Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, City Council President Pro Tempore Elizabeth Brown and City Attorney Zach Klein react to The Dispatch series "Suffering on Sullivant" and discuss the prostitution, drugs, crime, vacant and boarded-up houses and other problems along that major corridor in the Franklinton and Hilltop neighborhoods. Ginther said it is "not a place where I would want my children to grow up" and called investing city money to address problems there "a top priority."

As the mayor of Columbus walked past boarded-up buildings, past a prostitute perched on a trash can and digging through her purse, past beer cans strewn across yards, he acknowledged that the Sullivant Avenue corridor and the neighborhood around him need a lot of work.

"It's not a place where I would want my children to grow up," said Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, who recently purchased a $525,000 house in the Knolls on the Northwest Side.

Ginther met with Dispatch reporters to discuss the recently published "Suffering on Sullivant" series and his plans for improving the quality of life along the major corridor, which stretches west from the Scioto River through the Franklinton and Hilltop neighborhoods. He called the effort a "top priority" for his administration.

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"We can't reach our full potential as a city and a community until every family and every neighborhood is sharing in Columbus' success," he said.

Ginther and City Council President Pro Tempore Elizabeth Brown each said there have been investments made in the neighborhood through efforts to curb illegal dumping and improve infrastructure such as sidewalks. Both said, however, that there is a long way to go.

"You can never just hit one note when you're working on a neighborhood," Brown said. "There is money coming here, but it isn't enough."

Both Brown and Ginther called The Dispatch series a public service that shined a light on an area of the city that many who live elsewhere were unaware of and where the struggles are numerous and ongoing.

"It was seeing in words a lot of what I've seen in my work," Brown said, calling the series a "crystallization" of the despair she had witnessed.

Brown noted that a preschool is being built on the Hilltop, an area she called "a child-care desert" and which statistics show is the neighborhood where the fewest children in the city are receiving high-quality kindergarten-readiness programming.

The Dispatch asked each of the city's seven council members for comment about "Suffering on Sullivant" and was told by those who responded that Brown spoke on behalf of the whole council. Columbus' city council members are elected at-large rather than by a district or ward system. None live on the city's West Side.

Through an examination of city and census data, as well as court records, The Dispatch found that:

• More than half of the city's prostitution arrests between 2017 and July 1 took place on Sullivant or within a few blocks.

• Emergency crews use naloxone, an opioid overdose-reversal drug, at one of the highest rates in the state on the Sullivant corridor.

• Just 12% of homes are owner-occupied in the Franklinton area flanking Sullivant.

• More than 1,000 homes are vacant in the precincts touching Sullivant Avenue.

City Attorney Zach Klein said he recognizes that progress in the Franklinton and Hilltop neighborhoods might seem slow to those who live there, but he said his office has grown more aggressive in working to build cases to shut down drug houses and abate nuisance businesses and vacant homes.

He said he knows that vacant homes and rundown properties create "opportunities for criminals to use these houses for nefarious conduct." Attacking that problem will continue to be a priority, he said.

"Families deserve better than to live next to a drug house or a business that is a front for drug activity,” Klein said.

Though they refer to all of Columbus police Precinct Zone 3 (which covers Franklinton and the Hilltop and not just the Sullivant corridor), numbers from Klein's office indicate that since he took office in January 2018, cases have successfully abated two nuisance apartment buildings and shut down 17 drug houses, one bar/club and one massage parlor.

He noted that property owners have a right to due process, and that building cases takes time.

Klein said The Dispatch series underscored for him how badly addiction can ravage a community. He said he fully supports the philosophy of the Columbus Division of Police's new PACT unit, which employs an approach that is more rehabilitative than punitive when dealing with prostitution and human trafficking.

Traffickers and pimps and those who buy sex should be handled in the criminal justice system, he said. But the prostitutes are victims, he said, and should be treated as such.

The PACT team approach, he said, "doubles down and reiterates why we are all in the trenches to separate criminal conduct from those who are locked in the cycle of addiction and mental health issues."

He said Sullivant Avenue is fertile ground for showing over time how his office and law enforcement can be "tough on crime ... yet still advocate for and support a rehabilitative approach."

While much attention has been paid to the women who walk the streets of Sullivant Avenue, Klein agreed that more must be done to reduce the demand. In the Sullivant series, a Columbus police sergeant offered suggestions — such as mailing letters home — for men who are caught with prostitutes or pulled over for related suspicious activity in the area.

Klein said he would like to work with law enforcement to find out what's worked in other cities.

"I want to solve issues," he said. "I'm not afraid to steal a good idea, and I'm also not afraid to be creative."

Longtime residents along Sullivant told The Dispatch that they feel forgotten by the city when they see millions invested in a stadium project for the Columbus Crew and improvements to the Short North.

"I hear you and I see you, and we're working away at it," Ginther said when asked how he would respond to those residents.

Ginther and Brown noted the ongoing development of a plan for the Hilltop that will be similar to the One Linden plan, constructed with assistance from the community.

The One Linden plan consists of steps to help residents of the neighborhood find employment, improve housing, reconstruct major corridors through the neighborhood, reduce crime and build business through working with private businesses, nonprofit organizations and public agencies.

"People that have made our neighborhoods great are part of the future of those neighborhoods," Ginther said.

The Hilltop plan will guide the city in how to make strategic investments to best raise up a section of the city that continues to be a leader in homicides and violent crime.

"There is nothing more important to me than to improve the quality of life and support the neighbors in those neighborhoods and provide a better path forward," he said. "We're not going to walk away. I don't accept that some neighborhoods can thrive and others have to suffer. It shouldn't be acceptable to anyone."

Brown said it has been painful for her to watch the decline of Sullivant Avenue from her childhood living on the West Side.

"The Sullivant Avenue I used to walk down is not the same Sullivant Avenue," she said.

The city needs to keep its "foot on the gas" and measure the successes and failures as the work to raise the Sullivant Avenue corridor continues, Brown said.

"Block by block or neighborhood by neighborhood, whatever the recipe is, we've got to keep working," she said.

bbruner@dispatch.com

@bethany_bruner

hzachariah@dispatch.com

@hollyzachariah