One paper, same day, two stories:

[The Straight Story]

Market for $1 million-plus homes showed life last year

As home sales dropped in central Ohio last year, one exclusive corner of the market enjoyed a slight turnaround: 47 houses sold for more than $1million.

That's still a tiny fraction of the market - about 0.2 percent of all homes sold - but last year was the first year since 2005 to show any gain in that rarefied niche.

"We've got a collection of million-dollar properties in central Ohio that are starting to move again," said Doug Green, a Prudential Metrix Realtors agent who helps coordinate the Central Ohio Luxury Home Network, a group of two dozen real-estate agents who specialize in high-end properties.

Six central Ohio homes sold for more than $2 million and six more fetched at least $1.5 million last year. Those dozen top sellers range from a 4,000-square-foot Gahanna-area ranch on 15 acres to an 18,000-square-foot New Albany mansion that was on the market for almost six years.

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/home_garden/stories/2011/02/06/market-for-1-million-plus-homes-showed-life-last-year.html?sid=101

Job cuts hit a Columbus suburb hard

As middle-class Worthington reels, its schools give worried children comfort - and free lunches

...

The Kehlers have lots of company. While Wall Street is pumping, Main Street bleeds. This middle- to upper-middle-class suburban town of 14,000 bordering Columbus has 22 percent of its students getting subsidized lunches. That's up from 6 percent in 2005, when the economy was booming.

Statewide, 43 percent of Ohio public school students are disadvantaged, as measured by free and reduced-price lunches, compared with 33 percent in 2005, according to a recent survey by KidsOhio, a nonprofit educational organization based in Columbus. A sign of how deep this recession has reached into the middle class: Here in Franklin County, 44 percent of the disadvantaged attend suburban schools, compared with 32 percent five years ago.

...

Over on Eastland Court, Grace Koo and her now ex-husband, who have two children at Wilson Hill, were both laid off and went from making about $160,000 a year to zero. Koo, who had been a store design and construction director for Limited Brands, attributed the divorce to many things gone wrong, including their sinking economic status. "For months, both of us were home together, unemployed," she said. "We'd fight over money."

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/insight/stories/2011/02/06/job-cuts-hit-a-suburb-hard.html?sid=101

Worthington, which they are talking about in the second article, used to be the place to live (along with Arlington/Bexley). Most the people mentioned in the story were making over 100k total but those jobs are drying up (and another article is talking about layoffs here) - and yet the sale of Million dollar homes is going up?

Same paper, same day:
Central Ohio housing market still looks good for buyers, not sellers