Robert Rader, 86, has lived for five decades with his backyard up against the tall chain-link fence surrounding a currently vacant 11-acre city of Columbus office complex in North Linden.
His home on Beulah Road is among a quiet stretch of generally well-kept single-family homes and apartments that abuts the two office buildings and parking lots that have sat empty since the city moved Building and Zoning employees and other operations from 757 Carolyn Ave. to the Michael Coleman Government Center Downtown in 2018.
Rader remembers when the campus located at the west end of Carolyn Avenue, sandwiched against Interstate 71, the homes along Beulah to the east with apartments to the north was used in former lives as bank offices and, starting in the late 1990s, by the city to inspect licensed vehicles. While that caused food trucks, taxis and other vehicles to routinely line up front of his house, he didn t mind.