The 2026 Northwestern Essays, #11--My Unexpected Hometown

Northwestern (6-3) finds itself in a very unexpected place with regard to its opponent Saturday, No. 20 Ohio State (6-3)--the two teams are basically in the same place.  Both teams have lost the last two games, including bad losses at home last week.  Both teams have questions at quarterback--Ohio State's Julian Sayan is definitely out, Aidan Chiles is as of this writing questionable.  Both teams are likely completely out of the playoff competition if they lose this game.  The difference, of course, is that Northwestern fans, while bummed about a bad performance (especially on offense with the back-up quarterback) in a 24-10 loss to Iowa, are pretty happy with the team; Ohio State fans, by contrast, are in crisis after a 41-28 loss to Oregon that, truthfully, was not that close.  

So, really interesting game this week.  It is the "Big Noon Kickoff" game on FOX, which as the name suggests is on FOX and starts at noon Eastern.  Because the game is in Columbus, surely Ohio State is the favorite and will probably win, but I think neither side would be surprised if Northwestern pulls it out.

Speaking of Columbus--in August 2011, I moved to Columbus, Ohio.  I moved to Columbus for a job that, by its terms, lasted only one year.  Instead of staying for only a year, as my fellow clerks did, I have lived in the Columbus metro area ever since.  It is the longest I have lived in one place in my life--the prior record-holder was Oceanport, New Jersey, which I moved to when I was nine months old and stayed until I was ten. 

Despite being the state Capitol, Columbus is in important ways very different from the rest of Ohio.  Most of Ohio is rural, either of the Midwest style in the central and western part of the state (think Indiana or Illinois) or the Appalachian style in the eastern and southern part of the state (think West Virginia or Kentucky).  Historically Ohio has been dominated by its two large, older cities on opposite corners of the state--Cleveland which feels like Pittsburgh or Detroit or Chicago, and Cincinnati which is a strange northern/southern hybrid city.  And then you have a bunch of smaller cities, with Dayton being the largest example, that can very firmly be called "the Rust Belt"--places that were industrial centers that have definitely seen their better days (fun fact--Vice President JD Vance's hometown of Middletown, Ohio is much more Rust Belt-coded that than the Appalachian holler he portrays it in his book Hillbilly Elegy).

And then there is Columbus.  Only six counties in Ohio experienced population growth from 2010 to 2020.  Five of them are in the Columbus metropolitan area, including Delaware County north of Columbus which was the fastest growing county in the state.  Columbus's Franklin County is now the most populous county in the state, surpassing Cleveland's Cuyahoga county a few years ago.  For these reasons, I have consistently said that Columbus has far more in common with cities like Charlotte or Raleigh or Nashville--Sun Belt growth cities--than it does with either Cleveland or Cincinnati.  It is much newer and younger than the two "big C" cities, never really experiencing the fall off in the late 20th Century that is extremely obvious in Cleveland and Cincinnati.

A big part of this is that Columbus acts as a massive brain drain on the rest of Ohio.  If you were to pick the median Columbus resident, I would say it is someone who grew up somewhere else in Ohio (usually the rural part, but increasingly the other Ohio cities as well), came to Columbus to go to OSU/work in state government/work for Nationwide Insurance, and stayed.  Columbus's growth and development has many ways been at the expense of the rest of the state, at least in terms of talent.  I am not saying this is somehow Columbus's fault--people go where opportunities exist, and opportunities exist in Columbus that don't exist in these other places.  But it is a reality that informs much of Columbus's relationship to the rest of the state, especially in terms of politics.  Last week, seven Democrats won state-wide office.  Five of them are permanent residents of Franklin County; two of them live in my little suburb of 13k people.  "Ohio Against the World" is a slogan you see on hoodies around here, but for politics it might be "Columbus Against the Rest of the State."

When I think about why I have stayed in this area, the answer is something that I think some will see as damning Columbus with faint praise, but I don't think it is.  The reason I have stayed in Columbus is that at no point in the last fifteen years have I had any compelling reason to go somewhere else, and certainly no reason that overcomes the unpleasantness involved in moving to a new city and starting over.  On a couple of occasions over the last fifteen years, I have thought about moving somewhere else, and my reaction after some consideration has basically been "nah."  Soon after my wife and I got married, we had a fairly serious conversation about the fact that we are both a full day's drive from our families and whether we needed to change that (a consideration that is complicated by the fact that our respective families live in metro Philadelphia and western Wisconsin--opposite directions).  After some thought, we jointly concluded "nah."  

Columbus's greatest virtue is that it has to be one of the easiest large metro areas to live in.  The economy has grown consistently for forty years.  While prices for things like housing have grown significantly, just like everywhere else, it is still very affordable.  It is not massively sprawling, so you don't have to face down the barrel of hour commutes.  The public schools, at least in the suburbs, are excellent.  It's not New York or Los Angeles or Miami in terms of depth and variety of things to do, but it has a lot of options in terms of those things that people come to cities for--food, bar scene, entertainment both low and high brow, etc.  The weather is mild, at least by Midwest standards.  Airport access is OK and improving, with basically a brand new airport coming on line in the next couple of years.

It is also is an easy place to move to.  One of the underdiscussed elements of moving to a city is how open or closed the social networks are.  There are cities where the first question you will be asked is "where did you go to high school?" which makes it incredibly difficult to move to a place and integrate yourself into the community.  You will always be an outsider, a person who "just got here" in those places.  Frankly, the other two "C" cities in Ohio are very much like this, especially Cincinnati.  And, truly, it sucks for a newcomer to live in a place, sometimes for a long time, and still feel like an outsider.  But because so many people come from other places and move here, Columbus is the opposite of that.  And this has a snowball effect--because it is easy to move here and become part of the community, more people move here, increasing the percentage of transplants, reinforcing the culture of embracing new arrivals. 

On the down side, one of the things about living in a place that is now big but not that long ago was small is that you still have a lot of what I call "small town bullshit."  Here I don't mean "elements of small town living" but "things that are legacies of being a small place that no longer work for the scale of the place now."  For example, our public transportation infrastructure is a joke.  Salt Lake County, Utah, which is smaller than Franklin County and has to deal with the logistical problems of, you know, mountains, has orders of magnitude better public transit than what we have here.  No light rail or trains of any kind, no Amtrak service, nothing.  It sucks.  Our cultural institutions are sort of half-assed and not well run or supported (except for the Columbus Symphony, which is good).  There is often a lack of "thinking big," especially in terms of making plans for the future. 

Also, Ohio State has too much influence on the town.  Here I don't mean "too many people talk about Buckeye football in casual conversation"--that's fine.  I mean that Ohio State has an institution has too much of an influence on the political and social life of the city, so much so that it often crowds out other non-Ohio state institutions.  To take a single example, my wife is an opera singer, so I got a front row seat to the way a group of Ohio State professors basically took over one of the two opera groups in town and converted it into a group that now only casts Ohio State students and faculty.  Compounding this, the culture of Ohio State is the exact opposite of the culture of Columbus itself--very closed, very insular.  This seems to be breaking a bit (especially in connection to Ohio State's very long and deep connection with Jeffrey Epstein associate Les Wexner), but the members of the Ohio State tribe generally do not really tolerate criticism of Ohio State as an institution. 

But at this point, Columbus is my home.  Weird events may have brought me here, but I am here now.  I own a house here (technically a condo, but still), I have a  kid in school here.  I got married here.  I got involved in local politics here.  Barring some major unexpected life change, I will be here for the rest of my life.  At a certain point, the positive and negative characteristics of a place are less important than the fact that it is your place. From the time I was ten until I came to Columbus, I moved eight times--more or less once every 3 years.  I saw a lot of places in this country, and I don't regret it, but at a certain point you want to be from somewhere.  Any promises of another place on the horizon cannot make up for the groundedness of a home.  Especially if home is a good place to live, which Columbus unquestionable is.