because most of its growth is fairly recent, Columbus lacks neighborhoods that became entrenched, causing the kind of balkanized ward politics that dog many older cities. Until recently, members of the City Council were elected at-large. They now reside in particular areas but they’re still elected citywide, which prevents them from thinking in purely parochial terms or bashing other parts of town. “One of the things we’re able to do here is really try to stay focused on what’s in the greater good, what’s in the interest of the entire community,” Ginther says.
He helped promote the idea of shared regional cooperation while serving as president of the City Council. After becoming mayor, he made a point of meeting with all the suburban mayors and city managers in Franklin County, as well as some other surrounding localities, at their respective city halls. Talking to them about the importance of regionalism and cooperation, he won converts on a bipartisan basis.
Last year, he announced alongside other local leaders the creation of a Regional Housing Coalition aimed at expanding supply. Without more building, the area is in danger of having more families than homes by the end of the decade. One of the coalition’s biggest champions is Jeff Fix, a Republican commissioner in Fairfield County, while Reynoldsburg Mayor Joe Begeny is rewriting his city’s zoning code in concert with Ginther’s approach.
(David Kidd for Governing)
It helps that Columbus corporations by and large don’t compete directly against each other. Some of them have gone so far as to pool resources on matters such as their own cybersecurity. Beyond their corporate needs, Ginther says that over time CEOs came to recognize that issues such as housing mattered because they can’t retain the best and the brightest if Columbus loses its affordability advantage. “I remember one of our health-care CEOs saying to me early on, ‘I don’t have time for all of this community stuff. This is all about shareholder value,’” says Alex Fischer, a former head of the Columbus Partnership and a partner with The New Albany Company, The Limited’s development arm. “He became the poster child for community involvement.”
Overcoming Doubters
The combination of a patient approach — thinking in terms of decades — and the ability to bring major players together has clearly paid off. But naturally not everyone is happy. Formerly rural counties are filling in fast, while parts of Columbus itself visibly continue to struggle.
This leaves Ginther with twin worries. He doesn’t want Columbus to become Austin, a place so prosperous and initially affordable that it’s grown to the point of having nightmarish traffic and spiraling housing costs. Hence his efforts in areas such as transit and housing. Following earlier investments in affordable housing, Ginther is asking voters in November to approve a $1.9 billion bond package for more housing and other capital improvements.
He also doesn’t want his city’s own residents to feel they’re being left behind by the new jobs being created. Columbus helps fund a program that gets city students into college without tuition, for example, while also under Ginther investing hundreds of millions of dollars in traditionally underserved communities such as Linden and Hilltop. The city has paid for or helped attract new education and health centers, recreational facilities, and nutrition and jobs programs.
Ginther sometimes brings his teenage daughter along with him as he visits the city’s poorer quarters, wanting as his own parents did for her to understand the challenges that people from different backgrounds and circumstances may face.
“If the majority of people in this city are succeeding, everybody has to share in our success,” Ginther told a meeting of community activists back in August. “Having a third of our people left behind is not sustainable if we’re going to grow by another third in the next 30 years.”
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