Panel: Centuries-long racial gaps threaten Columbus growth; panelists call for neighborhood-scale, coordinated investments

Columbus — New research and local experience presented at a Columbus Metropolitan Club forum showed that racial disparities in economic outcomes in Franklin County are exceptionally large and persistent, and panelists said those gaps threaten the region’s long-term growth unless the public, private and social sectors mount sustained, coordinated responses.

Dwayne Pinder, a partner at McKinsey & Company and a founder of the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, summarized the institute’s findings, saying, “At the current pace of change, it would take over 300 years” to close national disparities between Black and white residents, and that for Franklin County the gap would take “700 years.” He added, “we don’t find a county where Black residents have the same outcomes or better as white residents.”

The numbers matter because Columbus is one of the fastest‑growing U.S. regions and the Black population is a principal driver of that growth, Pinder said. “If we do not fix that problem, we could see our population growth and our economic growth not just decline but go away,” he told the audience.

Panelists described practical steps they said should accompany those findings. Jason Rees, an associate professor of city and regional planning at Ohio…