CAMPUS-AREA OVERHAUL PLAN SET FOR REVIEW

Columbus Dispatch, The (OH) - May 20, 1995

Author: Alan D. Miller, Dispatch Higher Education Reporter

Traffic-packed streets - four and five lanes wide - cut like impassable, swollen streams through the neighborhood just east of Ohio State
University.
Even wider rivers of poverty and crime slice the community into little islands of despair.
From a second-story office overlooking High Street, a team of planners yesterday sailed through a sea of maps and charts looking for
ways to build bridges.
They have some ideas, generated over several months through suggestions from OSU-area residents, and they will share their proposals
from 1 to 4 p.m. today during an open house at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, 30 W. Woodruff Ave.
Parking is free in OSU's Arps parking garage on High Street, just south of Woodruff.
The open house is an opportunity for community residents and others to look over proposals and offer suggestions. More public meetings
will be held in the summer and a final plan is expected in the fall.
Traffic, parking, housing conditions, commercial and retail business, poverty, crime, social services, city infrastructure and trash removal
are issues being addressed.
The planners hired by Campus Partners for Community Urban Redevelopment suggest that Summit and 4th streets should be converted
to two-way streets.
Those large, one-way thoroughfares divide the community and create gulfs among neighbors, said Barry Humphries, president of
Campus Partners, the university-funded agency formed early this year to coordinate planning and revitalization of the neighborhood.
It's just one of seven items that should get quick action, planners suggest. The other six suggestions:
Develop housing, retail, office and parking space at High Street and 11th Avenue to create an enhanced "entryway" to the university area.
Expand parking and a parking management program.
Create a park at Indianola and 8th avenues.
Use community policing.
Use systematic code enforcement to improve housing.
Open a neighborhood family social-services center.
"We're entering the alternatives phase," Humphries said. "We're offering alternatives for land use and policy, and we want to get
community input on that. We want to know: Are we on course? Are we not? What's workable? What's not?"
Planners suggest creating a districtwide framework of two-way streets, greenways and open spaces to provide neighborhood connections
and identity.
They also suggest cleaning up High Street and returning it to the main street of the University District. The proposals include "maximizing
retail business on two sides of the street and reconnecting the University District south to the Short North retail area, establishing 15th
Avenue as the north terminus for specialty retail so as not to dissipate the retail market."
Planners also envision small, specialty districts along High Street, a retail and restaurant area on the south near 11th Avenue, an arts
area near the Wexner Center for the Arts and Newport Music Hall, and an "international" area near Lane Avenue encompassing the
ethnic restaurants already there.
A study by real estate consultants from Robert Charles Lesser & Co. of Washington, D.C., found "the blighting influences of crime, drugs
and deteriorated housing in university neighborhoods are the biggest problem facing the neighborhoods as a whole."
"A general increase in the level of homeownership from the very low current rates would be positive," the report said. "As of the 1990
census, fewer than 6 percent of the 11,000 housing units in the study area were owner-occupied."

Planners recommend offering homeownership-assistance programs to encourage OSU faculty and staff, other public employees and
current area renters to buy houses in the campus area.
They also suggest property renovation programs, possibly by designating the area as a "special improvement district" that would
encourage investment.
Caption: GRAPHIC
Edition: Home Final Section: NEWS Page number: 01A Record: 9505200006 Index terms: OSU NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT REVIEW
Copyright: THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH Copyright (c) 1995 The Dispatch Printing Co.