Mark Barbash teaches public budgeting and nonprofit financial leadership at Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs and chairs the board of the nonprofit Short North Stage.
Central Ohio is in the most dynamic stretch of growth in its history.
New companies are arriving, major institutions are investing and our national profile keeps climbing. The Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission once projected 500,000 new residents by 2050; we may now reach three million while the rest of Ohio loses population.
And yet nearly one in five residents – roughly 240,000 people – live below the poverty line.
The Mid-Ohio Food Collective now reports more than 1.8 million pantry visits a year, nearly double the pre-pandemic level. Food insecurity has spread into Licking, Delaware, Union and Pickaway counties. Homelessness in Franklin County hit a record high for the fourth straight year. Housing costs are climbing faster than wages.
This is what economists call a K-shaped economy: strong growth on one track, mounting strain on the other.
The old Columbus Way
A region cannot be economically successful and socially strained at the same time and still sustain its growth. Eventually, one track pulls the other down.
For most of our history, central Ohio answered challenges like this through a quiet civic compact – an unwritten agreement that this community looks after its own and that no single institution carries the weight of a social problem alone. Business, philanthropy, nonprofits, religious institutions and government worked from a shared playbook.
If you led something here, you showed up.
That instinct – eventually labeled “The Columbus Way” – is a major reason this region outperformed its peers.
It is also worth being honest about what that compact was and was not. It is most often remembered through big development deals rather than the social contract and the table where decisions got made was a narrow one.
When the same handful of leaders decide everything, the answers tend toward the cautious and the incremental. A renewed compact has to look different from the old one.
It also has to reckon with four forces straining the old model.
None of this reflects a failure of commitment.
It reflects the accelerated pace of change. But the alignment that used to happen informally now has to be built intentionally.
Government has a role too, even under real fiscal pressure.
Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther’s pledge of $500 million in bond funding for affordable housing is exactly the kind of investment that can move the needle and the Financial Resource Advisory Committee created by the city and Franklin County offers a serious look at funding the region’s social needs in a more coordinated way – work that should be extended across the region.
Here is what we need to do.
We have done this before. When the region faced economic stagnation in the 1980s and rising competition in the 2000s, leaders studied the problem, built consensus and acted.
The Columbus Partnership and Columbus 2020 grew from that instinct. The same instinct is needed now – pointed at the common good, not economic development alone.
Growth will continue to define central Ohio’s economy. Whether the common good continues to define its character is up to us.
Mark Barbash is a former director of development for the city of Columbus. He teaches public budgeting and nonprofit financial leadership at Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs and chairs the board of the nonprofit Short North Stage.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: ‘The Columbus Way’ is failing as community, problems grow. Time for change | Opinion
Reporting by Mark Barbash, Guest Columnist / The Columbus Dispatch
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Mark Barbash, Guest Columnist | USA TODAY Network
