This article originally appeared on Streetsblog.
Columbus, Ohio, is a retail Mecca. The town is home to the corporate headquarters of Limited Brands, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret. So it’s no surprise that malls figure prominently in the local economy. For decades they have guided development further and further from the core of the city.
Decades ago Columbus was served by a downtown mall — City Center — and malls in its west, north and east neighborhoods: Northland, Westland and Eastland. But in the ’90s, developers …

Stephan Whitaker, a research economist at the Cleveland Fed, has noticed two salubrious trends in RustBelt demographics:

1) between 2000 and 2008, college graduates rose sharply as a share of the work-force in several urban areas

2) in the future, the graduate share will keep rising as older, less-educated workers retire

This news is good taken at face value, because research by Ed Glaeser and other urban economists suggests cities thrive as idea-generating centers. When educated people interact face-to-face, they breed businesses and insights.

How segregated is your city?

You can see at a glance thanks to a project by developed by Bill Rankin, focusing on the city of Chicago. His idea was expanded to 40 US cities by Eric Fisher and posted on Flickr.

Using U.S. Census data from 2000, he created a map where one dot equals 25 people. The dots are then color-coded based on race: White is pink; Black is blue; Hispanic is orange, and Asian is green.

The city of Columbus has overhauled legislation on parking at new developments, seeking to limit parking spaces and expand amenities for cyclists, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

Here’s a rundown of the new requirements:
- Every type of building — bowling alleys, churches, shopping centers, restaurants, office buildings, etc. — must provide a minimum of two bike-parking spaces.
- Bigger places must provide an extra bike parking spot for every 20 car-parking spaces, up to a maximum of 20 bike spaces.
- Bike racks must be anchored to the ground …

I have recently returned to Cleveland after several years in the “Capitol of the Midwest,” Chicago. Chicago is filled with Midwesterners from all corners, and those who have committed to living there have a mixture of disdain, pity, and guilty longing for the places they left behind. The opinion they expressed was that leaving Chicago for a smaller Midwestern city would stifle career ambitions and deprive one of big city amenities. All they saw outside Chicagoland was corn fields and closed factories. In a discussion of urban development, one economist (originally from upstate NY) asserted, “Detroit and Cleveland no longer have an economic reason for being.” When I told people in Chicago that I planned to return to Cleveland, most looked dejected and some said, “I’m sorry.”

The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that the Obama administration has earmarked $400 million for Ohio’s plan to link Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and Cleveland via high-speed rail.
From The Dispatch:
Ohio officials are banking on federal stimulus money for most or all of the estimated $517.6 million they say they need to improve existing freight rail to passenger standards and to buy trains.

“This is some of the best news we have had in a long time,” Senator Sherrod Brown said. “If I put my ear down to the rail I think I hear …

Ohio voters recently passed a constitutional amendment that will allow for the construction of four casinos in the state for the first time.

One will be located in each Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.
Ohio voters have turned down ballot initiatives like this one before. But it seems this time the need for jobs and the pervasiveness of casino gambling in neighbor states helped sway the electorate.
Anyway, there’s been a lot of debate over whether this will ultimately be good or bad. I thought it would be interesting to hear from other …

Angie and Kate have posted about the Great Lakes Urban Exchange’s “I Will Stay If …” campaign a few times here; and as I was leafing through some of their photos recently, I noticed a number of references to bicycle unfriendliness of some of the Rust Belt cities.

With the Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey data now available, I took a look at what the numbers look like throughout the Rust Belt. I should note that I used only core-city geography data, so the comparisons are not completely fair, given the arbitrary nature of political boundaries, but I think they are reasonable enough for this sake of this comparison.

The state of Ohio lost population overall for the first time in nearly a decade, according to a study by Community Research Partners.

90.3 WCPN in Cleveland reports that the state lost 35,000 residents. In-migration and birth rates were not able to offset the decline.
Experts believe the out-migration can be traced to job loss. Ohio has a tendency to lose residents during a recession, experts report.
Franklin County, home to Columbus, managed to avoid the decline and gained residents. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County and Cincinnati’s Hamilton County both lost residents overall.
Tweet

Block Watch organizations across the county are latching on to a new powerful tool: social media.

The Associated Press reports block watch organizations are increasing utilizing tools like Twitter and blogs.

The article follows a Columbus lawyer who tweets about suspicious vehicles and break-ins to protect his crime-ridden Old Oaks neighborhood.

The strategy has payed off for Mr. Vickers. Neighbors report criminal activity has dwindled and the streets are safer.