Intel is building a $20 billion chip plant here. Columbus is the fastest-growing metro in Ohio. It also files more evictions in a single year than fit inside Nationwide Arena.
Most cities in this wave got their eviction crisis from decline — factories closing, populations shrinking, disinvestment hollowing out the tax base. Columbus is the mirror image. Its crisis comes from growth: a rush of new residents and new capital that has driven rents up faster than incomes can follow, in a metro adding people so quickly that its housing supply can't keep pace. The boom is real. So is the displacement it's producing. And the people being pushed out are not, by and large, the people the boom was designed to attract.
The contrast within Ohio is the story. Cleveland, an older industrial city, has actually driven its eviction filings down 27% below its pre-pandemic norm. Columbus, the boomtown, went the other way — up 38%, to more than 25,000 filings in a year. Columbus and Cincinnati both carry roughly a 10% filing rate, but Cincinnati's is up only 6% over its pre-COVID average while Columbus keeps climbing. Franklin County's filings have run consistently above the 2023–2024 baseline that Eviction Lab uses as its benchmark.
Columbus leaders have reached for the image that makes the scale land: in 2023, the city recorded more evictions than the number of people who fit inside Nationwide Arena — the 18,000-plus-seat downtown home of the Columbus Blue Jackets — and 2024 was projected to break that record again. The churn got so heavy during the pandemic that the Franklin County Municipal Court literally moved its eviction docket into an empty convention center to process the volume.
Eviction Lab's demographic analysis of Columbus makes the disparity explicit. White renters make up 53% of the city's renter population — but only 36% of eviction filings. That gap doesn't vanish; it moves onto Black, Latino, and women renters, who are filed against at rates well above their share of the renter population. The boom's benefits and the boom's evictions are landing on different people.
There is, at least, a growing recognition at City Hall. Columbus City Council has been weighing investment in legal aid for tenants facing eviction, citing a report finding that every $1 spent on an eviction-help program returns an estimated multiple of that in avoided downstream costs — shelter, emergency services, the public price of homelessness. It's the same right-to-counsel logic advancing in Houston and Phoenix, still early and still small against 25,000 filings.
To understand who's most exposed, look at the Near East Side — the historic heart of Black Columbus, and specifically King-Lincoln Bronzeville. In the first half of the 20th century, as Columbus's Black population grew from about 5,500 in 1890 to more than 22,000 by 1900, Mount Vernon Avenue became the spine of a self-sustaining Black economy so dense with business and wealth that it was known as "the Million Dollar Mile." The Lincoln Theatre, opened in 1928, became a nationally recognized jazz venue and a nexus of community life.
King-Lincoln Bronzeville thrives as the center of Black wealth, culture, and society in Columbus. About 64,000 people live in the neighborhood at its peak.
Interstate 71 is routed directly through the neighborhood, demolishing hundreds of homes and businesses — around 400 structures in one stretch — and severing King-Lincoln from downtown and the economic success next to it.
The neighborhood's population has collapsed from roughly 64,000 to about 16,000 — a three-quarters loss driven by the highway, disinvestment, and the flight that followed desegregation.
King-Lincoln Bronzeville is undergoing revitalization — and longtime residents are asking the question this whole wave asks: revitalization for whom?
It's the same mechanism this wave documented in Tampa's Scrub and so many other cities: a Black business district thriving under segregation, then a highway routed through it under the banner of progress, then a 75% population collapse. Columbus even has its own version of the Nextdoor-era tension — one longtime resident recounted neighbors posting alarmed messages about "a Black man in a hoodie walking down the street" as the neighborhood began to gentrify.
Here's what makes Columbus's version distinct. The city official now leading its effort to bring housing and people back to King-Lincoln Bronzeville is a man whose own family was displaced by the freeway that gutted it. His grandmother's home was among the roughly 400 knocked down to build Interstate 71. Reflecting on the city's new "Zone In" plan — its first zoning-code rewrite in 70 years, designed to allow denser, mixed-use housing in once-redlined neighborhoods — he drew the line between then and now himself:
"This is the difference between our forefathers who brought this freeway through and displaced my family. We have to be as intentional about including people as maybe our forefathers were about excluding and moving folks out of the way for success."
That's the honest tension in a boomtown. Zoning reform to build housing fast is a genuine tool against a supply crunch — the same kind of reform that community members in Gainesville feared as a displacement accelerant. Whether Columbus's version includes the people already there or simply prices in the next wave of arrivals is, as of now, an open question. Intent, as this official knows better than most, is not the same as outcome.
Perfect Tenant Innovation can't slow Columbus's growth or decide who its boom is for. What it can do speaks directly to the 25,000 filings and the disparity underneath them: rewarding on-time payment, building tenant credit through rent, and giving landlords a documented reason to accept a payment plan instead of filing — the same mechanism City Council is trying to fund through legal aid, working one household at a time, before the case is ever filed.
The Million Dollar Mile was built by people who made a thriving economy out of the little the city allowed them. Columbus is booming now on a much bigger scale. PTI is one more tool for making sure the people who built the first version get to stay for the second.
See how Perfect Tenant Innovation helps tenants build toward stability and helps landlords keep good tenants housed instead of filing against them.
Join the Tenant WaitlistA boom is only a success story if the people already here get to live in it. PTI is one more tool for keeping Columbus's renters housed while the city grows around them.