Dublin Wants a Second Bridge Park. Who Pays?

Local News

If you've got a kid in Dublin City Schools, there's a small but genuinely useful update worth setting up before fall: the district's switching to ParentSquare for all school-to-home communication. The part that actually matters — update your contact info once in ParentSquare, and it automatically syncs to Infinite Campus too, so you're not stuck making the same change in two places anymore.

You'll keep getting school and district communications either way, even if you never activate anything. But activating gets you the app, lets you choose your notification language, and lets you pick instant alerts or one daily digest instead of getting pinged every time something's posted.

Activate your account here if you haven't already.

Local News

With everyone starting to head out for summer trips, this is worth knowing if you haven't used it before: Dublin Police will keep an eye on your house while you're gone, for free. It's called a Vacation House Watch — let them know you'll be away, and they'll add extra patrol checks on your place until you're back.

A couple of things to know going in. It has to be for at least three days, and the house needs to be completely empty the whole time — if someone's stopping by to water plants or staying over even one night, they can't take the request. Otherwise it'll run for however long your trip is.

Sign up here before your next trip — takes about as long as packing your toothbrush.

Local News

Dublin's go-to move for years has been Bridge Park — need condos, office space, restaurants, a hotel? Build it there. Now the city wants to pull off the same trick about two miles away, turning the 210-acre Metro Center office district near Frantz Road into a mixed-use neighborhood with housing, retail, and modern office space. Built in the 1970s, it's Dublin's oldest and largest office park — and the city has said outright it's following the same playbook it used for Bridge Park.

Here's the catch, though. Bridge Park was a failing strip mall and a driving range — easy to clear. Metro Center is large, occupied office buildings and hotels, and the plan isn't to tear it all down. Some buildings stay, with new construction going up around them. Ownership is split between many different landlords, several from out of state, and the city's plan starts with the land along Frantz Road first. Getting that many separate owners to actually sell or redevelop is the real challenge, long before any big check gets written.

Two developers have at least started circling the edges. Pizzuti wants to build nearly 300 apartments on 19 acres along Blazer Parkway, just outside Metro Center's border. Keystone Hotel Group has proposed a smaller building just north of it. Real interest, but still outside the boundary — nothing like that has landed inside Metro Center itself yet.

And convincing those owners won't get easier anytime soon. Office vacancy across Columbus has roughly doubled since before the pandemic — from about 14% in 2019 to around 27% today, according to Cushman & Wakefield — as companies lean into hybrid work and need less space. That's not exactly a strong hand for owners being asked to sell or redevelop now.

If the city pulls this off, it'd be a great second act for that part of town — a second walkable, mixed-use district to go with Bridge Park. But what's still missing is the harder part Bridge Park never had to solve — getting that many different owners to actually move at the same time