Olde Towne East and the King Lincoln District will be eventual winners

If you’re considering a purchase on the Near East side of Columbus or in the German Village, Schumacher place communities, you should know that the Ohio Department of Transportation is going to tear up the highways on the East and South sides of downtown, where Interstates 70 and 71 meet and are the same road for a stretch.

Right now it’s a mess and the most congested, accident prone stretch of highway in the state.  Two generations ago, the highways tore apart neighborhoods and severed the Columbus Community while razing gorgeous and important residential and commercial buildings. Early ODOT renderings showed caps re-connecting downtown Columbus to its neighborhoods similar to the cap over I-670 that connects the Short North to downtown.

Now that construction is inching ever closer, it appears that only one of the bridges will be capped with enough real estate on top of it to actually build something – at Long Street over I-71, a big win for the King Lincoln Bronzeville neighborhood.  In the beginning though, there will only be a grassy field on the cap until a developer with some money decides to build there.

Most of the rest of the bridges be will built with the ability and strength to support a cap with buildings on it but that’d be an entirely new construction project or projects. Many Olde Towne East residents are upset that the project will wipe out a couple historic buildings on Parsons Avenue, including Carabar and ET Paul Tires–the Country’s  first gas station (I know, the irony).

I love the idea of a functional Broad Street bridge over I-71 that is pedestrian friendly with no on or off ramps coming onto Broad. Throw in that treed, park like median we’ve all been hearing about for years, extend it to Franklin Park and we’ll be in business.

It’s going to be a pain for residents of KLD and OTE for the next 4-6 years and there will be inconveniences. I don’t think property values will be adversely affected in the short term. I do think that, in the end, with a solution in place that looks better, feels better and will be more connected than what is currently there, property values and interest in these areas will increase–with an obvious bump up for OTE and KLD which have so much more pricing room than German Village.

Here is the latest from THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Coveted highway caps still in Downtown plan
But budget will limit final number
Monday, July 19, 2010 02:51 AM
By Robert Vitale
Bridges over a rebuilt I-70/71 will be better than the standard concrete and chain-link of today.

But only one of the six spans to be replaced during the project’s first half will include a Short North-style cap that near-Downtown neighborhoods have coveted throughout the planning process.

Ohio Department of Transportation officials say earlier drawings and descriptions were conceptual and now are outdated, even though they’re still posted on the agency’s website. The “visioning exercises” included cost estimates but weren’t subjected to the budget realities applied as the state moves toward a 2011 construction kickoff.

“We’re down to the nuts-and-bolts decisions now,”  more here