[aderwent]

To add on to the excellent post by Cityscapes:

My only interaction with Indianapolis was a short trip there as a kid, a trip to a concert there ten years ago, and the HGTV show 'Good Bones'.

That being said, Indianapolis has nothing even close to an Ohio State. The education, research, and cultural benefits are unmatched. They don't have an OSU Medical Center or Nationwide Children's Hospital. They don't have an Easton Town Center which continues to get even better. They have basically zero walkable neighborhoods. Which is insane to me considering when their core was built.

Indianapolis has a booming convention business, and its associated developments are what makes downtown Indianapolis feel so alive. It's great and all, but I just got a super touristy feel out of it. Not bad, but I prefer the neighborhood feels of downtown Columbus. Columbus has also really started to invest in public spaces downtown in the last ten years, and it's starting to reap the private benefits. Downtown Columbus is just so physically large it's hard to piece it all together. Once everything is filled out though I think it will be awesome that downtown Columbus will have several very different feeling neighborhoods within it.

Columbus seems to be a data center hub while Indianapolis is a distribution hub. Though Columbus is no distribution slouch (Rickenbacker is on fire), and I'm sure Indianapolis is no data center slouch.

Watching the show 'Good Bones' I seem to see nothing but tiny houses with zero redeeming architectural qualities in their run down areas. It reminds me of Kansas City. The only area I can think of in Columbus like that is Franklinton; which has a tiny stock of houses due to being in an undevelopable flood zone until the flood wall opened in the early 2000s. Most other run down, dangerous areas in Columbus have huge brick houses with tons of potential to come back to glory.