Yaromir Steiner
Developer Yaromir Steiner chairs the Columbus chapter of the Urban Land Institute, a global network of real estate and land-use experts who work on creating and maintaining sustainable communities. to make sure that we don’t become an Austin, where Austin became 30 years later, a traffic-jammed, unaffordable-housing place.
Q: What needs to happen to avoid problems with that much growth?
A: We’ll have to address our transit problem. When you can go anywhere in Columbus in 20 minutes, why would you install transit? Doesn’t make sense, right? It’s going to cost billions of dollars, and then you have to subsidize operations, makes no sense. That’s narrow thinking. The big thinking is Columbus adding a million people. If you can take 250,000 of them and put them in transit corridors, and use the existing infrastructure rather than taking hundreds of square miles of farmland, that may be fiscally more responsible. … Your measurement has to be 25 years out. You cannot look at it as what is happening today, because the bus line is justified. That is irrelevant.
You have to look at the bigger picture and understand it.
Q: Is growth in Columbus your main focus?
A: I’m trying to work now with the mayors of Heath, Hebron, Granville and Newark to try to do a similar study to Insight 2050 in Licking County. We are trying to activate Buckeye Lake now that it will soon have a strong dam. It can become a regional tourist (attraction) for central Ohio, so we are trying to work with Perry, Licking and Fairfield counties to make Buckeye Lake into a regional asset. It’s all about land use. How do you organize transportation, utilities, planning and things like that? I like Licking County because I live in New Albany, I’m in that direction. So the idea that Newark-Columbus, Lancaster-Columbus, Marysville-Columbus (cooperate), these are the relationships we need to reinforce because we are going to live or sink as a region. It’s not going to be Title: Founder and CEO, Steiner + Associates
Address: 4016 Townsfair Way Employees: 180
Founded: 1993
Locations: Columbus, Cincinnati Business: Develops, leases and manages retail and mixed-use projects with a commitment to building long-term value; portfolio includes more than $2 billion of projects totaling more than 9 million square feet of retail and mixed-use space. Education: Master's in civil engineering and business administration, University of Toulouse, France
Professional organizations: past trustee of the International Council of Shopping Centers; a past director of the International Council of Shopping Centers Foundation; member, Congress for New Urbanism Website: steiner.com the city of Columbus or Franklin County. At the ULI level now, I’m pushing even beyond that, trying to create a regional corporation where we’re trying to bring the ULI councils of Cleveland, of Cincinnati, of Louisville, of Indianapolis and Detroit together, looking at the mega-region.
Q: What does the future look like for Easton?
A: We are building an outer section of retail here, more of a new way of thinking about retail and residential environments. We are going to introduce a significant amount of residential, … additional hotels, additional office spaces and really want to bring Easton to life as a balanced, multilayered community, well beyond a shopping center. Right now we have a very strong office component. We have some hotels. We have a restaurant-retail component. But you want that residential component becomes a neighborhood, not just apartments, or not just homes, so that requires not only building things but also activating them in a certain way.