Politicians
Don't Deserve a Second Shot at City Center
by J. H. Huebert
Columbus Business First
November 2, 2007
With Macy's finally pulling out of the long-troubled, almost-empty City
Center, the downtown mall is about to go back into the hands that
created it, as the City of Columbus and Capitol South Redevelopment
Corp. are ready to take over the property once again.
"It's the end of City Center as we know it," says Mayor Michael Coleman, "and the beginning of City Center that will transform Downtown."
Transform downtown? Isn't that what Columbus's political leaders told us City Center would do in the first place?
What short memories they seem to have. Within weeks of City Center's opening in 1989, then-Mayor Dana Reinhart was ready to declare "mission accomplished" like Bush in Iraq, claiming that the mall "has revitalized Downtown." Columbus Development Director G. Raymond Lorello confidently stated that the mall was "absolutely" worth almost two decades of preparation, $72.2 million in taxpayer money, and the use of eminent domain compulsion that had forced it into existence.
Some in Columbus were all too ready to believe the politicians' hype. In an editorial published just after City Center opened, the Dispatch praised the City's "elected officials and business leaders" for having "the courage to ignore the criticism and continue with the project." Its concluding line: "With City Center, you can have it all in Columbus." That's almost as funny as a headline the paper ran later that month proclaiming, "Mall Revives Downtown."
An early manager of the mall declared it "almost competition-proof," bringing to mind certain claims about the "unsinkable" Titanic. A visitor in those first days breathlessly told a reporter that the mall's "novelty will never wear off."
Today, of course, no one can question that City Center has been an unmitigated disaster, as shoppers have flocked to new suburban malls from which City Center was supposed to lure them away.
Too bad no one seems to have learned anything from this experience, since the City is getting another shot at developing the property -- which is surely the worst way to determine the building's future.
The names of the politicians may have changed since 1989, but the economic reality never will: government planners lack the incentive and ability to accurately forecast what consumers want. They are driven by political considerations and, at best, by what they wish people would do. Entrepreneurs, in contrast, have an incentive to determine what consumers really want and provide it, because they put their own cash -- not taxpayers' -- on the line.
So-called public-private partnerships do not and cannot resolve this problem, because in such cases (as with City Center), the market is distorted: businesses respond to government-created incentives, not consumer preferences.
Some might try to rebut this by pointing to government-subsidized projects that appear to have succeeded. But these prove nothing. Undoubtedly, many such cases involve businesses getting government help to do something they would have done anyway, and thus amount to little more than a gift from hard-working taxpayers to politically connected business owners.
Mayor Coleman has called City Center an "elephant" dragging Columbus down. But there's an easy way for the City (together with Capitol South) to relieve itself of this burden: by disclaiming all its interest in City Center immediately and selling it to the highest bidder, zero strings attached.
Does that mean City Center (or whatever replaces it) will then flourish? No. Plenty of private buildings downtown struggle with a high vacancy factor and will continue to do so. A fully private City Center may struggle along with them. All we can say for certain is that private hands are by their nature more likely than political hands to succeed in determining what people want in downtown Columbus.
That idea may frustrate politicians who imagine themselves capable of wishing a specific vision of downtown into existence, of making people want something they have demonstrated again and again they do not want. But there is no fairy godmother to wave her magic wand for the City politicians and their economically illiterate gaggle of planners.
The reality is, the Mayor and City Council may nominally rule the City -- but City Center stands as a monument to their impotence, and to the fact that in the market, the consumer is king.
© 2007 Columbus Business First