Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning and Vice Provost for Urban Research and Community Engagement Jason Reece was recently featured by The Columbus Dispatch in “Were Latitude Five25 apartments always ’a towering problem’?”

The article explored the history and impact of the Latitude Five25 buildings, public housing originally built in the 1960s and sold in 2009 to a private company.

That’s because many such apartment towers were built as public housing projects in the 1960s and 1970s and then torn down when maintenance and other issues piled up, said Jason Reece, associate professor of City & Regional Planning at Ohio State University. Most didn’t last past the 2000s, he said.

“It's a bit of an anomaly that they’re still here just because historically most of these things were torn down,” Reece said.

He was shocked the towers have survived as long as they have without facing the wrecking ball, which they almost did in 2009, before a private company purchased the towers for $2 million.

Read more at The Columbus Dispatch