The first of three Downtown Strategic Plan Public Meetings was scheduled to be held tonight (the snow canceled it, and it should be rescheduled soon) but I can’t help but think that yesterday’s Dispatch article about the North Market by Robert Vitale was timed intentionally for this event.
The article starts off by looking back 20 years to compare the opening of City Center with the move of the North Market into their current location. Both were large projects taking place at the same time, but each has seen a much different fate. The City Center is being torn down, while the small business community in the North Market is doing better than ever… despite the current economic recession. Additionally, the article points out that the The North Market is now fully self sustaining and hasn’t received city subsidies since 2007.
Furthermore, the North Market has successfully served the city as a small business incubator. Several businesses that have started there have grown outside the market either physically or with a stronger online/shipping sales component. Jeni’s Ice Creams, Nida’s, Lac Viet and CaJohn’s are just a few examples of that type of growth. These are new businesses that are generating new tax dollars for the city, and providing new jobs to Central Ohioans. Granted, their numbers may be small, but it’s probably not too far fetched to imagine Jeni’s quickly becoming the next type of Wendy’s-sized local employer with hundreds of Central Ohio jobs headquartered here.
It’s my belief that Vitale wants the readers of his article to consider the North Market as an example of a successful publicly-funded project, and focus our attention on similar types of business incubators for the future. There are a variety of business sectors that could benefit from increased small business support: food services, technology, creative design, architecture, medical, biotech, and so on and so forth. In some instances there are existing incubators that could benefit from additional/public funding, such as Sandbox or the Kitchen Incubator program at ECDI. In other instances there may be room for new a public-private partnership between existing entities such as Battelle, OSU, COSI, OhioHealth, TechColumbus and other businesses.
Just imagine what Columbus could look like in another 20 years if we had a dozen other North Market type facilities in the heart of the city, each churning out new jobs, businesses, ideas, and innovation, each in a different field. That’s the type of creative city that I want to live in.
Nice work, Mr. Vitale.
Sounds great. I’ve been arguing for a long time that cities should stop bribing large corporations to locate within the city with tax abatements and TIF districts and use that money instead to fund the winners of an annual business plan competition for a year.