CityLab, September 21, 2018: When a hospital plays housing developer
Growing up on the South Side of Columbus, Ohio, in the 1970s, Carol Smith didn’t think much about the nearby children’s hospital, except when she went to see the doctor. Though the institution sat a few blocks from her family’s house in the Southern Orchards neighborhood, the people inside the stately brick building seldom interacted with blue-collar families living around it.
”It was just kind of an island,” said Smith, now a 55-year-old auditor for the city school district. “There wasn’t outreach or anything like that.”
That’s changed. About a decade ago, Nationwide Children’s Hospital embarked on a project to transform the adjacent area. The medical institution pumped investments into housing improvements in the surrounding community as part of an audacious effort to create a healthier environment for residents. The idea, as a recent article in Pediatrics journal explained, was in part an effort to treat a “neighborhood as a patient”—improve the overall public-health profile of the community by reducing the stressors of a high-poverty environment.
So far, Nationwide Children’s experimental cure for a sick neighborhood seems to be working—housing values are ticking up, the vacancy rate is down, and several other indicators are showing positive results. But as gentrification pressures mount on the downtown-adjacent neighborhood, some locals worry that the most vulnerable among them won’t be able to stick around for the full course of treatment.
