When 17-yea- old Alleesha Cremeans arrived at COSI about a half-hour after the start of the job fair she confronted the day’s first challenge. She was at the end of two lines, both about a block long.

“I was expecting a hundred or so, and looking out, wow, way more people than I expected.”

Cremeans was looking at an estimated 2,000 students and young adults, dressed professionally with folders of resumes in hand. They were waiting to enter the exhibition space. The West High School junior said she learned of the job fair through her grandmother.

“Uh, the newspaper. My grandmother read an article and told me I was going. So, I was pretty much going.”

Deshaune Stewart was closer to the front of the line. Dressed in a suit and tie, he said he was actually looking for two jobs.

“To get money for my family.”

Stewart allowed he was a bit nervous. He’s been looking for a job for six months and he was trying to anticipate what employers wanted.

“I think they expect confidence. I think they expect for people to look nice and I think they expect good workers.”

Stewart and others who had been searching for jobs for some months were also looking forward to meeting potential employers face-to-face and at least get a short interview and a chance to personally hand a resume to a company representative. Inside the COSI exhibit hall, 42 companies, both profit and non-profit, were prepared to make a combined 2100 job offers. Dan Olzak represents Jani-King. His company has the contract to clean Crew stadium after soccer games and concerts.

“We actually need a total of 230 people to take in for the large concert events and the pay range is $8 an hour.”

Olzak says his company has been inundated with phone calls and applications for the past three-and-a-half weeks. He says he’s not surprised by the large turn-out of job applicants. “Its very difficult for people to find something right now. ”

Brendan Kent was recruiting young employees to help distribute and install energy saving kits to Central Ohio residents. Kent says his 4-year-old Michigan-based company is a contractor for American Electric Power. He says the company is looking for both seasonal and permanent workers.

“We’re going to have a $12- to $14-an-hour pay range, on average, for people starting out. There’s a lot of opportunity for upward mobility and it is going to be an ongoing job.”

Vicki Johnson was also looking for new hires. She is a recruiter for Gap Inc. and needs more employees for a call center in Grove City.

“The call center will be hiring all the way through the summer. We’re looking for the most part, customer service representatives. So it would be entry level customer service, very, very good jobs for our young people.”

Many of the job applicants received coaching help and job readiness training through the Central Ohio Workforce Investment Corporation. COWIC, along with civic and business leaders helped fill the need for summer employment for youth. In the past, funding for summer jobs was provided, in part, by the federal government. No federal money was available this year.

“The next least-expensive diesel that I saw was almost $6,000 for a car that I think is maybe the same year as the one I’m looking at here, had less miles, but it rattled, shook and shimmied, and I could tell it hadn’t been maintained,” Lennington said.

Lennington has spent two months looking for a second car and until today she says hasn’t had much luck. There’s a shortage of cars on the market priced at less than $5,000. Lennington guesses the Cash for Clunkers program is to blame. Nearly 700,000 cars were destroyed to try to jump start the production of new ones.

“I feel sorry for anyone looking for anything $2,500 or under because now you’re looking at a real heap of poo because most of those got turned in,” Lennington said.

Many of the used cars at dealerships in Central Ohio come from the Groveport Auto Auction. Every Wednesday hundreds of dealership owners and salesmen come in search of cars for their inventory. Keith Whann is the CEO of the auction. He says two years ago the auction showed more than 3,000 cars a week, but lately that number is down to 2,000. Whann confirms the Cash for Clunkers program is one reason supply’s down, but it also has a lot to do with the production and sale of new cars.

“When you think about the fact that there are a number of millions of less transactions taking place on the new car side and traditionally roughly 60 percent of those generate a trade-in, there’s a vast number of used cars that aren’t being traded-in to dealers. And when you combine almost seven-hundred thousand cars leaving the road, there’s a real shortage of used cars,” Whann said.

College Car Company manager Mike Hinterschied watched as Lennington negotiated the sale of the Volkswagen. He says the demand for affordable cars hasn’t changed, but the supply has forced prices up. The average sale price for cars at his dealership has increased from five to $6,000 to nine to $10,000- and the higher price may not mean a better car.

“I can perceive a difference in the quality between what I can sell for under $6,000, and what I used to sell for six. I think it’s less for your dollar right now.”

Hinterschied says he expects it will be some time before the automotive industry is thriving again. This, for consumers, means fewer options and higher prices. Lennington knows. She did buy the Jetta and says it was a good deal in a tough market.

“It’s manual windows, no sunroof, it’s a stick-shift, you know, but it has air conditioning, it has heat, and it has a stereo I’m happy,” she said.

“Last year we had over 11,000 people visit our farmers markets over the three Thursdays. This year we anticipate even more,” says LeMaile-Williams.

It appears she’s right. Last Thursday’s market was packed.

But what isn’t so clear is whether the big turn-out is reason to celebrate. In the center of the market is a line of people about 0.25 mile long. The line – mostly women and children – is waiting for $15 of food aid benefits.

Shannon asked her last name not be used.

“So you come out and you get these coupons and you have like $15 to spend and you can get all types of nutritious stuff. It just helps people feed their children healthy,” says Shannon.

The Women with Infants and Children program – or WIC – is a program from the Department of Agriculture. The organization began handing out the benefit almost 20 years ago. It wanted to encourage its clients to purchase fresh produce from Farmers Markets.

But Dr. LeMaile-Williams says WIC realized many of its clients were not actually redeeming the vouchers.

“When surveyed it was largely because they didn’t know where to access a Farmer’s Market. So we felt that by hosting a farmer’s market right here on our grounds would hopefully increase participation,” says LeMaile-Williams.

It seems to have worked. In its first edition of the market five years ago, the voucher redemption rate doubled.

The purpose of this farmers market goes beyond providing locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables. Michael Jones, from the Greener Grocer, says purchasing any type of produce could be difficult for those without easy access to transportation.

“In many of the inner city urban areas there is no grocery store that is accessible to the population there. They may have access to a corner store but that store is likely to carry beer, wine, cigarettes but very little in the way of healthy food,” says Jones.

A few hours after the Market’s opening, the line of people waiting for the $15 food aid benefit is almost gone. But it’s no comfort to Jones. He expects the line of people waiting for the food aid benefit to during next Thursday’s farmer’s market. “Just imagine. People waiting in line mile long simply to get $15 of benefits to purchase healthy food. That should be a wake up call to our community,” says Jones.

And Jones is awake. Because the farmers markets are seasonal – taking place only during the summer. So the Greener Grocer and Columbus Public health looked for ways to provide similar shopping opportunities year-round.

“So this idea of the veggie van was born,” says Jones.

The Veggie Van is a travelling farmer’s stand. It makes two or three stops a day in different parts of the city to sell locally grown produce. But Jones says sales at the Veggie Van have been slow.

“There’s also an issue of resources. If you don’t have money you can’t buy fresh fruits and vegetables,” says Jones.

So while the veggie van ran year round since last fall, it’s not clear if the initiative will continue through the winter.

The Veggie Van’s stops include St. Stephen’s Community House, the Jewish Community Center and the South Side Settlement House.

City Health officials use the markets to promote fruits and vegetables to residents whose access to fresh produce is limited by income or by where they live. And the three hour event drew thousands.

Participants in the Women, Infants and Children assistance program, WIC, received a coupon booklet worth $15 to use at any of the 18 stands set up by Ohio farmers across the front drive of the city health department’s campus at the corner of Parsons Avenue and Main Street.

Renee McLaurin’s daughter is in the WIC program, but she is at work. So McLaurin is standing in, waiting patiently in line to shop for her four-year-old grandson.

I would like to find some fresh okra, if possible, she says. Actually, my grandson loves it.

McLaurin says the price of gasoline is one reason she is trying to cut back on food costs.

Jerry Farber of Dolan’s Farm Market in New Albany says farmers are trying to hold down fuel costs by using ATV’s in place of tractors when possible on the farm. Nevertheless, some prices on their produce are edging upward. He says last year, a dozen ears of corn was $4.95 cents.

This year we’re up to $5.25, says Farber. That’s up 30 cents. That’s not bad. We’ve tried to hold the cost down. We might be paying a little bit for it. But we have very loyal customers, and that pays off.

Jim and Sharon Patterson are selling their organically grown corn at $6 for 14 ears. It’s priced to accommodate the five, $3 coupons carried by WIC participants.

And we try to keep our prices comparable to conventional farms, says Sharon Patterson, so people can afford to still eat healthy and enjoy good food.

Eating healthy is the message behind this event, and the turn-out far exceeded last year. In 2007, all three farmers markets done by the city health department drew a total of 5-thousand people.

This year, underscoring the pressure families are under with high prices for food and fuel, 3500 people came for the first market. Half of them were part of the Women, Infants and Children assistance program.

A construction worker cuts a piece of granite just outside an unfinished condominium at Harrison Park. He’s about to hand it off to another worker who will glue it to the back splash in the kitchen.

Harrison Park sits on a former industrial site in Columbus’s Harrison West.

Eric Casto is the marketing and sales director for Wagenbrenner Development – the group heading up the project. Casto said this particular unit will be ready for occupancy in about a month.

“Has this unit already been sold? Is it a pre-sale? This unit is indeed a pre-sale unit. We put it into contract recently. She was lucky enough to get in in time to make some choices remaining in the unit,” Casto said.

Harrison Park has 90 of what the company calls lofts. Two-thirds of the condo-style units are already sold. Casto said the early stages of this project started around 2003. And construction began in 2005. He said the company was lucky to have started this development when it did – at the tail end of the most recent housing boom.

“We’ve been extremely fortunate in the sense that we have not been dramatically affected by a sales standpoint, although it keeps you on your toes,” Casto said.

Ken Gold is the director of the Center for Real Estate Research and Education at Ohio State University. Gold said he’s not surprised that a condominium community in Harrison West is doing so well. He said that’s because areas near downtown Columbus are the hot place to be right now. Gold said downtown condos attract young professionals, who are often first-time home buyers, empty-nesters and people new to city. He said it’s condos in the suburbs that will be tough to sell.

“You’ll find in a Gahanna there being more condominiums on the market that are available that are typically three years old or younger and there’s not a lot of people looking to purchase them,” Gold said.

While it may be easier for someone trying to sell a condo in say Victorian Village or Short North, Gold said it’s going to take longer – everywhere. But sale prices in the suburbs could suffer.

There are a lot of condos for sell in the Franklin County area. Right now there are about 2,700 on the market. And there are plenty of new developments being built – even in this slow economy. Gold said developers are “optimists.” He said they always think they can market their project better than the guy across the street. But Gold said lots of times it’s too late for builders to get out of a project – the land’s been purchased, the financing is in place. As a result, a lot of condos – especially ones in the suburbs languish in the MLS listings. Gabe Gayhart knows all too well what it’s like to sell a condo in the suburbs. It took him eight months to sell his Reynoldsburg condo when he got married to his wife, Melissa.

“And I had to lower the price a few different times to get people to come in to look at it. And in that period I only had maybe four people look at it,” Gayhart said.

When he and his wife got married they each owned a condo. So Gayhart moved into his wife’s renovated, one-bedroom unit on Buttles Avenue in Victorian Village. But they want to move to the suburbs. They need more room. She’s having a baby. Their condo has been on the market for two months with no offers.

Gayhart’s hoping they do not have to lower the price on this condo like he did with his in Reynoldsburg. But they’ve made an offer on a house.

“And if that moves forward we may have to be a little more aggressive with the sale,” Gayhart said.

Neil Rogers is the sales and marketing vice president for Bob Webb Group – a local developer that’s been around for about 50 years. Rogers said he too has worked through several economic down times. One of Bob Webb’s large condo projects is on Hayden Run Road. Rogers said he’s not too worried about the economy affecting their condo sells.

“It’s impacting everybody, and I won’t deny that. But we’ve been able to hold our own. We’re doing pretty well right now. So I think we figure we’ve got to weather probably another year to year and a half,” Rogers said.

In the meantime, Rogers said they’re doing what a lot of builders are doing right now and that’s trying to maintain their projects until the economy heads back up again.

“Well, you obviously have to be more aggressive. You’ve got to watch all your costs more than you did before. You still market, but you pull back a bit. You don’t spend the dollars you used to spend when marketing at the top of the market,” Rogers said.

For now, it looks like everyone involved in the condo market including developers like Neil Rogers will have little bit longer till they can breathe a sigh of relief.

“But I think when everything shakes out we’ll be back on a good track again. You have to look at the news everyday (laughter) you look at it and you go, oh no, not again,” Rogers said.

“Always sympathetic to those typically manufacturing jobs that may have been lost because of free market principles and trade around the world. But this bill had a tax increase in it – an unemployment surtax in it,” he said.The Act still has to be passed in the Senate, where it also faces a partisan divide.

The state lost more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2005. Ohio’s Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown says it’s a small measure to help those hurt by trade policy.

“We’ve not done enough for those workers that are displaced. I mean, I don’t agree with the trade policy, but if we have this trade policy then we’ve got to help those workers that have lost their jobs,” he said.

Even if the bill does pass the Senate, the President has threatened a veto.

At the Clintonville Farmers’ Market on a picture perfect Saturday morning, farmer Ben Sippel is helping customer Peter Craigmile put together his produce share for the week. Sippel and his wife Lisa run a Community Supported Agriculture operation, a CSA. Craigmile is one of their 175 subscribers. Each subscriber paid $560 for 30 weeks of produce deliveries like this one in Clintonville.

While the number of farmers’ markets in Ohio is around 600, the number of CSA’s is barely four dozen with many of those having only a handful of subscribers or shareholders.

Holly Born is a member of a Community Supported Agriculture group- CSA – in Lewis, Iowa. She is also an expert on sustainable agriculture. Born says CSAs started in the U-S about 20 years ago and the number now is about 15-hundred. The growers and the consumers are sharing the risks of food production, says Born.

Even though farmers and consumers share risks, CSA farmers are expected to juggle dozens of different crops. The challenge of being able to provide a variety of produce in as long a growing season as possible is difficult, even for experienced growers, says Born.

The Sippels grow more than 120 varieties of 40 different crops. They are planting on one or two days per week every week during a growing season that runs from early February to October.

This week’s produce includes: Romaine lettuce, summer squash, beets, garlic, basil, and two pounds of tomatoes. Ben and Lisa Sippel say, diversity is important because no one wants, for example, four cabbages a week.

The Sippels bought their 77 acre farm in Mt. Gilead four years ago. Lisa Sippel says having a CSA subscriber base made it possible for them to get a loan even though they were both only 23 years old. They now have 25 acres in produce and the beginning of an apple orchard.

Ben Sippel has a degree in environmental studies and geography. As a student, he says he listened in classes to all the problems facing agriculture global climate change, field run off and some factory farm practices. He made a decision.

We don’t really have an option of whether we participate in agriculture, says Sippel. We need to feed people. So, all of these problems that were covered in great detail that were wrong with agriculture, I started to think, we need to fix those.

Sippel says agriculture should be sustainable in three ways – ecologically, economically and socially. Keeping those three balanced, he says, makes it possible to feed larger numbers of people. Otherwise, he says, those working in CSA’s and other sustainable operations is just, playing in the dirt.

While he hopes to encourage more young people to get into farming in the future, Sippel’s present is filled with planting, harvesting and boxing produce sometimes late into the night and delivering to customers. Subscribers Megan Kadel- Edwards, Isaiah Harris and Kami Niehoff all have their reasons for investing in the Sipple Family’s CSA.

It’s knowing where your food comes from, getting to know the person who’s producing it, says Kadel-Edwards. There’s a level of safety and security doing that.

It’s important to me not to pay for fuel for it to be shipped, says Harris.

Salad greens, you don’t want any salad dressing at all. There is that much flavor, says Niehoff.

Andy Ingraham Dwyer says buying produce through a CSA is more expensive, but he is willing to pay ,his words – fair money for a fair product. Ingraham Dwyer also doesn’t worry about the less polished appearance of produce grown organically.

So long as I can look the farmer in the eye when I’m taking it from him, he says. That means a whole lot to me.