Columbus Issued 17 Demolition Permits in August 2026

Columbus issued 17 demolition permits in August 2026, up from 11 in July and 10 a year earlier, according to city building records. None of the 13 sites sat inside a designated historic district, and South Side ZIP 43207 accounted for the largest share.

How the count was built

A demolition permit is the city permission an owner needs before a building can legally be torn down, and each record lists the site address, the applicant's declared teardown cost, and the date the permit was issued. CREN counted every August record in the city's public Building Permits dataset whose permit type ended in the word Demolition. The dataset is released into the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero waiver, and CREN pulled it on September 27, 2026.

A rebound after a slow summer

The August total was up from 11 in July and 7 in June, the quietest month of the year. It ranked second among the eight months of 2026 measured so far, behind January and May, which each recorded 18. A year earlier, in August 2025, the city issued 10 such permits. Because one redevelopment can carry a separate permit for each building on a site, these counts track permits, not projects.

Where the teardowns clustered

The 17 permits covered 13 distinct addresses. Six of those addresses sat in ZIP 43207, the South Side, which together carried 10 of the month's permits. The busiest single site was 2260 Lockbourne Rd, a South Side commercial property that drew five separate teardown permits worth a combined declared value of $80,000. The rest were scattered through the Hilltop, Clintonville, the University District, the Near East Side, and the Far East Side.

Teardown estimates, not property values

The declared value on a demolition permit is the applicant's estimate of the cost to raze a structure, not the sale price or the county's assessed value. Across all of August's records, those estimates added up to $360,000. The single largest, $60,000, covered the month's only multifamily teardown, at 1921-1931 Bairsford Dr on the Far East Side. The biggest commercial estimate away from the Lockbourne site was $42,000, at 3635 W Dublin-Granville Rd on the city's northwest edge.

No historic-district buildings on the list

CREN checked all 13 addresses against the city's Historic Districts map, which covers 18 protected areas including German Village, Victorian Village, and the Brewery District. None of August's sites fell inside any of them, so the month brought no permitted teardowns of buildings shielded by the city's architectural review. That is worth tracking, because a demolition inside a historic district needs a separate commission review that routine teardowns elsewhere do not.

What the permits do not settle

A permit records permission to demolish, not the day a crew arrives, so some buildings on the August list may still be standing. The city refreshes the dataset daily, and late entries can lift a month's total after the fact. CREN will rerun the count when September closes, and will watch whether the cleared Lockbourne Rd site files for new construction.