A year that once seemed so far in the future — 2020 — is now just 20 weeks away.
Gazing backwards instead of forwards into the crystal ball about Columbus and Bartholomew County, The Republic revisited just what the community saw as major challenges and trends in the early 2000s, much of it chronicled in a special section from the newspaper entitled “Vision 2020.”
In September 2004, The Republic ran a series of 36 stories that identified the trends that would emerge or continue in Bartholomew County over the following 15 years and how the community must respond to ”remain safe, welcoming and vibrant.”
Looking back, the stories offer a snapshot of a community grappling with a similar set of challenges as it is today — how to attract and retain top talent in Bartholomew County, how to be a welcoming and inclusive community as the county’s foreign-born population increases and how to adapt to a rapidly changing technological landscape.
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When asked about the Columbus of 2004 as compared to the Columbus of 2020, business and community leaders said while many things have changed in the past couple decades, and much progress has been made, many of the challenges have, in large part, remained the same.
Attracting, retaining talent
In 2004, local business leaders were attempting to recruit young Bartholomew County natives and their start-up companies to Columbus by touting the city’s low cost of living and its research hub, which included at that time the InfoTech Park, a local business incubator and educational institutions such as the Columbus Learning Center.
At the time, SmallBizU, an online classroom dedicated to small business management, and the Entrepreneurial Network, a network that brought together business experts to exchange and brainstorm ideas, were gaining some traction, said Amber Fischvogt, who was director of small business services at Columbus Enterprise Development Corp. in 2004.
The Entrepreneurial Network was described that year as a “big step” for the local business community.
As 2020 approaches, many of those programs have evolved, been rebranded and operate out of the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce, Fischvogt said.
“The CEDC programs were rebranded and became part of the of Chamber of Commerce’s small business programs,” Fischvogt said. “The chamber is still doing small business programs. The programs are still out there, but they have a different look and feel to them. They’ve kind of evolved.”
Fischvogt told The Republic in 2004 that Bartholomew County held a lot of potential for a vibrant economy in the following decade if the community continued to initiate new approaches to foster a pleasant business climate.
Fischvogt is now the director of CivicLab, an institute that seeks to advance the practice of civic collaboration.
“I think in many ways we’ve done well (at attracting talent),” Fischvogt said. “But we’re looking at, as we continue to move forward, what are those gaps or where are those opportunities? It’s not just about attracting individuals to the community, it’s also about once they’re here, how do you engage and how do you retain them? Then the people within our own community, how do we continue to develop them and continue to retain them in the community?”
At the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce, talent attraction is — and has been — paramount to building a thriving business community, said Cindy Frey, who has been president of the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce since 2013.
“Talent has been the big question since I got here,” Frey said.
Since 2010, Columbus has seen an influx of young, educated professionals largely driven by “our major employers,” said Frey, pointing to a 2017 analysis by Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent non-profit, non-governmental organization that seeks to serve the public by “improving public policy, informing the public and stimulating civic life.”
In Columbus, the number of people ages 25 to 34 years with a college degree increased 62% from 2010 to 2017, the analysis states.
However, there still are some challenges to attracting and retaining talent in Bartholomew County, said Frey and Jason Hester, president of the Greater Columbus Economic Development Corp.
“Housing has been a factor that we’ve heard from our employers,” Hester said. “It’s a supply-and-demand issue. You’ve got the Cole, what’s happened at the (Golden Foundry) site, what’s happened in east Columbus, what’s happened on the west side — hundreds of new apartment building that have all been built, yet we know that relative to other communities in Indiana, we have higher rents.”
“If somebody is moving within Indiana, you feel the difference in housing prices,” Hester added. “If somebody is moving from outside Indiana, certainly if they’re moving from the coasts or even other areas, they just find tremendous value here. Relatively speaking, we still do have very affordable housing relative to the rest of the U.S.”
In Bartholomew County, rents increased at a faster clip than the overall rate across the state from 2000 to 2017, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
In 2005, 8.46% of rental housing in the county had monthly rents of $1,000 or more. In 2017, that number had jumped to 32.16%, or nearly one out of every three units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
From 2005 to 2017, the median rent in Bartholomew County increased from $666 to $871 — a 30.8% increase. The median rent across the state increased from $615 to $793 over the same period, a 28.9% increase.
In 2000, there were 29,853 total housing units in Bartholomew County, including 7,193 renter-occupied units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2017, total housing units in the county increased 13.5% to 33,897, and total renter-occupied units increased to 9,127, or a 26.9% increase.
In Indiana, there was a 12.8% increase in total housing units and an 18.3% increase in the number of renter-occupied units over the same time period.
“If employers are wanting to grow as they have been, we need places for those employees to be able to live,” Hester said.
Frey and Hester said Bartholomew County competes with other communities to attract and retain talent, but it’s hard to track how that competition has evolved over time.
“If someone is offered a job here with one of our local employers, then the competition for that talent is anything within a 30- or 45-minute drive,” Hester said. “I don’t look at our neighbors as our competition. There’s the aspect of, ‘No, we’re not competing against our neighbor, we’re all in this together.’ But if (prospective employees) choose to live somewhere else, say Johnson County, then their property taxes go to that community, their kids go to those schools, they may or may not be volunteering at Columbus non-profits. …In that regard, there is a little bit of healthy competition.”
“On the much bigger scale, we’re also competing against the best cities in the nation,” Hester added. “I think that’s why the call to be the best community of our size in the country is so true today. We’re not going to be Austin or Chicago or wherever.”
The competition to recruit talent is as fierce as ever, Frey said.
“There’s an all-out talent war for people with certain skills,” Frey said. “And that’s not just in Columbus, that’s across North America and the world. But there are some challenges in recruiting people to Columbus, and those include the Midwest and the size of our community. People have a certain mindset about what a small town in the Midwest looks like. We’re working hard to find ways to change that, reveal the surprising aspects of this community. …A lot of the global companies have recruiters who don’t live here, so they’re selling the job and the company, but maybe not the community. So we’re looking for ways to help them do that.”
Changing demographics
In 2004, local leaders were noticing an “influx of foreign residents” in the community — a trend that has continued.
Bartholomew County’s foreign-born population, as well as the overall population, has dramatically increased since the turn of the century, outpacing population growth rates in Indiana.
The county’s overall population grew from 71,435 people in 2000 to 81,024 in 2017 — a 13.4% increase and 1.5 times the rate of population growth in Indiana, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.
The county’s foreign-born population tripled over the same time period, from 2,683 people in 2000 to 8,147 people in 2017.
The increase in foreign-born residents represented approximately 57% of the county’s overall population growth over the 17-year period.
The state’s overall foreign-born population grew by 78% over the same time period and the U.S. foreign-born population increased 38%, compared the to 203.7% increase in Bartholomew County.
In 2004, communities leaders were already noticing a shift in the county’s demographics, Frey said.
“(2004) was a time when there was a lot of discussion about how globally diverse we were becoming,” said Frey, who worked for the Community Education Coalition in 2004. “We now have some 56 languages in the school corporation. But 2004 was sort of the beginning of that recognition that we have a different population we’re serving in our schools, but also in our broader community.”
In 2000, the most common region of birth among the county’s foreign-born population was Latin America, where 38% of foreign-born residents reported being born. In 2017, local residents born in Asia was the most common region of birth, representing over half (54.3%) of the county’s foreign-born population and nearly 1.5 times the number of local residents who were born in Latin America.
In 2000, 472 people identified themselves as of Indian origin. In 2017, that number was 2,954. The number of people who said they were of Chinese origin tripled over the same time period from 257 in 2000 to 816 in 2017. People who identified themselves of Mexican origin nearly quadrupled from 1,195 in 2000 to 4,431 in 2017.
Though the foreign-born population increased over that period, the native-born population — people who were born in the United States, Puerto Rico, other U.S. possessions or abroad to at least one American parent — also grew and still made up nearly 90% of the overall population in the county in 2017, compared to 96% in 2000.
In 2000, around 94% of the overall population identified as white, compared to 85% in 2017. The county’s African-American population barely increased — 0.1% — to 1.9% over the same period. The Asian population went from 1.9% in 2000 to 6.3% in 2017.
Approximately 4% of people identified as “some other race” in 2017, compared to 1% in 2000.
“In 2004, we were already starting to see a more diverse community, and now to be able to say, ‘Yeah, every single day we have a new international resident moving to our community’ continues to speak to the international diversity of our community and the fact that we’re a welcoming community,” Hester said.
Preparing for the future
Local business and community leaders said they are optimistic about Bartholomew County’s future over the next few decades, but cautioned that change is inevitable.
Fischvogt said that while she is unsure what the future holds, she sees opportunities for systemic civic collaboration initiatives, such as Columbus Leadership Development System, to continue to evolve in the future.
Created by Leadership Bartholomew County and CivicLab, the Columbus Leadership Development System is a comprehensive approach for developing individual, organizational and collective leadership skills
“There are some fantastic leadership programs in our community, but they’ve all been loosely connected over the years,” Fischvogt said. “What we’re really working to do is work with them in partnership and build those relationships for those who are looking to engage in the community, want to work on their leadership skills, want to plug in, whether you’re new or you’ve been here for 10, 20 years, here is a system you can plug into.”
Hester said the business community needs to be ready to adapt to evolving technology that could become more commonplace by mid-century.
“When we look at the core technologies of what drives our economy today, it’s a lot of diesel engines and a lot of automotive parts,” Hester said. “Well, we’re 20 to 30 years away, at least in the automotive space, half of cars will be fully electric. Those cars don’t require fuel systems or exhaust systems or half as many nuts and bolts if they’re a pure battery electric vehicle. We look at the trends, and as we look forward to the future, it’s like, ‘Well, we may have half as many cars on the road in North America. Of those that are on the road, half will be electric. Of all the cars on the road, half will also be autonomously driven, perhaps.’ What does that mean for people who today are making car parts in our community? It means we need to be ready to adapt.”
Bartholomew County added 1,400 manufacturing jobs, and the labor force increased by 4,688 people from 2000 to 2017, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
In 2000, 34.5% of the county’s workforce worked in manufacturing, followed by 16.9% in educational, health and social services and 11.1% in retail. In 2017, 34.6% of the workforce was in manufacturing; 19.3% educational, health and social services; and 10.5% in retail, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.
“None of us have the crystal ball,” Hester said. “When we look to the future, we see that change is inevitable. We all know this. The pace of change is as fast as it’s ever been. The winners are going to be those communities that adapt. I really, genuinely believe that Columbus, Indiana, is and will be one of those winners.”{!–[if gte mso 10]} {style} /Style Definitions / table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:8.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:107%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:”Calibri”,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} {/style} {![endif]–}
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The world was a different place in 2004. Here were some of the headlines.
- The Iraq War was in full swing, with 849 U.S. soldiers killed in combat in Iraq that year, or approximately one combat death every 10 hours, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.
- President George W. Bush won a second term in the White House — and the popular vote — defeating then-U.S. Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts, in the 2004 presidential election.
- In the world of sports, musicians Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake caused controversy during the half-time performance at Super Bowl XXXVIII when an alleged “wardrobe malfunction” resulted in Jackson’s breast being exposed to the audience.
- The Boston Red Sox won their first World Series title in 86 years, sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2004 World Series.
- "Shrek 2" was the highest-grossing movie of the year, pulling in a total of $919.8 million worldwide. R&B singer Usher’s album "Confessions" spawned three Billboard No. 1 singles and would go on to sell 8 million copies in 2004.
- "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown was the bestselling book of the year. Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year was "blog" and was defined as "a website that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks."
- Singer Britney Spears was the most popular Google search query in 2004, followed by Paris Hilton and singer Christina Aguilera. Soccer star David Beckham was the most searched sports topic, and former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was the fifth most searched for public figure.
- Google and Yahoo! were nearly tied for the most popular search engines on the internet in 2004.
- Facebook launched in February 2004 and would grow to 1 million unique users by the end of the year. The fledgling social network, however, wasn’t the first social network to reach that milestone in 2004. MySpace eclipsed 1 million users in June 2004.
- In Bartholomew County, local educators were excited that students would soon be "traveling down the information superhighway" — their minds seemingly "transported elsewhere via the internet" — and many local healthcare providers were "hoping to switch to electronic record keeping," according to a series of reports from The Republic in 2004.
- Twitter launched in 2006, followed by Instagram in 2010 and Snapchat in 2011. Fast-forward to 2019, and Facebook has 2.38 billion monthly active users (around 30% of the entire world population), and around 6,000 tweets are sent every second, or around 200 billion tweets per year.
- Other notable technology that wasn’t around in 2004 include the Apple iPhone, YouTube, Google Maps, Apple App Store, among others.
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