40%, $500 Billion, We Could Do It In 3?

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COLUMBUS IS REWRITING THE RULES UNDER 40% OF THE CITY

Most people will never read a zoning code.

Unfortunately, zoning codes have been reading us for decades.

They decide where apartments can go, how tall buildings can be, where businesses can open and, in a city expecting hundreds of thousands of new residents, whether there is actually somewhere for all those people to live.

Columbus just proposed changing those rules across more than 40% of the city's land area.

This is Phase 2 of Zone In Columbus, the city's enormous rewrite of a zoning code largely built for a much smaller version of Columbus. The new proposal creates nine zoning districts covering additional commercial corridors, industrial areas, warehouses, hospitals, universities and major employment centers like Polaris and Tuttle.

But the number that really matters is housing.

City officials estimate the land included in this phase could accommodate around 13,000 new homes over the next decade under today's zoning.

Under the proposed zoning?

Approximately 119,000.

That does not mean Columbus is about to build 119,000 apartments. Zoning does not build anything. Developers, financing, demand, infrastructure and approximately 47 meetings eventually do that.

What it means is Columbus would legally allow dramatically more housing to be built on land where the current code makes that difficult or impossible.

The city started this process in 2024, when the first phase of Zone In changed rules along many of Columbus' major commercial corridors. That included allowing taller and denser buildings in certain areas and removing requirements that officials argued were making housing more difficult and expensive to build.

Phase 2 goes much bigger geographically.

Mayor Andrew Ginther called zoning an "invisible force" shaping where homes get built, where businesses invest and how neighborhoods evolve. That is a pretty good description of why something this boring on paper matters so much in real life.

Columbus is growing quickly, but land is not appearing alongside the new residents. The choice is increasingly between building more densely in existing parts of the city or pushing development farther outward into Central Ohio.

And this still is not the part of Zone In that will generate the biggest neighborhood fights.

Traditional single-family neighborhoods are largely being saved for a future phase, when Columbus is expected to tackle questions like accessory dwelling units and whether more kinds of housing should be permitted inside residential neighborhoods.

So if Phase 2 changes what can happen on 40% of Columbus, consider it the warm-up.

For decades, Columbus built outward.

Now the city is preparing to build upward, inward, and on a whole lot of land where the old rules basically said no.

The skyline gets the attention.

The zoning code decides whether it ever gets built.

Scarlet Letter Trivia

In 1905, Columbus hosted what is considered the first race of its kind in the United States?

A) A 24-hour automobile endurance race
B) A nighttime motorcycle race
C) A coast-to-coast airplane race
D) A 500-mile stock car race

SOUTHERN OHIO MAY BE GETTING A $500 BILLION COMPUTER

Ohio's transition from cornfields to server farms has officially reached a scale where the numbers start sounding fake.

A massive artificial intelligence data-center campus is being developed on federal land near Piketon in Pike County, at the site of the former Portsmouth uranium-enrichment complex.

The companies involved are not exactly small.

SB Energy, owned by SoftBank, is developing it. OpenAI is expected to lease capacity there. Nvidia will provide the computing hardware and has agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, while also providing enormous financial guarantees supporting the project.

Current plans could eventually provide OpenAI with as much as 8 gigawatts of computing capacity. Earlier development plans contemplated as much as 10 gigawatts.

For perspective, one gigawatt is one billion watts.

Eight of them is less "server room" and more "build an energy system and attach computers to it."

Estimates for a complete buildout have climbed as high as $500 billion, depending on how much of the campus is ultimately developed and what future chips, power infrastructure, construction and equipment cost.

The first 800-megawatt phase is expected to begin operating in 2028.

And then there are the jobs.

Reporting on the current proposal estimates roughly 35,000 construction jobs during development and around 2,500 permanent positions once operations ramp up. That would land in Pike County, an Appalachian Ohio community that has spent decades dealing with the economic and environmental legacy of the uranium facility that once dominated the area.

That history makes the location particularly interesting.

Beginning in the 1950s, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant enriched uranium for America's nuclear weapons program, Navy submarines and eventually commercial nuclear power. The federal government is now cleaning up the decommissioned site.

So a piece of Ohio land once central to the nuclear age could become central to the artificial-intelligence age.

There is also a small matter of powering the thing.

SB Energy's plans call for billions of dollars in new power infrastructure, including large amounts of natural-gas generation. That has already created concerns about emissions, water use, housing pressure and whether nearby communities will see enough of the economic upside to justify hosting one of the largest computing projects ever attempted.

Supporters see something very different: thousands of jobs and a once-in-a-generation investment in a part of Ohio that rarely lands projects with this kind of money attached.

Either way, the scale is difficult to ignore.

We've spent the last few years watching Intel, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others turn Central Ohio into what politicians lovingly call the "Silicon Heartland."

Now southern Ohio may be getting a project so large that $100 billion no longer sounds particularly impressive.

For a state that spent the last century making steel, cars, tires and glass, the next great Ohio factory might make nothing you can actually hold.

Just intelligence. Lots and lots of very electricity-hungry intelligence.

OHIO WOULD LIKE TO REMOVE A YEAR FROM COLLEGE

The four-year college degree has been called a four-year degree for so long that nobody really bothered questioning the number.

Ohio is questioning the number.

State universities are exploring new bachelor's degrees requiring around 90 credit hours instead of the traditional 120, potentially allowing students to graduate in three years without cramming four years of classes into three.

Ohio State and the University of Cincinnati are among the schools examining how the model could work, with the state aiming to have at least two 90-credit bachelor's programs available by spring 2028.

The argument is fairly simple.

College costs a lot of money.

Average in-state tuition at Ohio universities is around $13,000 per year, before you add housing, food, books and all the other expenses attached to spending another year on campus.

Remove a year and, theoretically, you remove a sizable chunk of the bill while putting graduates into the workforce sooner.

The state's research suggests the model would make the most sense in fields like business and technology, where programs could focus more heavily on coursework directly tied to a degree or career.

But chopping 30 credits also means something has to disappear.

Critics worry shorter degrees could eliminate electives, humanities courses and other parts of college intended to provide a broader education. There are also practical questions about whether graduate programs will accept 90-credit degrees and whether those credits will transfer cleanly between universities.

And nobody is proposing that every degree suddenly become a three-year program. Engineering, medicine and other heavily regulated or specialized fields are much harder to squeeze.

Still, the idea represents a pretty major rethink of something Americans have treated as standard for generations.

For years, the conversation around college affordability has mostly focused on financial aid, scholarships, loan forgiveness and tuition.

Ohio is trying a different question:

What if college simply took less time?

Three years. Ninety credits. One fewer football season.

Depending on the price tag, some students may be willing to make that trade.

Trivia Answer A. 24-hour automobile endurance race