The Secret American Dream Factory: My Love Letter to Columbus, Ohio
From Bangladesh to Home Ownership at Age 28
Columbus is one of those cities that everyone loves to hate. It’s located among corn fields and factory-towns in a decidedly red state. Outsiders associate Columbus with general boredom—a city destined to remain in the minor leagues, an overlooked flyover. Those people are chumps.
They don’t know what they’re missing. This is what they’re missing: the opportunity to transcend the luck of their birth, their social class, and their humble immigrant beginnings. The resources to shape their life into one that most people in the world can only dream of.
In 2017, I bought this cute little blue house in Columbus as a 28-year-old single woman carrying six figures in law school debt. (Completely on my own, with no “bank of mom and dad” to help with a down payment).
It’s located in the Columbus neighborhood of Clintonville (the Ohio version of Berkeley, California) where all the weirdo OSU grad students, academics, and artsy types live mixed in with young families. Exactly my kind of people.
I paid less than 5% down on the house, and still locked in a 30-year mortgage fixed at 3.875%. Does that blow your mind? Because it still astounds me. I’ve owned the house now for about seven years and it has appreciated 48%. Thank you, Columbus.
Columbus, Ohio made buying a house all by myself at age 28 possible. Why? Two reasons: 1) public institutions in Columbus shaped me into a person who could get a well-paying job, and 2) Columbus has a low cost of living despite being an amazing place to live.
Forget the snotty New England prep schools and the old money East Coast. In the American Midwest, we succeed by going to public school.
I immigrated from Dhaka, Bangladesh to Columbus, Ohio in 1990 when I was two years old. My family history includes a bootlegger grandfather who, as a teenager, built up his shipping business by running black market goods from Assam to Bangladesh, navigating treacherous wetlands and shallow rivers on horseback. He was kind of a pirate/cowboy.
In just two generations, his descendent (me) obtained a Juris Doctorate (law degree) from Georgetown University, one of the finest educational institutions in the United States. Much of the credit for this goes to growing up in Columbus.
It started at the very beginning—with me attending pre-school for free through the publicly funded Head Start program. That gave me a great foundation to do well in my inner-city public elementary school, which was full of other immigrant kids.
I loved spending weekends in Columbus’ award-winning public libraries, taking art classes at the recreation centers, and spending summer days at various day-camps subsidized by the city Parks & Rec department.
It was in those spaces that I found my love of reading, grew comfortable being in nature, and met diverse kids from other parts of the city.
Forget Harvard or Princeton or Yale. Go to the Ohio State University and live happy.
When I was in middle school my parents moved us from our diverse immigrant neighborhood in central Columbus to one of the suburban neighborhoods with better-ranked schools.
Moving to the suburbs ended up being the right choice for my education, but I didn’t have a great social experience. The Columbus suburbs were very white and devotedly Christian in the 2000’s. As one of the few brown Muslims in my middle school I struggled to fit in and dealt with some bullying. Feeling like I didn’t really belong made me want to run away from Ohio and I tried to go to college outside the state.
But then I got a full-tuition merit scholarship to attend the Ohio State University. I couldn’t turn it down. When I moved into the OSU dorms my freshman year, I still lived less than 20 minutes away from my family home in Columbus.
Ohio State University is a state land-grant institution, meaning it was funded through the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890. My Morrill Excellence full-tuition scholarship from Ohio State is part of the public education legacy that began at the university’s founding over 150 years ago. Receiving this scholarship is one of the most impactful events of my life.
Sometimes I wonder if the old white statesmen from the 1800s who drafted and voted for these Land-Grant acts would be shocked to discover that a brown girl from Bangladesh benefited from them.
I spent some of the best years of my life at Ohio State. I finally felt comfortable in my skin. I found my tribe. I felt supported in my growth. I graduated magna cum laude with two separate Bachelor of Arts degrees in four years (with honors, research distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, etc.).
I was educated by publicly funded institutions my entire life, up until the point I went to Georgetown University (a private, Jesuit institution) for law school in Washington, D.C.. I never would have been admitted to Georgetown were it not for the excellent (free!) public education I got in Columbus, Ohio.
Trying to make something of yourself in NYC or DC or SF or LA requires being a cog in the machine. In Columbus, you can make your own machine.
I spent five years living in Washington D.C. in my 20’s. And while I loved it there, I felt lonely and disconnected. All my friend groups disintegrated every couple of years because people always leave D.C. after their fellowship or grad program or political party job ends. I wanted to live somewhere that people stayed. And I wanted to live somewhere I could be someone and make a difference.
After law school, I decided not to band-wagon with many of my law school classmates who took well-paying “BigLaw” jobs in New York or D.C. Instead, I moved back to Columbus and joined a smaller but prestigious regional law firm called Bricker & Eckler (recently renamed Bricker Graydon).
I had gone to law school to make a difference. But I needed sophisticated corporate clients so that I could make enough money to pay off my law school debts. So my plan was to do public service through civic engagement, outside of my paid job.
My hope was that working at a regional firm in Columbus would allow me to have a slightly less insane workload (as compared to the hamster wheel of billable hours required for New York Big Law) and I could use that time to engage in civic life.
And I’m happy to say, that’s exactly what happened. In 2017, within a year of moving back to Columbus, I, along with some friends, helped found the Columbus chapter of the national nonprofit org New Leaders Council. NLC is a leadership training fellowship that helps politically progressive up-and-coming leaders from every industry sector build community and develop professionally. I stayed on as a board member of NLC-Columbus until 2019.
This past year, no less than four of my fellow founders and board members have appeared on the Columbus Business First 40 Under 40 List—Dylan Borchers (second from left above), Monica Cerrezuela, Bhumika Patel, and Laura Recchie. I could not be more proud. NLC-Columbus has helped develop so many incredible leaders in its short lifespan. Case in point: Dontavius Jarrells (pictured above on the far right) is now an elected member of the Ohio legislature.
Despite what a lot of arrogant coastal people think, living in Columbus is fun.
When I lived in my little blue Clintonville house, I loved to frequent Studio 35, an indie movie theater that has as a full cocktail bar. The bar serves movie-themed drinks and goes all out with decorations for Halloween. I ran into many of my neighbors there, and I loved that it was walkable from my house. I was living my dreamy European walkable city life.
Another walkable place from the blue house is Walhalla ravine, this gorgeous out-of-this-mortal-plane dip in the topography. The ravine is astounding—not only for its beauty—but because it’s smack in the middle of a dense urban part of Columbus.
One second, you’d be driving down High Street, the main drag full of bike shops, weed stores, and artisanal cafes, and the next you’d be driving down Walhalla and have to watch out for deer. I cherished walks down Walhalla on crisp fall mornings. For a few moments, I’d be transported to somewhere else—maybe even the Viking afterlife.
Immigrants have built resilient, well-connected communities in Columbus, a blue enclave in a red state.
Even though my high school was mostly white, Columbus as a whole is still a diverse city. For example, there’s a surprisingly large number of South Asians. I grew up around a lot of Bangladeshi people my age, seeing them regularly when my parents went to social gatherings with other South Asian people in the city.
Here’s a perfect example: my parents are part of a community theatre group that puts on plays entirely in Bangla. By that I mean, no English is spoken. They rent out theaters and put on multiple shows that sell out with attendees being other Bangla-speaking individuals. I’m not talking about New York, or LA, or Toronto, or Chicago. No, this happens in Columbus, Ohio.
Columbus weather is good for creativity, introspection, and growth.
Sure, it’s more difficult to be social in the winter. You might find yourself having to reschedule dinner plans (as I have done) because there’s too much unplowed snow on the highway, or miss out on drag brunch (like me) because you’re afraid to drive on the icy roads downtown. But the somewhat forced solitude can be a time for introspection.
In my 20’s living in Columbus, I’d find myself snuggled up on the couch with a cup of tea, writing in my bullet journal and making grand plans for my life. I don’t find that homey hygge feeling here in the Bay Area, where it’s basically bright and temperate all year round.
I miss the seasons in Ohio, not just because they were beautiful, but because they helped me experience my life as seasons. There are seasons of exploration (summer) and seasons of introspection (winter). There are seasons of new beginnings (fall, ironically), and seasons of big changes (spring).
As the days pass in a four-season climate, you feel your years because the change is so visible, so palpable around you. You feel it on your skin on the hot humid summers, and in your breath when you take in that freezing winter air. You smell it in the mildly fermenting piles of autumn leaves, and you can hear it when the birds come back in the spring. These are all signs of the outside world that bring back such deep nostalgia for me, and I miss it here in California.
A good life + low cost of living = Columbus is a haven for artists and writers like Maggie Smith and Hanif Abdurraqib.
You can a have a really nice life in Columbus, with a lot less money than in cities like New York, Chicago, DC, LA, or the Bay Area, where I currently live.
Relative to these other cities, houses in Columbus are really affordable. They are big and new, and there’s constantly more homes being built. Public infrastructure is set up for growth, which means the roads, the electricity, and water lines have ample capacity. Columbus is expanding upward and outward all the time.
Places like Columbus are perfect for artists because the community is nurturing and the bills are low. I love how hard Hanif Abdurraqib reps Columbus. He is a jewel of the city. Maggie Smith also raves about how much her Bexley neighborhood in Columbus makes it possible to live a good life with her kids.
In sum, the American dream lives on in Columbus, Ohio.
We’re selling the Clintonville house this summer and I’m sad. My husband is only half-joking when he suggests every few months that we leave the Bay Area and move back into my little blue Clintonville house. (He’s from Ohio too and quite possibly loves it more than me). But his tech job keeps us in the Bay Area year after year. At this point, we’ve put down new roots and we’ll probably never move back to Columbus.
But a girl can dream.
Thanks for reading. Do you love or hate your hometown? Let me know in the comments.
—Noor
Phenomenal! Now I want to hear more about your Grandfather.
Might have to move to Columbus now!