What exactly does the Short North think it is?
The only thing its leaders seem to hate more than the problem is the solution.
The Short North has a crime problem, as you might have heard. Last night, while attending the wake of my friend who got murdered on High Street over Labor Day weekend, another assault occurred that left the victim in critical condition outside BrewDog.
That’s .2 miles from where my friend died three weeks ago.
The madness was supposed to end when police and neighborhood leaders (more on them in a bit) thought they had eradicated the problem at the root by banning e-scooters preferred by teenage stick-up artists that were befuddling police.
You’ll probably be as shocked as I was that their idea didn’t solve the noise and crime problem. So, City Council did the next best thing: sending $750,000 to the Short North Alliance for more patrols in the area.
As the Columbus Council Review noted, the money comes from the “Reimagining Safety” sub-fund, which is poetic because there is nothing re-imagined about it.
Those extra patrols didn’t do much for my friend, nor the guy who got whacked last night. The assailants in both assaults escaped the neighborhood.
If there is a discussion in this city about re-imagining public safety, it won’t be led by the socially stunted weirdos on the city council. They’re too busy trying to shift the blame for my friend’s murder from a systemic failure of the criminal justice system to food vendors operating in the area.
It sounds ludicrous; I wouldn’t fault you if you thought I was pulling it straight out of my ass. But that’s exactly what’s happening.
From Mark Ferenchik of dispatch.com:
Responding to concerns from Short North leaders, residents and business owners about high-profile crimes, loud vehicles and other issues, Columbus officials plan to place more restrictions on food carts and noise.
They are crafting two ordinances: one that would shut down mobile food cart operators at 2 a.m. rather than the current time of 3 a.m.; another that would apply the same noise standards to commercial areas as residential ones and boost the penalties for violating the regulations from a fourth-degree misdemeanor to a second-degree misdemeanor.
Work started on these ordinances before Gregory Coleman Jr., 37, died Sunday after being sucker punched around 2:30 a.m. on Sept. 5 outside a bar on the 1000 block of North High Street where he had stopped for food at a food cart.
It’s easy to mock Republicans for trying to solve the gun menace by doing anything other than banning guns. But this is just as egregious.
Greg Coleman did not die because he stopped at a food truck. He died because he decided to confront two men harassing women and got sucker-punched by a career criminal. The food cart is the least important thing in that sentence.
Columbus does not offer bus service after 10 p.m. anymore. The bars are open until 2:30 a.m. And we’re going to ban food carts a half hour before the city kicks thousands of hungry drunks into the street? That being a recipe for social harmony only makes sense if you’re a Short North business owner who wants to sell food to those drunks.
The article only gets worse from there.
Jason Henry, a Victorian Village resident and a member of the Friends of Goodale Park and Short North Civic Association Foundation, said it's important to get people out of the Short North after the bars close instead of milling around until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. It's also important to deal with the noise, he said.
"If I'm coming from Dublin, Gahanna, Powell, for a night out, I don’t want to have some jackass on an ATV plowing down the street where I can’t hear," he said. "I'll just stick to an Applebee's out in Powell."
This guy doesn’t even live in the Short North! And even if he did, why should a neighborhood in the heart of the city cater to wealthy suburbanites? I don’t think anybody from Powell is coming to Merion Village to see how I feel about their latest development.
Do you think a guy like this is going to Applebee’s? If so, good! Fuck him! Let him stay in Powell, then. No skin off my back.
And it’s not like I don’t have noise complaints. I live a block off Parsons Avenue. Because it exists solely to transport suburbanites to and from downtown as conveniently as possible for them at peak hours, it’s routinely used by obnoxious assholes for drag racing in the middle of the night.
I could go crying to the cops or the media. But nobody in power will give a shit because if they did, this problem would have been solved long ago. You cannot have a serious conversation about noise reduction in Columbus without addressing the primary cause: Personal automobiles.
And hey, wouldn’t you know it? We had a plan for that a long time ago, too:
What do you suppose would happen if we kicked this plan into action? The same people crying about the original problem would start crying about the solution.
That’s the dirty secret of the Short North: Its residents moved to an open-air bar when it was a trendy arts district, and now they’ve aged to the point they think it’s those damn street meat vendors, who tend to be poorer and blacker than the average Short North resident, as the source of all their problems. They want all the perks of living in the big city but none of the drawbacks.
Until the Short North gets serious about reducing cars in the neighborhood, the noise will only worsen as the city continues its inevitable growth. The crime in the area will continue until we reimagine public safety by doing something other than lavishing the police department with whatever new tool of autocracy they swear they need to stay one step ahead of Johnny Bad Guy.
Guys like Jason Henry only want to return to when they felt the neighborhood belonged to them. But the wheels of capitalism never spin in that direction as long as there’s still money in the banana stand. His only solution will be reactionary shrieking to local media outlets. He should just cut out the middleman and start a Substack like other well-adjusted Columbus cranks.
The outcome of this newest wave of nonsense is easy to foretell. Street meat vendors closing at 2 a.m. will be a boon to Short North business owners, and the police will use the stiffer penalties to crack down on disproportionately poor and/or black people.
It’s that famous Columbus charade of pretending to attack a problem while actually making it worse. We’ll re-elect every one of the perverts responsible at the next opportunity, too.
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