Central Ohio's population boom.

Where are we all going to live and work?

Welcome to this Columbus on the Record special.

I'm Mike Thompson.

Once labeled a cow town, known mainly for its college football team, Columbus is now asserting itself as a major regional and national city.

The growth projections are kind of startling.

Right now, a little more than two million people live in central Ohio.

The Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission projects the region will add more than 700,000 residents in the next 25 years.

It's a 33% increase.

So the question is questions are, where are we going to put them?

Where are they going to live, work?

Will we have enough water?

Will have enough electricity?

How are we gonna get around?

To peer a bit into this future, we welcome two people who have been tracking these changes for years.

Lisa Pat McDaniel, she's the CEO of Aspire, formerly known as the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio, and Michael Wilkos, Senior Impact Director for the United way of central Ohio.

Michael Wilcox, we'll start with the, how.

Real are these projections?

What are the chances they come true?

Well, projections always come with some vulnerability, but if you look at Columbus, we have been one of the most consistently growing U.S. Cities for a long time.

I always say to folks that a great decade for central Ohio is 15% growth and a slow decade is 10% growth.

So I feel that these projections are very solid and they're really rooted in what we've been growing for the last couple decades.

So I think they're pretty close.

Yeah, Lisa, we've grown basically 34% since 2000, in the past 25 years.

In 1960 to 80, we doubled the population here, so we've been down this road before.

We have, but I don't think quite with this amount of change.

A change not just in the number of people coming, the growth of Columbus out into the region, but also in the mix of the kinds of jobs we're gonna have, what those jobs are gonna require.

I mean, we are just at a kind of change that I don't think we really, we thought we saw a lot of change, but not as much as we're going to be seeing quickly now.

If you look historically, Michael, if you look at the 40s, 50s, 60s, that was baby boomers.

You know, where are these newcomers coming from now?

Is it just birth rate or are they coming from other parts of Ohio?

Where are they all coming from?

Well, it's a great question, and I'm going to break it into two time periods.

So if you look back at the period from 2010 to 2020, we had significant population growth, but half of our metropolitan growth was babies over deaths.

We have a very young meeting age, so we're growing just through natural increase.

And 26 percent of the growth was international arrivals.

And the smallest part of our growth, at 24 percent, were people moving to central Ohio who were already American-born residents.

Most of that in migration was coming from very nearby communities.

So Cleveland, Dayton, Akron, Detroit, Youngstown.

I say that one of the reasons why Columbus struggles to have a national name recognition is because our poll factor, the geography in which people are coming to Columbus from has been relatively narrow.

So then this pesky little thing called COVID-19 showed up and really changed a lot of those development patterns.

And we all know that every major American city saw significant population losses.

Remote work drove a lot of people who were renting in very expensive cities to think about where they needed to live.

And so since 2020, in the four years since the decennial census was done in 2020, our metropolitan region has grown by 87,000 people.

The state has only grown by 84,000.

So all of the population growth has been basically here in Franklin and the counties that touch us.

But the...

The components of that growth is very different than it was from the previous decade.

So only 29% of the population growth the last four years was natural increase and 71% has been from international immigration.

International immigration is now the largest share of the popular population growth we've ever seen in history in central Ohio.

And believe it or not, in the last 4 years we've lost.

Domestic or native-born American residents, just 3,000 individuals.

My theory on that is, is who's most likely to move to come from Cleveland and Dayton and Youngstown, Detroit?

Young people.

And And now, when young people look at the housing costs in Central Ohio, they say, geez, Columbus is now pretty much the same housing to income ratio as Chicago, and can I make that leap as a young person to Central Ohio?

And I think people are thinking differently about that move.

We'll get to housing in a second, but so this influx of immigrants, basically folks from other countries, it's changing our demographics here.

It absolutely is.

And I mean, it's just we're a much more diverse community than we were even 20 years ago.

Yeah, that's true.

I remember when I moved here out of college, we were definitely not a diverse community at all.

And now we most definitely are.

But that brings with it a lot of exciting culture, but also people with a lot of skills.

Some of the challenges to that are people bringing skills that sometimes aren't recognized here, and that's something we have to change, especially as these demographic shifts keep coming at us.

But it also brings a lot of new workers, and we really need that here as we see job growth just continuing to go up the charts, so.

And we focus at United Way on Franklin County.

And so if you look at Franklin County's demographic change, as recently as 2010, close to 70% of the county was white.

By the end of the decade, it was just over 60%.

All of our population growth has been non-white since 2020.

So we're on track to not have a racial majority in Franklin County by the end of this decade, that's how quickly it's shifting.

And is it, Lisa, what's driving it?

Is it jobs?

Is it the attractiveness of the housing, the advances in the city as far as arts, sports, Growth over.

Yeah, growth overall.

No, I do think it's because of the fact that it's a newer city.

I do you think that, not recently, but previously, it was the housing, the cost of housing, the ability to get jobs.

I mean, Columbus has been driving the GDP for the state for a while.

And so you know if you come here.

And as we know, young people are making decisions.

Where do I want to go versus do I have a job already?

And there's a lot of opportunity here.

So that's what's driving it.

How do we compare to, you mentioned Chicago, how do we compared to other cities?

I know we're doing better than say Cleveland or Toledo, Cincinnati is okay, I guess, but you know, Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, how are we doing compared to those cities?

As far as population growth?

Yeah, so, well, Columbus is definitely the standout.

We are growing quite fast for a Midwestern city, but we are not Charlotte or Austin.

Some of these other benchmark cities we do like to compare ourselves to tend to be growing at twice the rate of Central Ohio.

And when you look at Cincinnati, well, it has some modest growth, growing slower than the national average.

Central Ohio is growing faster than the natural average.

A lot of that growth in Cincinnati is on the Kentucky side.

So when you look at the Ohio counties that population growth is considerably slower But going back to the decennial census It's fascinating when I tell people that 74% of Ohio's population growth over a decade was one county and it was Franklin County So pretty pretty significant growth here You know, let me add though, interestingly enough, the biggest city where people are coming to Columbus from, Cook County, Chicago.

Why is that?

You know, I think because while Chicago is a, even though it's a major city, it's very Midwest city, and Columbus is a very Midwest City.

And I think it's, again, it's the fact that Columbus is so much more affordable in comparison relative to Chicago.

And producing a lot of jobs.

Yeah, and producing a lot of jobs, right?

All right, all of these new residents will need to make a living.

Morpsey Projects, the central Ohio region, will add nearly 400,000 workers over the next couple of decades, and they are not all going to work at Intel or whatever company puts its name on that new Albany computer chip factory.

Lisa Pat McDaniel, where are these folks going to Which industries show the greatest potential?

Well, I think this could be a challenge.

So we are growing much more in manufacturing, health care, tech, finance tech especially.

And so people coming here, especially if we're talking about young professionals, I'm afraid I want to make sure there's not a skill mismatch.

They're moving here.

They're probably moving here with degrees and where our growth is really in jobs that don't require degrees.

Or in healthcare, which not everybody wants to work with healthcare, not everybody likes needles and blood.

So that is going to be probably one of the challenges that we have.

So which manufacturing in particular, everything's advanced manufacturing now, right?

Right, right.

It's all, even if it's pharmaceutical, if it is an Andrel, which is a defense manufacturer, if it eventually is a chip manufacturer, they're all manufacturing.

They're all advanced manufacturing.

They all take a lot of skill in other things besides using your hands, robotics, and understanding computer technology.

So.

There'll be a lot of opportunity, there'll absolutely be a lot of opportunities and we may start attracting a different demographic, perhaps people who are looking to do credentials or two year degrees and not necessarily a four year right away.

So back to manufacturing, Michael, that's, you know, for 20, 30 years, it was away from manufacturing in this part of the country.

Well, I think it's interesting when you compare the fact that so much of the growth of central Ohio is now driven by this advanced manufacturing when we all know that central Ohio was never really a manufacturing city because it simply was not on a navigable waterway the way Cincinnati was or Cleveland with the Great Lakes.

And so the other thing that is important to acknowledge is that the industry and manufacturing that central ohio did have, we held onto it a lot later than the in Cleveland's and Detroit's.

They started to lose a lot of those jobs in the 1970s, but I always tell folks, to give you this visual, imagine you're driving south on 71 and you're going by the old crew stadium, and you hop on 670 and then you get off at Lenox Shopping Center.

As recently as the late 80s, early 90s, there were nine manufacturers that were still in operation with 9,000 jobs, AC Humpco, Columbus Coated Fabrics, Timken, Columbus Auto Parts.

Every single one of those industrial sites has been redeveloped.

Only one of them went manufacturing to manufacturing.

It was the Timken site, which is now Rogue, but if you look at the salaries of what Timken paid back in the day versus what Rogue pays today, they're not a one-to-one comparison.

Where all the other sites went from manufacturing, Lenox Shopping Center was Lenox Air Conditioning, right?

They had a thousand jobs there.

Well, you go from a thousand manufacturing jobs to, you know, Petco and Target and a movie theater.

Those aren't the same kind of jobs.

All the other sites went luxury housing.

And so it is interesting that this very stable Central Ohio economy rooted in state government, education, banking, insurance, is now becoming a manufacturing center where the rest of the state continues to see really a flatlining or a shrinkage in their manufacturing base.

So is the office worker in Columbus, Lisa, they faced the same fate as the manufacturer did back in the 1970s?

That's a really good question because we've actually seen over several quarters now that those kinds of professions have been slowly disappearing.

And we can't pinpoint any one thing.

It's definitely not related to AI because it's been happening before AI became such a thing that we've all given our attention to it.

And so when you think about that, if it's happening now, we have to think about We need to pinpoint where is it going and where are those people going to work.

And again, as I stated before, if you're working in an office, do you wanna do manufacturing?

But if you understand what manufacturing is now, not to mention all of the back office work.

I mean, there will be white collar jobs, white collar job, it's funny how we even say that anymore.

But we still have insurance and we still have finance, and those are very strong.

And some of the work will be taken over by AI.

But AI is really going to be a tool alongside of people as they work.

So although I do see it shrinking some jobs, there's definitely still going to jobs.

What I think is important to acknowledge though, is that the manufacturing that we're adding versus the manufacturing we used to have, the manufacturing you used to have was very centrally located.

It was in neighborhoods.

It was close to where there was a lot of workforce housing.

Now we're having manufacturing centers, but they're large sites way out on the urban periphery, which makes the housing and transportation connectivity a bit more of a struggle.

A struggle.

Health care.

I mean, the baby boomers now are entering their later senior years.

Will healthcare be as dominant a force in the economy 25 years from now when the baby boomers are gone?

That's a great question.

One would hope that as a society, we learn to be more preventative.

And you're right.

There will probably be a dip in the requirements for health care, given that the baby boomers will no longer be.

But there's still going to be a demand for health care.

And we're already, you know, we're up.

People are still going to be getting sick.

Yeah, they're still getting sick, but... That's not going to change, even with AI, people are still getting Healthcare, nurses have been the number one in-demand occupation since the minute I took this job and it'll be nine years.

And it has continued to be the number one in- demand occupation.

And just the other day, they're still down like close to six to seven hundred positions that are continually not being filled.

So when you think about that, unless we have a huge influx just in nursing, let alone all the other occupations.

It's very possible that over time healthcare will right size itself once the baby boomers get through.

I hate to say it that way.

Well, no, see, the baby boomers are gonna live forever.

So the baby-boomers in our audience, don't worry.

I'm just speaking hypothetically.

Yeah, I was thinking about that.

Well, you know, I was just cleaning out some old boxes with some magazines and then I came across a Columbus Monthly issue from 10 years ago that was talking about the hospital building boom and it was talking the Neuroscience building at Riverside Methodist and the Wexner Center Tower and some things happening to children and now each of them are building projects that dwarf what was happening 10 years ago.

Hospitals, airports, they're always under construction.

Always.

They never stop building.

Anyway, Central Ohio already has a housing shortage.

There are not enough homes across all price categories, but affordable housing is an especially short supply.

And because of the expected population growth, the shortage could get worse.

Building industry experts say the region needs more than 100,000 new housing units just over the next 10 years.

Michael Wilcox, where are these The house is going to be built.

Well, let's wind the clock back just a little bit.

In 2010, we had 107 housing units for every 100 households.

By 2020, we were down to just 102 housing units for every one hundred households.

I think what happened between 2010 and 2020 was this real recognition from people that affordable housing, which is this thing over there that I don't really understand, it's got some complex income guidelines.

Reverse the order of affordable housing to housing affordability, and everybody started to talk about housing costs.

We're on track, because of this chronic underbuilding, we're on the track to only have 96 housing units for every 100 households by the end of the decade.

So I believe this housing pressure that we're all experiencing, it's gonna be here for a while.

Now, what's fascinating about the geography of that growth is yes, there is, and continues to be a lot of growth on the urban periphery.

But things really began to change after 2010, where that growth moved inward.

So if you look at neighborhoods like Linden, Linden's now a growing neighborhood for the first time in 50 years, they added 2,700 people.

The Northland community added nearly 13,700 people in a decade, but only added 464 housing units.

So what we're starting to notice in neighborhoods like Whitehall, Reynoldsburg, Linden and Northland, is there might be significant population growth even though you can't see it.

Because there's more people living per unit.

If housing costs are going up faster than your income, one way to offset that is just have more people living in the unit.

And for young people who've wanted to move out of mom and dad's home or auntie's home and get their own place, they're not able to do that as young as they used to be.

So we're seeing vacant and abandoned housing getting reused.

We're seeing more people per unit and we're seen a movement of people back into inner city neighborhoods.

So Lisa, is Sproul a thing of the past?

But to go back to what Mike said before, no, because a lot of these major employment areas are around the periphery of the city.

And with transportation, I mean, Coda is doing its best.

There's all these plans, but there's going to need to be more housing out on that periphery too, because people wanna live closer to where they work and they wanna be able to access it easily.

And so, I think we're...

I would say it's not going to be sprawl in the way we might have considered it in the 70s and the 80s.

Is the housing going to look differently, back in the 70s and 80s, little Cape Cod on a quarter acre lot in Dublin, in Delaware County, or in Hilliard, in Westerville, in New Albany.

Is that going to be the case anymore?

So what is the real conundrum is we have a zoning code that really favors this three and four bedroom single family detached home on a standard lot.

And that's just not the demographics of who we've become.

And so we need a very different type of housing typology in order to build toward the future.

So, you know, when you look at what the city of Columbus is doing, they've already passed their first phase of zone in which was about rezoning the commercial corridors or the transit lines.

Which up until July of last year those 140 miles of commercial corridors were zoned for 6,000 units of housing.

Now they're zoned for 88,000 units of housing.

So if you want to build a five, six or seven story building now in one of these commercial corridors, the city has made it much, much easier.

And then just recently the mayor's office unveiled the second phase of zone-in, which is going into the neighborhoods to look at accessory dwelling units and duplexes and triplexes and other kinds of housing types.

Dublin, New Albany, Westerville, they're rezoning to allow for these types of homes.

I think that the pressure is going to come.

I mean, I really do.

And you know, as you go farther out, for example, if you take 33 North and you start to go through Marysville, there are all kinds of developments with homes on smaller lots, smaller homes, apartments, condos that you wouldn't have expected to see that far out.

So I think you're going to see it.

And I mean in Dublin, you have Bridge Park, right?

And Bridge Park is.

It's very hard to get a unit in there.

Yeah, Upper Ellington has done it.

But they aren't affordable.

Yeah.

Well, they are affordable for some, but not for all.

Well, it's a big shift.

I mean, when you look at what's happening on Main Street in Bexley, and you mentioned Upper Arlington, you know, many of Central Ohio's suburban communities are looking to go with greater density and building more town centers.

Reynoldsburg, Pickerington, Hilliard, they've all adopted very pro-housing policies.

You look at happening on 270 in Hilliards, which is their new version of Bridge Park.

Some other communities are kind of waiting to see what the kind of regional picture What is important is that Columbus has said we're willing to do what we need to do to make sure that half of all the future housing units can be built in the city of Columbus in an easier way.

But the city Columbus is only 45% of the metropolitan region, so the whole region has to look at housing.

Other communities have to step up.

Well, if we grow population, add jobs and workplaces, and add homes, our systems will feel the pinch.

We will need more water.

We'll have to get rid of sewage, that's how it works.

We'll need more electricity to power homes, factories, data centers, and office buildings.

And unless we all want to work from home and order everything from Grubhub, we'll need larger roads and new ways to get from point A to point B.

All we have to do is look at water shortages in the Southwest and traffic jams in Atlanta and Austin to see what rapid growth can do to daily life.

So Lisa, Pat McDaniel, are our systems ready for this?

That's a really good question.

I think that they are going to be forced to move towards some of the things that we started to move toward, like clean energy options, electric cars.

I think we definitely.

Will probably not have data centers, and that'll probably end up being a blessing because of the amount of water that they use.

And I think technology will keep moving forward to accommodate that.

But I really think things like solar panels and primarily probably solar panels and other sources of clean energy, it's gonna become a necessity to do them.

And you can see people moving towards them even without all the incentives they'd had previously.

Yeah, I mean that technology will also improve as well cities have to handle this by building more lanes of highways They sure have are we gonna do that here?

So, let's talk about that and I always like to wind the clock back because I think history is very important to understand current and future context.

So believe it or not, the idea to build Interstate 270 was written in a report in 1953.

They started construction nine years later, 1962.

The highway opened in 1975 and the Columbus Dispatch wrote an editorial calling 270, Wait for it.

The Highway to Nowhere.

Why would anybody get on the highway and then 55 minutes later, you end up at the same place you started from?

So if we continue to build in the way that we have built over the last several decades, an outer outer belt would be something that would be a logical conclusion.

However, the voters of Franklin County by a 16-point margin approved an $8 billion mass transit plan in November of last year called Link Us.

And I think the link us levy was.

Uh...

Truly transportation restorative justice because it looks at the pedestrian experience the bicyclist it looks it bus rapid transit three lines should be open by twenty thirty west broad east main and northwest line out at bridge park in dublin methodist but it's also about giving people transportation choice yet the question Will they ride it?

I think they will.

Right now the average commute here in this city is 22 minutes in your car.

That's very good.

That is very good, but I do think that people are going to ride it.

And we do know that younger people prefer, still, they would prefer to take public transit than they would to drive a car if they have the ability to get where they need to go.

It's not going to be the big thing, because we're talking about this population growth, but these aren't people from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, these are new, this is a new generation, I think a little differently.

Well, let me give you an example that's just a couple blocks here from the station.

The University Area Commission in the City of Columbus just approved a 13-story apartment building at the corner of 9th and High.

It'll have 435 bedrooms and zero parking spaces.

This is the way in which developers are saying, I want to build for the city of the future.

And people are moving to Columbus, at least for Ohio State University, which is what this building really serves the OSU community.

You know they're moving here from los angeles in new york city but they're also coming here from bangalore in shanghai and they have very different attitudes about uh...

The role of a single occupancy vehicle you think about the average used car payment is five hundred fifty dollars a month the average payment on a new car seven fifty year old and uh...

Gasoline and insurance cell phone chargers don't forget to sell oh there you go so you know we talk a lot about housing costs but we don't talk about the exorbitant cost of transportation and if some people can get from point A to point B.

And not have that transportation cost, we'll not only have a different kind of city, but we'll have different transportation options.

We could spend a lot of time talking about this and we're going to save this program and come back in twenty five years and see if we are right.

See if we have a new road to nowhere.

I would love that.

I hope we don't have.

I don't have one of those.

Yeah, I hope we don't.

All right, that is Columbus on the record for this week.

My thanks to our panelists, Michael Wilkos of the United Way of Central Ohio and Lisa Pat McDaniel of Aspire, Workforce Innovation.

We urge you to continue the conversation on Facebook.

Make your predictions on Facebook and also watch us anytime at our website, wosu.org slash c-o-t-r. We're also on YouTube and the PBS app.

For our crew and our panel, I'm Mike Thompson, have a good week.