I Don’t Love Columbus Because I Can’t Participate In It

“I love Columbus!”

My passenger, whom I had picked up from East 4th and High, exclaimed.

We went into a conversation. I learned he had finished undergrad at Ohio University only a few months prior. From our conversation, he extolled about how the “city is growing” and there’s so much opportunity. He said that he tells his friends, family, and other frat brothers all the time about how much there is to do here. He tells me how nice it is to live in a city so cheap. “It’s like a budget Boston, or a little Chicago!”

I drop him off somewhere in Grandview Yard. Five stars. He’s a little excited, maybe a bit drunk. Whatever, I don’t care.

It’s 8 PM, on a Friday. I know that if I need to use the bathroom, I’d better find a spot soon — most places with clean restrooms are going to be closing soon. After that, I knew I’d be in for a fifteen-mile drive home to use the bathroom. I had been driving since 3:30 PM, and I knew I was likely going to be out until 3 AM.

I click “go offline” on the apps, as I pull into the Starbucks on the corner of Dublin Road and Grandview avenue.

Although Friday is usually my biggest moneymaker, this week is slow. College students are only just now returning to class. OSU Football season is over. Everyone is still broke from the holidays. There’s no real big event going on in the city right now.

I get a Venti Iced Chai Tea Latte from Starbucks. I press “go online” on the Uber Driver and Lyft Driver apps, and I sit in the Starbucks parking lot, waiting for a ride request.

I browse Twitter.

I look at Instagram.

I spray down my seats with Meguiar’s Hard Surface car interior cleaner, and do a quick wipe down. The guy two rides ago reeked of weed, and I swear to god I can still smell it.

I check Apple Music — it’s Friday, so they’ve got a whole new selection of “new music” I can check from. I’m not sure what the hell is going on with this algorithm — the first five songs are total trash.

Ugh.

It takes 45 minutes for either app to send me another ride. I see the ping; it looks like Lyft hit me up first. I switch apps, and tap “go offline” on Uber, as I make my way towards the Lyft call. The app tells me I should be on location in about six minutes. I’m driving for four minutes, when I hear the all too familiar “dee-doop” accompanied by a text message from a Bay Area phone number that says that my rider has canceled.

Dammit.

I navigate in the app to check the specifics of the cancellation, and I see the generic “Because this rider canceled within two minutes of requesting, no fee will be assigned to this ride!”

Damn.

I know I’ve definitely been driving more than two minutes, but I know driver support is useless. Looks like I don’t get that $5 fee.

It’s been more than an hour since my last ride.

Two minutes later, Lyft sends me a new ride request; this one has a 22 minute arrival time estimation. I am also in the wrong lane, facing the opposite direction of the ride request, about to drive on the on-ramp to 670. Hell no.

I decline the ride.

I get off the freeway, and loop back down Goodale Street, and I park on the side of the road somewhere in Victorian Village. I turn my car off. There’s no point in idling all out of my gas out, since I go through three tanks of gas in a week.

About ten minutes later, I finally get a new ping. It’s one of the residence halls on campus. I arrive a few minutes later, and I put my hazard lights on, and wait. A few moments later, two girls get in my car, dressed to go out.

I generally don’t talk to my passengers aside from a friendly “Hello” or “How’s your day going?”. It’s easy to tell when someone does not want to talk, and I am more than happy to oblige. To be honest, sometimes the stories my passengers regale me with are annoying, and I’d rather just focus on getting you to your destination quickly and safely.

I drop them off in the Short North, at Condado Tacos.

I check the ride receipt. I’ve made $3.00 for that fare. No tip.

I turn on the Uber app, and to my surprise, I get a ride request immediately. Just a few blocks away — I drive a little bit slow to get there, I’m only 45 seconds from them, and they’re probably not expecting for their Uber to come so quickly.

I arrive. Uber’s countdown timer and arrival start automatically. After about three minutes, a middle-aged couple gets in my car. I slide the “Start UberX” bar in the app and I can finally see where they’re going. Far, and it’s mostly a freeway drive, way out towards the Dublin/Plain City border.

I can tell they don’t use ride-sharing apps very often. They seem taken in by the novelty of ordering a car via an app. They compliment my car, say it’s “much more spacious inside than it looks!”. They say it’s very clean and they appreciate how “fresh” it smells inside.

They ask me the standard questions, the questions most every ride-share driver gets.

“How long have you been doing this? Is this your full-time job? Where are you originally from? What part of the city do you live in? Do you like doing this job?”

Some drivers tire of answering those questions. I don’t mind.

I answer them honestly.

“I’ve been doing it for three years, and yes this is my full-time job as I search for work. I’m originally from Northeast Ohio, Akron in particular. This job pays my bills sort of, but there’s a reason I am looking for work.”

People often follow up with other questions.

“Did you go to college? Have you thought about going to Columbus State?”

I smile. Or wince. It depends on what kind of day I’ve had.

I say “I graduated from Ohio State.”

“Oh.” they say.

I’ve lived in Columbus for six years now. I transferred here to The Ohio State University, sight unseen, escaping trauma from Northeast Ohio. I came here after I brief bout with homelessness. I moved down here owning nothing but a car (that I ended up totaling three months later) and a few clothes in some plastic tubs that didn’t really fit well or look very good.

Nevertheless, I graduated.

I am a ride-share driver. It’s an easy job. I started doing it in college while holding down a couple of part-time jobs, and other side hustles. It paid more than on-campus jobs, or doing retail. I could work “when I wanted”, although demand kind of ends up dictating a schedule anyway. I came here poor, with no assets. I needed something that would give me money, without interfering with my studies too much. For a time, it worked.

Ride-sharing’s moving target, shift-on-the-fly changes with their pay structure has turned a once OK paying job into a scam that feels on par with Arbonne or LuLaRoe. When I started, the commissions were split 75/25 (Uber was 72/28) with myself getting the lion’s share, and the ride-sharing company getting a small take.

This is no longer true.

I get paid per mile, per minute. In Columbus, it’s $0.87 per mile, and about $0.14 per minute. What the passenger is charged has no bearing on what I am paid. In other Ohio cities, it’s even lower; Dayton’s per-mile cost is about $0.60 per mile. In other parts of the USA, it’s as low as $0.24 per mile.

I guess I should count myself lucky.

When I first started in 2016, things were good. I got paid 75% of whatever the passenger paid, plus tips. Uber didn’t allow in-app credit card tipping, and they took more of the fare, so I primarily focused on doing Lyft rides. Back in the day, Lyft would run incentives, called the “Power Driver” bonus. Drive a certain number of rides, they’d take less and less of your commission. If you put in hard work, Lyft would take as little as 5% of your earnings.

It was great.

Little by little, Lyft started removing those features. First, the “Power Driver” bonus went from being commission-based, to dollar amount based. Now I had to hit a certain number of rides to get a dollar amount bonus; less good than the commission-based bonus, but still decent. At first, it was good; drive 100 rides a week, get an extra $225 dollars. I knew that 100 rides on Lyft would take me about 40 hours, so it was a push, but possible. Then after a few weeks, $225 dropped to $205. Then a few weeks later $205 dropped to $174. A few weeks after that $174 dropped to $155. Near the end of the year, $124 only came every couple of weeks. Then, $124 dropped to $82, when it showed up, every four weeks or so. Then I stopped getting them altogether. The last “power driver” bonus I received was January of 2019. I called Lyft’s support, (back when they had an actual customer service phone line), and the representative told me “Unfortunately, bonuses are random, and we don’t control who gets them or the criteria for receiving them. Keep checking back, hopefully, you will get one soon!”.

I have never gotten a bonus again.

I knew Lyft and Uber were going public on the stock market, and were looking to cut costs to show a path to profitability for their shareholders. I could feel the cutbacks coming. I knew I needed to get out before it all goes down and I’m stuck holding the bag, so to speak.

Still, even with the lack of bonuses, I was able to make ride-sharing work.

First, both Lyft and Uber changed the pay structure, I no longer was commission-based. They shifted to the per mile, per minute base I talked about a few paragraphs earlier. I didn’t even realize until about four months in; there was no email or announcement, just a new terms of service I had to accept when I updated the apps in the Apple Store. I only noticed, when I saw that I was earning less on rides I was familiar with what the cost had been in the past. I checked the receipts, and it was obvious to see that I was not making 75% of what the passenger was paying. It wasn’t even a consistent percentage, some rides I’d make as little as 40% of what the passenger paid.

Although slighted, and clearly making less than when I started, I continued to try and make it work.

Then Lyft took away surge pricing.

I had read it online, on Reddit, and on Twitter, and on online forums and message boards. Some markets across the country had eliminated surge pricing, (called Prime Time in Lyft speak), but for the time being, Columbus still had it. It gave me a real incentive to stay out until 3:30 am picking up drunk people who should have been cut off hours ago. It was an incentive for me to drive in a snowstorm. Or in the freezing rain. Or for a football game, dealing with fall-down, black-out drunk Buckeyes all over town.

Yet, the passenger is still charged inflated pricing based on demand. It was easy to check the receipt in-app, and learn the passenger was getting charged two, three, even four or five times the normal rate, only for me to get paid a standard fare ride.

Then Lyft took away the ability to see what the passenger paid.

I don’t have any way of knowing what the passenger has paid for their ride.

I don’t know if it’s surging for the passenger or not.

Between Lyft and Uber, I have taken over 8,000 rides in the central Ohio area. I’ve had thousands of different people in my car, and with that, thousands of personalities. Hundreds of viewpoints. Dozens of backgrounds and income levels.

You listen to what they say. Some of them have conversations that are banal. Some aren’t. You learn how people think, even if they’re only in your car for a few minutes, and never see you again.

It’s interesting what you overhear.

Some are boring conversations, what kind of errands are they going to run? What are they going to do for the rest of the week? What do they want for dinner?

Some are more serious. People struggling with money. People struggling with health issues. People who only had enough money to pay me for this ride, and don’t have a clue how they’re going to afford the return trip home.

Some are very telling. I think about the affluent person who bought a house in Olde Town East, only to flippantly and cavalierly shrug off concerns longtime residents have about their neighborhood being gentrified. I think about someone who worked with the city of Columbus, praising their work with getting E-scooter companies like BIRD and Lime to come here — saying its utilization and ridership by percentage is higher than most “good” public transportation systems.

I’ve learned from listening — no matter what political affiliation, the city is a very different place for those who “have it” and those who don’t. Those who have a “good” job. Those who have the right connections. Those who “look the part”. The ones who are “successful” can do whatever they want, get whatever they want. The rest of us have to do the best we can, with what little we can scavenge.

Columbus likes to think it’s doing something different than other cities. It says they’re more equitable, and more open, and more accepting, and that it’s full of opportunity. Columbus likes to go out of its way to pat itself on the back. It seems like every few weeks I that Google SEO optimized “Columbus is the best city in the USA to live!” piece on my Facebook feed.

They share that article and feel good that they’ve been told that their city is doing well.

Even remotely suggesting that Columbus is not the same for everyone is viewed as a personal attack.

I pick up a lot of young adults in my car who are my age or younger.

They call for an Uber. Or Lyft. It doesn’t matter. People constantly ask which one is better; they both pay the driver at the same rate. In the name of competition, (pre-surge pricing), they’ve reached price parity.

I pick them up. From New Albany. Or Grandview. Or “SoHud”. I take them to the Short North. Probably Standard Hall. Or Food Hall. I don’t know. Those two bars are interchangeable.

I listen to the conversations they have. They talk about whatever new apartment complex they’ve looked at. “Gravity”. Or “Battery B.” Or “The Jeffrey”. For them, paying $1800 a month or more is cheap. Yet, somehow it’s imperative they split cost four ways of a $7.56 Uber ride. Spending hundreds of dollars per weekend at the bars is normal to them. It’s easy for them to take off work to do a long weekend trip in Manhattan or Boystown, it’s no big deal.

Of course, they never tip.

More tourist-y passengers (or just people who don’t go out much) often ask me about what are some good places to go, and things to do in Columbus.

I used to know the answer to that question. But now, I spend most of my time behind the wheel driving for Lyft and Uber. I don’t know what many of the places I drop my passengers off at are like. I don’t have the money to patronize those spaces. Most of my time is spent working. It wasn’t always like that — I used to make enough doing ride-share where I could take a day or two off to myself, but now I can’t. It’s too risky, and whenever I do take a bit of time to myself, I feel on-edge, like I’m squandering my time. I don’t have a “real job” that lets me have a normal schedule.

“Ha, I couldn’t tell ya, I don’t really go out too much!” — is my usual sheepish response.

Every other day, I talk to someone who’s freshly moved from a much more expensive city, like Chicago, or NYC, or San Francisco, or LA — they’ve just moved here and they won’t shut up with “how cheap everything is here. They see those overpriced apartments and they marvel at how much space they can get for so little compared to where they came from. They come here with high paid jobs, connections — and it seems like the city loves them for it. They make the city more cosmopolitan, I’m told.

They rent in neighborhoods that are now trendy, in apartments that photograph well and are Instagram worthy. They buy houses and renovate them in historical neighborhoods, often with little care to the people who’ve lived there for decades. They say shallow, catchy words like “this little town has soul” or Instagram photos with dozens of hashtags proclaiming how “cute” it all is. For them, good praxis is planting a community garden or painting a mural, and saying “free to all” — never mind the fact their neighborhood might be a food desert, and the muralist probably isn’t from here.

I have filled out more than 600 applications since graduating college in December of 2017.

I am embarrassed.

I freely admit that the first year of applying for work, I was not 100% prepared — I didn’t have a strong idea of what my degree could do, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, my application materials were mediocre, and I was too focused on trying to get a job anywhere but here. But I got help, I got my resume reviewed. I met with career counselors and mentors, and other people who said they could help me on my way. I scaled back my expectations to something I thought was more realistic.

I‘ve talked about the interviews I’ve had. I’ve talked about getting to the final stage of interviews at multiple companies, only to get rejected. I’ve talked about going on promising interviews, sending the follow-up emails, doing due diligence, only to get ghosted. I talk about getting ATS’ed (applicant tracking system) and getting auto-rejected for jobs I know I’m well qualified for. I talk about the times I’ve tried to network and “seize the opportunity” only for it to turn to grains of sand in my hands.

To a great deal of the people I’ve talked to, my experience is not familiar to them. Many of them have told me about how they’ve maybe talked to a couple of people, and got a job right away. Even if they haven’t told me that explicitly, it’s obvious from the conversations they have. They give me tips and techniques that I’ve already tried. They give me solutions that don’t work. They tell me to do things that I feel like I’m too poor to implement.

I am poor. I have to be very strategic with taking off work to pursue an opportunity. Yes, I can “make my own schedule” but the time I’m not working, is the time I’m not generating income. Taking a full day(s) off from work to go after an opportunity that, with my previous track record, won’t bear fruit, feels irresponsible. If I take off work, will I make all my bills this month?

I feel like everyone is screaming at me:

“If you’re unemployed, why don’t you just go and get a job?”

You think I haven’t tried?

I struggle to relate to a lot of people now. The handful of times I can make it out in “the scene” (usually during a slow weekday evening, at a bar that has a drink special) the conversations people have seem out of my depth.

Planning for trips across the country.

Building a house.

Negotiating for a raise or promotion.

Office politicking.

Buying a new car.

Taking time off from work, without having to worry about lost income from taking time off.

Complaining about being “poor” because maybe they have to save up a little more to buy that shiny new something or other they’ve seen online.

When the conversation shifts to me, I stay quiet. I don’t have anything to add.

The other day, I had a passenger in my Lyft — an older black woman. She took her time getting in my car, as she laughed and said “don’t ever get old!”

Although our ride was short, we had a very meaningful conversation. She had been living in Columbus for 25+ years, and she had seen many changes.

We drove to her neighborhood, rife with new development. I asked her “what do you think of all these new apartments and condos they’re building in your neighborhood?”

She laughed, and bluntly said “Oh, it’s going to be “the ghetto” in less than ten years.”

I laughed.

“Those people don’t stay. They don’t care to integrate in the neighborhood. They don’t raise families in those apartments, and the houses where you can raise a family are too expensive. They’re gonna get grown and move somewhere else.” She said.

She’s right.

Columbus schools are not rated very highly. I’ve picked passengers up all over the city — the passengers who want to start families have overwhelmingly talked about moving to a suburb or municipality that is not Columbus, a large reason because of the schools. The handful of people I met that lived in these “premiere” neighborhoods often send their kids to private schools. Even when I was at Ohio State, I could count on one hand the amount of people I knew that came from Columbus Public Schools that went to OSU.

Why should they stay and raise a family in the city? There’s no incentive to. It’s not like Columbus has any sort of ward system (yet) that would actually give a fighting chance to getting money distributed to less served parts of the city, and maybe possibly improving our school system.

Growing up in Akron, Akron Public Schools feed into the University of Akron, for better or worse. High School kids, even if they don’t get into their dream school, they know that they can go to the University of Akron. Akron Public Schools are hit or miss, but Akronites truly do believe in their school system, even if it is not the best.

To see so many view CPS with so much disdain, structurally, is disheartening. Being a product of public school in a city that is more impoverished, I identify more towards Columbus public school kids than I do from any of the well-to-do suburbs that surround Columbus. If I was raised in Columbus, and not Akron, would I have had a chance to go to the school that’s in my own hometown? Would I have been encouraged to give back to my community and study at the world-class school that’s in my own backyard?

Columbus is full of new construction, but it’s never for the people who actually need it. It’s always one or two-bedroom apartments, rarely ever three or more bedrooms, and almost always “luxury”.

It seems obvious that the developers and the powers that be don’t want families or working-class people living in there. Although there are fair housing laws that are supposed to curb discrimination, in practice that doesn’t always happen. There are ways that you can craft policy and design your units to create a defacto sort of discrimination.

I am so very tired of developers creating only two-bedroom units that are clearly set up for “young professionals”. The units often times end up with bedrooms that are identically sized, with en suite bathrooms — often more trouble than they’re worth, even borderline dangerous for families with small children. They often end up charging $2,000+ for a unit with slapdash build quality and thin walls; appliances, fixtures, and finishes, are usually only marginally better than a much cheaper dwelling in a “less desirable” neighborhood. These buildings open with such pomp and circumstance; usually have some sort of instgrammable amenities attached to it, an upstairs pool where residents can only bring one guest, and probably yet another coffee shop or microbrewery. They cater to same people that end up in the back seat of my ride-share car. Now they have yet another generic apartment development they can choose from when their lease ends at their current place. The new units end up mostly unfilled — and you can tell — a lot of these places offer promotions to attract and fill units.

Charging $2,000 per month for a two-bedroom, and then offering heavy incentives on the units (because occupancy rate is low) is like making all the seats on an airplane first class, but not understanding why the plane is empty. The minimum wage in Ohio is $8.55. Many people living a quarter-mile from these properties, $13.50 is a good wage to them, and they don’t qualify for many of these units being built.

Some will craft internal policies that end up being discriminatory in practice — occupant limits and “occupancy checks” that feel antagonistic towards the lower-income residents that need housing. They create internal policies that don’t allow too many “non-relative” occupants living together, forcing working-class people who would need to share living spaces to cut costs into sub-par or more expensive dwellings. Or worse; some risk an eviction by breaking the rules on occupancy limits. This eviction not only ruins the renter’s credit, but makes searching for a new place to stay exponentially harder; I have seen friends who have had the correct rent-to-income ratio or even good credit only get disqualified from renting because of a past eviction, years ago. Some rental companies check eviction history as far back as seven years. God forbid you have anything even remotely close to a felony — that’s an instant disqualification for many rental companies.

And yet, I’ve learned that some higher dollar complexes don’t even do criminal background checks.

The rules are different if you’ve got money.

I live with a friend in the suburbs, living in the house he owns, paying rent to him. It is the only way I can have some semblance of a decent standard of living. Otherwise, I would be in dire straits, trying to find a place to live in a city that does not want me here. The quality, amenities, and benefits I get from living with my friend would not be even remotely possible by myself. I’m not even sure I would able to get close to it, if I did have a “real job”. The concept of picking out which swanky apartment complex I could move into feels foreign. My peers are building $300,000 houses in neighborhoods with good schools and starting families.

I can pay my bills, sort of.

I live from hand to mouth.

I am scared — I know that driving every day puts me at risk of an accident that could put me in the hospital, or at the very least, take away my car and ability to earn an income.

I see no clear path to being able to start my life.

I don’t think it’s possible for me to ever buy a house. Or save for retirement. Or pay down my student loans.

I have a degree from a “world-renowned” university, but my situation feels just as precarious as when I was homeless.

There are so many more in this city that are just like me. I know; I’ve picked them up in my car.

I think about the person who I picked up at the women’s shelter, escaping an abusive ex-partner, working with a social worker trying to find a place to live that’s on the bus line, since she doesn’t have a car.

I think about the people who I’ve picked up in Groveport, or Blacklick, or Obetz late at night and taken them home to the city, because they have no way to get home from work after 11:30 PM.

I think about the numerous people who I’ve given rides to, who grit their teeth and work their ass off at places like UPS or the Amazon Fulfillment center — working to exhaustion, falling asleep in my car — for a job that still doesn’t pay them enough.

Sometimes we talk. A lot of them had been living in the city for years — and we talk about how rental prices have skyrocketed. We talk about how pitiful wages are, and how raises seem to be scarce at their job. We talk about “the hustle”. I’ve got tips and business cards from multiple side hustles, anything from selling dinners, painting houses, to doing hair. We talk about how we want a better future for ourselves, even though it doesn’t seem possible. Our conversations often end with a “hang in there!” show of solidarity.

I interact with people who unapologetically love Columbus every day. They get in my car, and they rave about this city. They want me to agree. They want me to love it too.

But the Columbus they talk about, is not the Columbus I have experienced.

I don’t see the “easy job market” when I’ve been constantly ghosted or rejected.

I don’t see the “booming housing market” I could never qualify for the places they live in.

The things they talk about don’t seem real.

I pick people up on the campus that I graduated from — as they prepare to lead lives that I will never have — while they praise and try and explain to me how much they love this city.

The Columbus they love I have never been a part of.