Franklinton’s True Believer: How Developer Lance Robbins Helped Change the Neighborhood

On a Friday night in October, right before sundown, a small parade assembled on Franklinton’s Walnut Street. It was a minor part of the goings-on that evening, which included Franklinton Friday festivities and the annual mural festival Scrawl. Many visitors were likely unaware of this quirky homage to the person who helped make such events viable.  

Long before East Franklinton became an urban turnaround story, developer Lance Robbins saw the area’s potential. He gobbled up properties when others considered the neighborhood too risky, and supported the emerging creative community that grew around one of his signature investments, 400 West Rich, a massive arts center in a former toilet factory. Though his business was based in New York and Los Angeles—and he owned real estate all over the country—Robbins developed strong ties in Columbus, winning over locals with his generosity and eccentric charm. But Robbins, who died in August, was a complicated figure, and in recent years, he upset locals with some of his decisions. 

As so often happens in Franklinton, the parade came about organically, starting as a conversation among friends at Rehab Tavern. Former Strongwater general manager Kris Howell showed up in an inflatable sumo suit on his daughter’s bicycle. Someone else dressed as a character from “Planet of the Apes” and held a sign that read “4th Tier Artist,” an allusion to an insulting comment about the tenant artists reportedly made by Bobby Goldman, Robbins’ girlfriend. 

At the head of the parade was a giant likeness of Robbins mounted to a scissor lift. Originally a foam and wood sculpture of James Thurber, the piece was repurposed by Sarah Weinstock, an artist and friend of Robbins. To make it look more like Robbins, she made the eyebrows and mustache bushier and added more gray hair.  

The two-block parade route didn’t have permits. It was done on the cheap and a little under the radar. It was fun, feisty and mischievous, showcasing the spirit of the neighborhood that Robbins found so appealing. “He would have liked it,” Howell says. 

Earning City Leaders’ Trust

Twenty years ago, East Franklinton was in shambles, with vacant homes and an open air drug market outside its public housing complexes. Chris Sherman knew it well. He’d purchased a warehouse and renovated it into his home and witnessed a 16-year-old get shot in the chest three times.   

In that period, Robbins’ daughter, Becca, who studied at Antioch College in Yellow Springs and frequented Franklinton to take photographs, recognized it as being similar to Robbins’ properties in Rhode Island. She introduced the neighborhood to her father. 

In Los Angeles, where Robbins lived and first made his mark in business, politics had become challenging, says Aaron Iskowitz, the COO of Urban Smart Growth, Robbins’ development company dedicated to adaptive reuse. Columbus, however, made it clear that it wanted to see some economic development in Franklinton, says Zachary Robbins, Lance’s son.  

In concert with the 2004 flood wall that gave the area more protection, former Mayor Mike Coleman asked the development community for support. “I had no takers. Zero,” he says. “I was investing city revenue to jumpstart the area, but no one was interested in that.” Nobody except Robbins. 

Robbins had to earn the trust of city leaders. Previous projects earned him several lawsuits and a reputation as a Los Angeles slumlord. Coleman faced criticism for his support of Robbins after a Columbus Dispatch article aired the developer’s past misdeeds. “I was skeptical at first,” Sherman says, but historical preservation work in New Haven, Connecticut, and success with a project in Rhode Island won him over.    

In 2007, Robbins announced an ambitious plan for the area, with an investment of $23 million. In 2010, Robbins hired Sherman to redevelop the properties, giving him $1,000 in spending money to make improvements and saying, “Show me what you can do.” Sherman passed the test. The first artist tenants opened their studios in 400 in July 2011. 

Filling Vacant Buildings and Creating Employment

Robbins had a unique style, but it worked for him in Franklinton. “He’s a guy who would walk into a bar without any shoes on,” Howell says. “You wouldn’t be able to distinguish him from a construction worker or a janitor. He had the vibe of a nutty professor who happened to be in real estate.” His bushy hair and mustache, plaid shirts and jeans were so casual that in a closing dinner, a banker said he didn’t know if Robbins was going to ask him for a loan or bum $5 for lunch, Iskowitz recalls. 

That professor comparison is fitting. Robbins studied Jungian psychology, neurofeedback therapy and multiple religions, going down rabbit holes and seeking opportunities to practice what he learned. He was interested in treating trauma-based experiences and human trafficking, was a drug and alcohol counselor, started a treatment center with his brother (a rabbi) in Beverly Hills and mentored countless individuals.  

Robbins engaged in quiet philanthropy, seeking personal impact. His properties not only put vacant buildings to use but offered employment in the area. At 400 West Rich, he frequently offered jobs to people he wanted to help. “He would collect some of the strangest people from all over the country and endow them with weird amounts of power [at 400],” Howell remembers. 

In one instance, Robbins hired a roofer from Venice Beach who would fight with employees and sleep on the job. “Lance sent him to Rhode Island, and [the guy] got caught stealing scrap metal,” Sherman recalls. 

Robbins was frugal. “He would take cheap red-eye flights,” Howell says. “He didn’t spend money on anything.” Robbins was often quoted saying that he’d saved more money than he made. (And rumor is, he made a lot.) 

Trust was central to Robbins’ enterprise. “He gave us the tools, but he was super hands off,” Sherman says. “He trusts people, sometimes for the bad. He felt like he was saving them.”  

Trust Between Robbins, Franklinton Erodes

Over the past couple of years, the trust between Robbins and the Franklinton community began to break down. His girlfriend, Goldman, became a divisive figure in the neighborhood, and he raised rents at 400 West Rich in March 2023. In January, Strongwater closed, as did the Vanderelli Room, the influential gallery operated by local artist A.J. Vanderelli in a McDowell Street building owned by Urban Smart Growth. 

Iskowitz acknowledges company officials could have communicated the rent increase better. “Our expenses are going up, and artists aren’t the highest-paying tenants, but we wanted to maintain the heartbeat of the neighborhood,” he says. 

“Lance raised the rents way later than he should have,” says Brett Kaufman, the developer of the Gravity mixed-use project in Franklinton. “He was losing money. He couldn’t do that forever. When the [interest] rates went up, he had to.” 

Meanwhile, the company made the decision to close Strongwater after Robbins’ death. “Strongwater was one of his pet projects, and without him, there wasn’t much time [to give it attention],” Iskowitz says. “Over the last few years, we tried to run it from afar, and it just wasn’t working.” 

In March 2021, Robbins put Goldman in charge of Strongwater to make it more upscale. With Goldman gaining influence, Robbins “became less likely to hear ideas other than hers,” says Kim Kiehl, a friend of Robbins who met him through her board work with the Franklinton Development Association  

“They were ambitious people; I think that was the attraction,” says Zachary Robbins of the pair. “They both had a cantankerous way about them. Sometimes, you feed off of that with another individual.” 

The widow of Oscar-winning writer James Goldman (“The Lion in Winter”), a onetime owner of a construction company and the author of an autobiographical off-Broadway musical comedy called “Curvy Widow,” Goldman shared her business philosophy in a 2017 advice column inForbes. She advocated doing a “big public kill” to earn respect. “It makes your reputation and after that you just have to walk into a room and people say ‘yes.’ ” Rather than saying yes, many longtime employees left the company, including Sherman. 

During a breakfast conversation in February 2023, Robbins’ friend Weinstock spoke with him about his girlfriend, expressing concerns about her attitude toward artists and her desire to pull support from Franklinton Fridays. “He thanked me for my honesty, but reassured me of her brilliance,” she says. “He seemed hypnotized, caught up in her at the expense of his own place. He was starting to lose his friends here.” 

“Lance worked with the community for a long time, and that’s what changed in the last two years. He didn’t work with the community anymore,” Kiehl says. “But deep down, he cared about the neighborhood, and wanted it to be all it could be. I think that he just lost his way a little bit.” (Goldman, who’s no longer involved with Urban Smart Growth, declined to speak with Columbus Monthly.)  

In June, Robbins was put into a medically induced coma for six weeks while struggling with an infection. And in August, he died from cardiac arrest. He was 76. 

Today, Iskowitz leads Urban Smart Growth with input from Robbins’ children. The company will build two four-story apartment buildings called Lucas Lofts in a current parking lot, a plan that has been approved for a few years. Without Robbins’ more deliberative approach, Howell predicts that the area will physically change more quickly.  

“Aaron is a good guy. He’s very smart and knows what he’s doing,” Sherman says. “With him in control, they’ll be able to actualize the ideas.” 

‘Franklinton is Going to be the Best Part of the City‘

“Good community is good business. Build it from the bottom up, not the top down.” 

Those words of wisdom, written in Robbins’ unpublished autobiography, can be seen in what Franklinton became under his leadership. “I have started rereading and editing the book, and it feels very different than it did when he was alive,” says Kiehl, whom Robbins entrusted with the manuscript. 

Kiehl says he starts the book with a discussion about “cheating death and living on after you are gone.” In a way, that’s what he did in Franklinton. “He had an uncompromised vision,” Iskowitz says. And that vision (and a high tolerance for risk to go along with it) allowed Robbins to make a lasting imprint—a legacy that will live on in Franklinton long after his death. 

“Franklinton is going to be the best part of the city of Columbus, and that doesn’t happen without Lance Robbins,” Kaufman says. 

This story is from the March 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.