Transmuting the Remains of the Industrial Metropolis: On Kevin R. Cox's "Boomtown Columbus"

Kevin R. Cox | Boomtown Columbus: Ohio’s Sunbelt City and How Developers Got Their Way | Trillium | 2021 | 274 Pages

Any Ohioan will tell you that Columbus is a city apart. It’s more like Austin than Cleveland, with its sprawling, car-centric footprint, its chichi exurban shopping centers, and its decidedly white-collar economy. In Boomtown Columbus, geographer Kevin Cox sets himself a few tasks. He sets out to explain how Columbus avoided the fate of its Rust Belt neighbors by adopting a postindustrial model, weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this development pattern, and ask how the champions of the city’s Sunbelt urbanism, its developers, established and maintain their iron grip on Columbus’ metropolitics. 

Once known as “Cowtown,” it was during the 1950s that Columbus began its rise to prominence among Ohio cities. Cox argues that this owed to the remarkable berth it gave its developers. The temporality of Columbus’s rise represented challenges and benefits. Because of its geographical location, only a short drive from the older urban centers of Cleveland and Cincinnati, Columbus was never able to secure coveted major league football or baseball teams, major airline hub status, or convention centers, amenities ostensibly essential to attracting capital within the context of the ascendant “knowledge economy.” 

But avenues for the postindustrial transformation of Columbus remained. Cox reminds us that only after World War II did “development”—the speculative acquisition of land by a developer followed by the construction of real estate leading to the sale or rental of said development to homebuyers or businesses—emerge as a sector unto itself. Realtors and their friends in government set about transmuting the remains of the industrial metropolis into condos, office space, hotels, (smaller market) sports arenas, and entertainment districts. All this in an attempt to lure white-collar workers from surrounding suburbs and other cities in the region to downtown Columbus. With the help of tax abatements, local developers have accumulated since the 1970s a critical mass of those amenities considered desirable by homebuyers, recent graduates, and industry executives like Les Wexner. Photos of new construction condos appear on the websites of both The Ohio State University (OSU) and student housing real estate brokers these days.  

Images of the disinvested south side do not. The majority of Boomtown Columbus explains how developers and their friends in local government pursued postindustrial urbanism to the detriment of the working poor. Developers remade the city with the help of tax increment financing (TIF). In decades past, the city required builders to pay tax intro the General Fund which in turn financed services and improvements across the city. Under the novel TIF arrangement, developers were permitted to buy and improve property (for eventual sale to commercial owner-occupiers) without paying the city any taxes. Instead, the retailers that eventually bought developers’ shiny condos and arenas would be taxed for infrastructural improvements—but only in the area immediately surrounding their new property. The TIF served a dual purpose. City Hall could boast of a “good business climate” and save money by privatizing public improvement. Meanwhile, developers could pass the cost of the aforementioned on to their buyers. But this hyper-localized and privatized infrastructural improvement strategy left poor neighborhoods out to dry. TIFs inflated the price of already profitable properties and left neighborhoods in places like East Columbus starved of desperately-needed improvements. What is more, TIFs led to dwindling tax revenue with which to fund municipal-wide investment. Neighborhoods such as Victorian Village were gentrified during the 1980s, thereby displacing poor Appalachian and Black residents out. Transplanted yuppies came to complain about the visual nuisance of the overflowing bus stop queues which wrapped around fixer-uppers, comprising of course those working class residents who remained. The benefits of the TIF-enabled “redevelopment” of Nationwide’s Arena District™, the “neighborhood revitalization” of quarters abutting OSU’s campus redounded not to existing residents but rather to the new residents developers courted. 

Aside from its bountiful amenities, “The Biggest Small Town in America” appeals to contemporary white professionals in part because Columbus’s late postwar city fathers’ refused to be hemmed in by suburbs. Local government and developers alike promoted aggressive annexation of central Ohio suburbs, especially those to the north of the city. Unlike in Cleveland and Cincinnati, the city captured tax revenue from outlying homes and shopping centers while developers cashed in on cheap, city-subsidized road infrastructure and utilities. But city and developer kingpins disagreed about how to address schooling and taxation in these newly annexed quarters of North Columbus. Columbus wanted to incorporate erstwhile suburban schools into their district to increase tax revenue, while developers knew that the white families they were trying to attract to outlying neighborhoods wanted to retain “local control” over their children’s education and avoid busing during the 1980s (read: they wanted their schools to remain all-white). Developers, meanwhile, opposed the imposition of “impact fees,” one important way for the city to recoup the cost of providing expanded services to these new tracts. This led to the first of many city concessions to developers; the state legislature’s “Win-Win” system, so titled by the developer-friendly editorial board of The Columbus Dispatch decreased tax revenue for the city and allowed annexed tracts to retain their suburban school districts. 

A “win-win” for whom? For developers and their friends in City Hall, not for poor Columbusites living in the southern reaches of the city. Cox sketches a “Golden Arch” stretching North from the Brewery District to Polaris and Easton malls. It captured the majority of metropolitan capital during the postindustrial era while the south side oxidized into an economically retrograde internal Rust Belt . Cox does not take this opportunity to make what would have been an enlightening comparison—has this sort of uneven development taken place in Austin and Atlanta? Is Columbus more like Balkanized Cuyahoga and Hamilton counties than Travis and DeKalb in this regard? And, for that matter, what of the staggering inequality of Sunbelt cities? 

Does Cox believe that the city’s salvation lies in a nice convention center or in municipal reform? I think it is the latter, but he never answers this question outright. Entire chapters are critiques of Sunbelt urbanism. Cox contends that developers get their way because of their wealth, a friendly city government, an at-large electoral system, and the complicity of “experts” (like the editors of The Dispatch and OSU economists) in the development game. Despite significant public opposition to both cushy annexation deals and city giveaways to developers, Columbus’s politicians have subsidized the wholesale transformation of the city into a Sunbelt metropolis. Cox implies that some politicians, as owners of choice tracts of “up and coming” properties and as beneficiaries of developer’s hefty campaign contributions, have personal stakes in redevelopment. However, these chapters appear alongside other, fatalistic ones. Columbus had (and has) no real choice. The city is dependent on the tax revenue (however small), capital investments, and bonds which the development game attracts, he writes. His early chapters on how Columbus will always be “minor league” compared to Cleveland and Cincinnati parrots Chamber of Commerce speak. The rather confusing structure of the book (why are there text boxes with seemingly immaterial anecdotes?), its many redundancies (it should really be 100 pages shorter), and the less-than-illuminating maps do not help to clarify Cox’s position . 

Still, this book is worth a read if you are interested in Midwestern cities. One takeaway for residents who do not benefit from status quo “redevelopment” is that while developers will threaten capital strike if you thwart their plans, you have an advantage over them. Developers cannot leave—their success depends on a public-private network unique to your city. They are not Ford plants, and if you continue demanding that the public sector stop enriching the private at your expense, developers won’t have much choice but to adapt. If you can outlast them, and read the pages of your local newspaper more critically, you may find that the city is yours, too.

This review is part of our series on Midwest History, a collection of reviews on texts of historical significance in the region. Writers interested in contributing to this series are encouraged to contact its editor, Jacob Bruggeman.