Decades later, Linden still looking for rebirth

Columbus’ Linden neighborhood knows loss, and it knows pride. It’s had plenty of both for decades. The question is how to harness the pride to reverse decades of decline.

As the city of Columbus points to Linden as a redevelopment priority, Dispatch reporters will spend the next year examining the area’s challenges and its prospects for revitalization.

The first installment ran last Sunday and featured Sundi Corner, a real-estate agent who lives in South Linden and believes it should be as nice a place to live as Clintonville, the prosperous neighborhood less than a mile away across I-71.

Linden never has lacked dedicated and energetic people like Corner who are determined to bring jobs and prosperity back to the neighborhood, but its problems have proved stubbornly persistent.

Consider this passage from a Dispatch story: “Mention the north Linden area, and many people will talk in the past tense. But a growing number of residents are talking about what Linden is today – and what it can be.”

That was in 1986. The new block watch that a Genessee Avenue couple started back then didn’t erase the area’s reputation for crime. An effort called Project Pride, which maintained a small park and gave House of the Month awards for especially well-kept properties, was already 17 years old then and hardly had wiped out blight.

Not many folks would say things have gotten better in Linden since 1986. That was the year the biggest part of the Timken Roller Bearing Plant in the nearby Milo-Grogan neighborhood closed, eliminating thousands of jobs.

The overall population continued to shrink through 2010. Since then it has seen an uptick, thanks in large part to growing communities of immigrants and refugees from Somalia, West Africa, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. But poverty, crime and blight remain.

Generations of city leaders have vowed to focus on boosting the area. What will it take to turn the tide in Linden’s favor?

There’s at least one obvious answer: Jobs. More, better-paying, full-time and with benefits. The sort of stable jobs on which the American middle class is