Columbus saw a ton of new development proposals the past year, but not all of them have a future. Here are 3 major Columbus proposals that died in 2021.
Harmony Tower
Originally announced in the summer of 2020, this proposal called for a 30-story, mixed-use tower to replace a parking lot at 158 N. High Street Downtown. The $100+ million project would’ve included a hotel, 15 floors of condos, office and retail space.
After announcing the project, Schiff Capital went silent and the project basically disappeared. There were no updates, no news. In some ways, it was a reminder of the way Arshot had gone silent on the SPARC project years earlier.
Sometime over the summer of 2021, plans for the tower were quietly abandoned, though no reason was given as to why. Speculation for its cancellation mostly revolved around Covid and its consequences related to supply chains and rapidly rising costs of construction materials.
Sadly, this was not the only skyline-altering proposal that went belly-up this year.
Whittier Peninsula Tower
At the end of 2019, a North Carolina company announced a proposal for a significant new development along the railroad tracks just to the east of Scioto-Audubon Metro Park in the Brewery District. The plan called for for the multi-phase development of 10 buildings, including a mixed-use tower that would reach up to 30-stories, with a 7-story and 12-story containing another 400 residential units and retail and office space making up the first phase. The use makeup of the 30-story tower and other buildings had not been determined fully at the time.
Rendering of the original 30-story tower.
As with Harmony tower, after the initial announcement there was radio silence for months. 18 months later, in June of this year, new renderings for the proposal all but confirmed that the project had gone through a serious downsizing. Instead of 10 buildings with heights between 7-30 stories, the update consisted of just 5 6-story apartment and retail buildings.
Unfortunately, the scaling down wasn’t finished. In early October of this year, yet another update was released. In it, the 5 6-story buildings had been reduced to to just 3. So the number of buildings had been reduced by 70%, and the top height was now 5x shorter than the original proposal. To me, it seems like a pretty blatant case of the developer never having the necessary resources- or ability to access the necessary resources- required for the original proposal, and by the end of it, the neighborhood development commission was just happy to approve whatever leftovers the developer had really intended to build all along.
The Mondrian
The Mondrian was originally a 13-story tower for 567 W. Broad in Franklinton. It was by far the largest proposal for Franklinton to date in its new revival. The Mondrian would’ve had 80 residential units and ground-floor retail space along Broad Street.
The 15-story Mondrian proposal rendering from Spring 2021.
In April we found out that the proposal had actually increased in height to 15 stories, likely to try to take advantage of new, large-project state tax credits, but otherwise, there was no known movement on this project.
We know by now that no news on a big project tends to be bad news, and while there has been no official word that this project has been canceled, the evidence points that it has met an end. It was reported earlier this month that the listed site for the project is now up for sale, indicating that the proposal is likely dead.
That said, this project could still have some legs to it and the situation will be monitored until a more definitive answer is known.
Proposals come and go, and in a city growing as fast as Columbus, the more proposals the city gets, the more likely it is that some of them never come to fruition.