Opposing gentrification
Milo-grogan residents try to maintain community amid growth
Daisy Milner owns five houses on East 4th Avenue, including the brick house where she lives. She has gardens in the backyards of several of them, and enjoys showing the okra, the peach trees, the beans, and the tomato vines climbing a fence to visitors.
Milner, 89, is a Milo-grogan area commissioner whose age is hardly a barrier to her daily activities, including dealing with constant offers to sell her homes.
“Ten a day!” Milner said.
Milo-grogan is among the latest Columbus neighborhoods to see newfound interest by developers.
But Milner said she has no plans to sell any of her properties there.
“I’m sick and tired of them,” she said. “I want to keep control of the neighborhood.”
Buying and keeping those homes, she said, is the way to do that.
New homes are rising on Gibbard Avenue, and a row of them line East 2nd Avenue near Cleveland Avenue.
The boxy, modern-looking apartment complex The Rise at 825 Cleveland Avenue stands as a stark contrast to the worn-looking buildings nearby. The Milo Arts complex has long been a neighborhood anchor, but Rogue Fitness’ sprawling 600,000-square-foot headquarters and manufacturing facility at Cleveland and East 5th avenues now dominate the landscape.
A new $13.5-million Boys and Girls Club is being built at Cleveland and Gibbard avenues. Just to the south, a 90unit apartment building, The Cleveland, is planned, with 3,874-square-feet of commercial space and a seasonal patio.
Change is a constant of course, but it has come more quickly of late to Milogrogan. A neighborhood long plagued by blight and crime and ignored by the city’s power structure, it is now eyed by many as the next area to be redeveloped and gentrified.
Some in the neighborhood welcome the new attention. Others are worried that the rising prices and new neighbors will force them out of what has long been a primarily Black neighborhood.
But Milner said she is not afraid of gentrification.
“We’re going to keep what we have, fix them up one at a time,” she said.
Milner said she’s not concerned that the neighborhood will lose its character. “I’m not going to let it!” she said. Milner said she moved to the area 60 years ago. She used to live in the neighborhood now occupied by Columbus State Community College but left when crews tore through the area to build Interstate 71.
Milner and her family found a home in Milo-grogan, itself sliced in two by the same freeway.
It was largely a white population then, Milner said. White people then began leaving.
But that is changing. According to data the U.S. Census Bureau released last week, white people are moving back into the area.
The census tract now covering Milogrogan is a big one that stretches beyond the neighborhood’s boundaries, going from the railroad track west of Cleveland Avenue to east of Leonard Avenue, with East 5th Avenue as a northern boundary and Interstate 670 in general the southern boundary.
In that area, the white population more than doubled between 2010 and 2020, from 165 to 342. Meanwhile, the Black population dropped 16%, from 1,207 to 1,016. But Black residents still make up two-thirds of the census tract’s population.
The census tract’s overall population grew by 3.4%, from 1,453 to 1,503.
In parts of Milo-grogan, the median household income is just more than $22,000 annually, according to the 2019 American Community Survey data, which is collected by the Census Bureau. That data comes with a high margin of error, but when compared to data from the city of Columbus as a whole, it indicates a community that could be vulnerable to gentrification.
Milner was a licensed practical nurse in Columbus for 41 years at St. Anthony Hospital, which ultimately became Ohio State University Hospital East.
She was born in North Carolina, one of 13 children. Her father was a sharecropper, and she still easily remembers long days of picking cotton in the fields from sunup to sundown when she was a child.
“I know what it means to hurt. I know what it means to suffer,” she said. “God brought me through.”
Nearby lives Andre Green, who has lived in her Starr Avenue home for 34 years.
Now almost 72, Green grew up in Milo-grogan after her parents moved from Huntington, West Virginia in 1950. They first moved to Starr Avenue, then on East 3rd Avenue across the street from what was then Milo Elementary School.
Green remembered people of Italian and German ancestry living there, along with Black residents like herself. The neighborhood had a market at the corner of Starr and Cleveland avenues.
There also was Dick’s Fish Market. A laundromat. Many in her neighborhood worked at the nearby sprawling Timken plant, which for decades made tapered roller bearings.
Like Milner, she owns multiple properties in Milo-grogan; in her case, three. And like Milner, she constantly receives offers to sell them.
Green said she might sell one some day. But she said she might just leave it to someone too.
But if she does sell, she said it’s going to be a bidding war.
New City Ohio is one builder that has been busy in the neighborhood. The Franklinton-based developer bought eight city land-bank lots on which to develop homes. Two of those lots were on East 2nd Avenue, and sold in 2020 for $350,000 and $358,000 respectively. Both were 1,974 square feet and each had three bedrooms, just like the three other New City Homes built next to them, which sold for $364,900, $380,000 and $387,555 in 2020 or this year.
New City Ohio partner Chris Knoppe said his interest in Milo-grogan began about a decade ago when he lived in Victorian Village and he was mentoring an 8-year-old through the Big Brothers program and went over to pick him up.
“He was standing outside of this house holding a bullet casing in his hand,” Knoppe said.
But it wasn’t until 2017 that Knoppe started working in Milo-grogan. In 2019, he sold the first home New City Homes built in Milo-grogan to a young preacher and his wife who lived two doors down. The price: about $300,000.
New City Homes now has five homes under construction in Milo-grogan. All but one are under contract, Knoppe said.
One buyer of a New City Ohio home is Laura Noonen, the senior director of global compliance for a retail company. She moved to Columbus from pricey central California, and bought her East 3rd Avenue house for $399,900 in May on a block where the market values of homes a few doors down are $48,000 and $56,000, according to the Franklin County auditor’s office.
Noonen said she wanted to move to a neighborhood within walking distance of the Short North, but Italian Village was too expensive.
The Milo-grogan home fit the bill. “This had the availability, had the features,” she said.
One thing that helps developers and buyers: the city’s 15-year, 100% tax abatement on new residential homes built in Milo-grogan.
John Turner, who administers the city of Columbus’ land bank, said that in 2017 the city sold 30 lots to Homeport for a 33-house scattered site, low-income housing tax credit project. The singlefamily homes are all rent-to-own.
Turner said the land bank also sold four land bank lots to Urban Development Ventures, and another seven lots will go for community land trust homes.
Milo Arts owner, others fight to preserve neighborhood
The sounds of Rick Borg’s broom echo through Milo Arts as he sweeps the steps of the building, a former school turned artist sanctuary at 617 E. 3rd Ave. The 10-year resident of Milo Arts is a sculptor, painter and multimedia artist, and he wears a paint-spattered cap and T-shit as he sweeps.
Borg, 63, said that he’s noticed the community begin to change over the years. Homes are being torn down and new builds arise in their place. But despite this, Borg said he would be “hard pressed to do much better” than living at Milo Arts. His rent is $350 a month.
Despite the steadfast and unwavering determination of Milo Arts’ owner, Rick Mann, to hold on to the building, Borg is uncertain about the building’s future.
“We just play it day by day and see if we survive,” Borg said.
Mann has a long history of battling the city over safety issues and the condition of the Milo Arts building, which dates back to 1894, as well as outside developers to preserve the Milo-grogan neighborhood. He said he is motivated by his tenants to fight against redevelopment.
“I really love these kids,” said the 73year-old Mann, who said just more than 40 people live there. “I don’t raise the rent.”
Mann said he receives multiple calls a day from developers attempting to buy his properties, but he is not interested in selling. At one point, Mann said he blocked more than 250 phone numbers of various developers.
The fight to preserve both Milo Arts and the Milo-grogan neighborhood is growing harder, though. According to the Franklin County auditor’s office, the annual taxes on the Milo Arts building are now a whopping $28,081. The auditor values the old school building at $1.07 million.
“They’ve got all the money in the world,” Mann said of outside developers who are looking at Milo-grogan as the next frontier.
For Deb Patrone, a Milo Arts resident and Milo-grogan area commissioner, maintaining the quality of the neighborhood is paramount.
“This community has heart,” Patrone said. “(Developers) may not understand the quality of the community we have here.”
Over the years, Patrone has seen an influx of wealthy, white residents into Milo-grogan. While she welcomes new residents, she is wary of new residents who show little regard for the community that has been built in Milo-grogan.
“It’s a close-knit community,” Patrone said.
That’s why she joined the area commission. “I would like to preserve it,” she said.
‘Look through their glasses’
“This community has heart. (Developers) may not
In July, Maurice Wills was at the small ranch house his mom rents on Gibbard Avenue. Back in 2013, the landlord, Gal Ben Haim of the Far North Side, bought the property for just $17,000.
Wills said he didn’t know what his mom pays in rent. But he said he has seen residents pushed from central city neighborhoods to areas farther from the city center.
While Milo-grogan residents say they receive multiple calls a day from outside developers seeking to purchase their properties for redevelopment, two organizations have been busy there for years.
Habitat for Humanity-midohio has built one new home in Milo-grogan, said E.J. Thomas, the nonprofit’s president and CEO. At the request of Milogrogan residents, he said the organization has focused on repairs and restorations to existing homes.
This benefits the neighborhood in two ways, Thomas said. It slows the process of gentrification, and it also reinvigorates the neighborhood for current residents.
Thomas said this is the specific niche that Habitat fills – allowing communities to make improvements on their own terms and in ways that keep longtime residents in their homes.
“You have to work to look through their glasses,” Thomas said.
The Boys and Girls Club of Central Ohio is redeveloping in Milo-grogan, but not in the ways one might think.
The club has had a location in Milogrogan since 1955, but is now rebuilding its location there at a cost of $13.5 million to better serve members of the community, CEO Doug Wolf said.
By next March, if construction continues on track, the corner of Cleveland and Gibbard avenues will be home to The Boys and Girls Club of Central Ohio’s Milo-grogan location and its administrative offices. Wolf said choosing the Milo-grogan club to house the organization’s administration was intentional, as it allows them to be as close to the club’s mission as possible.
Wolf also said he hopes the new building also will be beacon for members of the community.
“My hope is this building will be a place where (residents) walk in and immediately feel a sense of hope,” Wolf said. mferench@dispatch.com @Markferenchik tcarlin@dispatch.com @timcarlin_
understand the quality of the community we have here.”
Deb Patrone,
A Milo Arts resident and Milo-grogan area commissioner