Category: Business

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Business Development Opinion Transportation

EDITORIAL: Parking Requirement Removal Should Be First Step In Broader Reform

Unused Parking at The Banks [Randy Simes]

Recently, the Cincinnati City Planning Department sent out a notice to property owners in downtown and Over-the-Rhine regarding the implementation of an Urban Parking Overlay District. The city will hold several meetings with the next one being at the City Planning Commission meeting this Friday, July 27th at 9 a.m. If approved, the district would remove the requirement for uses in downtown to provide off-street dedicated parking.

Since 2012 when I first wrote about parking in downtown and Over-the-Rhine the number of off-street parking supplied has increased well over 3,000 parking spaces (38,760 in downtown alone according to DCI). The Banks parking garage alone with over 6,000 spaces is the third largest parking garage in the United States.

We have an abundance of parking in the urban core.

At its core function, the removal of required parking minimums has proven to allow for more creative parking solutions to blossom. As Donald Shoup, parking guru and professor at UCLA found in his book The High Cost of Free Parking, most parking minimums were established as arbitrary standards by planners in the middle of the last century. Many of these requirements are intended to account for the busiest times of the day or year. UrbanCincy interviewed Dr. Shoup in 2014 regarding a variety of local parking issues.

In Nashville for example, the removal of parking minimums helped remove barriers for small-scale developers who could not afford to acquire additional land for a few parking spaces. Instead, agreements with nearby garages helped facilitate automobile storage demands.

Back in 2012 Nashville Planner, Joni Priest told UrbanCincy, “Removing the parking requirements from downtown zoning allows flexibility for site-specific and program-specific solutions. Flexibility is key in urban environments,” said Priest. “As downtown becomes more comfortable for pedestrians, cyclists and transit users, new development will have the flexibility to build less parking.”

Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, the city continues to struggle with developers looking to build new infill or rehabilitate and reactivate the many historic buildings in the urban core.

Even when parking requirements are reduced or eliminated most banks and investors still require parking to be provided or identified for developments to move forward. Removing zoning requirements for parking often allows the developer to build the parking that is really needed and not what is arbitrarily demanded by local zoning controls. This reduces the cost of development and in turn, allows more affordable housing to be provided.

Removing parking minimums also preserves historic structures from being demolished for parking lots and garages. Over-the-Rhine is the largest collection of German Italianate buildings in the country yet it currently has lost over half of its historic structures. If parking minimums are retained, the demolition of our communities historic assets will continue to be encouraged to meet the city’s parking requirements.

There is an abundance of alternative options to traverse to, from and around the urban core. These modes include walking, biking, CincyRedBike, buses, streetcar, uber, lyft, Gest, and Zipcar. In the near future, we’ll likely see Bird scooters and Lime bikes introduced. In the long-term, improved transit and autonomous vehicles will reduce the need to own and store a vehicle. Every one of these trips is one less parking space needed per resident, worker or visitor.

It would be wise for the City to anticipate criticisms from residents of the urban core. Some of whom recently voiced concerns regarding the increasing struggle to find on-street parking spaces. This is a struggle that is common in many dense, historic urban neighborhoods across the country where the expectation is that it is very rare to snag a parking space directly in front of a persons residence or business. However, it is important to consider this in light of a broader parking strategy, one that would balance resident, business and development demands.

There are a few additional strategies for city policymakers can consider in conjunction with approving the Parking Overlay District to remove parking requirements. Most of these are adapted from Dr. Shoup’s recommendations:

1.) Continue to pursue the implementation of the on-street residential parking permit program.

2.) Add on-street 10-30 minute convenience parking at some spaces around Findlay Market.

3.) Consider opportunities for future public underground parking facilities to serve Findlay Market and the rest of Over-the-Rhine north of Liberty Street.

4.) Enable the demand-responsive capabilities for on-street parking meters. This strategy will encourage more meter usage and could be a potential revenue add for the city’s parking meter program.

As part of a broader plan, it makes sense to remove the parking space requirements in the urban core. To quote Shoup, “If Cincinnati uses fair market prices to manage on-street parking – the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on every block at every time of the day – it won’t have to require off-street parking spaces for every land use. If the government regulated any other aspect of our lives as precisely as it regulates the number of off-street parking spaces everywhere, everyone would join the Tea Party.”

Removing parking minimums is a productive first step in the city’s comprehensive strategy to balance the demands of residents, workers, visitors who help make our urban core a vibrant and attractive place. Supporting this policy is a step in support of enhancing housing affordability, historic preservation, environmental sustainability and livability in our urban core.

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Business Development

Venture Aims to Bring Passive Houses to Cincinnati

Recently UrbanCincy contributor Timothy Broderick sat down with Ronald Vieira, founder of PassivHaus — a venture designed to shake up the region’s building industry by dramatically reducing buildings’ energy expenditures to discuss building Passive Houses in the Cincinnati region. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Who are you?

My name is Ronald Vieira. Graduated from Xavier class of 2016. Born and raised in Valencia, Venezuela, but Cincinnati is my hometown. I like that I come from here.

What’s your job?

I am doing research to figure out how to decrease the extra payment people have to pay to build a passive house (PH). And that research consists in building the first PH in Cincinnati. There are a few PHs in construction in Cincinnati currently, but none of them have been certified yet.

What’s a passive house?

A PH is a building standard, a series of building standards that, if followed properly, you will reduce up to 90% of your heating load of your house, building, whatever your facility is. Overall it reduces up to 75% of your overall energy consumption.

How does it achieve such efficiency?

The main principle is super insulation — or as they call it, continuous insulation — because the idea is to isolate as well as we can the inside temperature of the house from the outside environment. Whether the outside is hot or cold or mild or humid or not it’s just to preserve the indoor environment to the best of the indoor’s ability.

So you’re basically creating a very stabilized climate?

Mhmm. A good analogy is your skin, which are your “walls.” To stay warm when you go outdoors, you put a jacket on. Similarly, when you’re building a house, the plywood is the skeleton of the house and then you build another exterior wall and put a lot of isolating material, like foam, and then that’s your newer, thicker wall.

Then you look where house is more prone to exchange air with the outside, which is windows and doors. You have to have really high-efficiency building doors and windows. Twenty years ago, new houses had single pane windows. Now the standard is double paned windows, and for PHs the standard is triple-paned windows.

How do you keep the air from getting stale/moldy?

Since you basically don’t have any communication from inside air to outside air, the filtration system for a passive house is a little different. This is an add-on equipment that you put on top of your furnace which cleans the air and filters it way more than a standard house. A high-quality filter is super important to a PH because it is airtight and needs better quality air while still using a lot less energy.

The way you put it it sounds like this cool thing that everyone should be doing, but it can’t be that simple. What are the biggest barriers to wider implementation?

Let’s start with the cost, which is the easiest to explain. You need more material — two walls + filler, for example. Another cost driver is the talent to design these buildings. There were only a handful of certified PH buildings in the US in 2009. The materials and the talent sums up to a 10 to 20% more cost. Now, this is all weather sensitive. The larger the building is, and the colder the climate is, the less expensive it’s going to be. It’s easier to keep it cool in the summer. When I did market research in Cincinnati, I found that we won’t need to go over the 10% premium. This is the promise of my company in the first three years. Then, we are going to figure out how to build these houses at 0% extra at the end of the third year.

The second barrier is the learning curve. These houses use new material and new ideas that most builders and architects don’t know. However, if you have the same group of people who are building the first house and then the second house and the third, they will quickly learn the process. That’s what I’m going to do.

You, yourself, are still learning how to build a PH. How will you build the first one?

You just need a PH consultant, which is not hard to get. Paul Yankee is my mentor on PH design, and he is the owner and CFO of Green Buildings Consultants. He has been advising since Day 1.

Are you going to get certified?

Yes, not as a designer but as a builder. But my architects will be certified.

What’s your motivation behind this work?

Typically, I think a little bit more in the bigger picture than the smaller picture. When I graduated college, I wanted to do something that will significantly impact the life of people in the world. That’s where everything starts.

Why climate change and not global poverty or something like that?

I think it was the education I received. Venezuela is a developing country, so my mom’s side is very poor. All my life I had very personal contact with extreme poverty. I felt like I was more qualified to tackle a systemic, non-social challenge than a social challenge. Plus, climate change is science, and my first three years at Xavier were chemistry.

So climate change, turns out the largest emitter [in the United States] is residential living. Why aren’t people doing anything about this? That’s when the research starts: how do I get people to generate energy in a greener way, or how do I get these people to use their energy in more wisely.

This has to do with energy efficiency and energy generation. Energy generation is far more complex, and my technical ability is not there at all. But my ability to find out how to build buildings in a way that keeps energy and consumes a lot less energy — ok, now I can do that. Doing research on home energy efficiency is how I stumbled upon PHs.

Is this only for rich suburbanites? Can you build something in the city?

No. I’m currently looking at a lot close to downtown. Furthermore, anything and everything can be built passive. You can use any particular architecture style whether it is contemporary, whether it is a bungalow, whether it is classical, or civil war era. You can have any type of architecture built to PH principles.

Now what you’re getting at, renovating houses like in Over-the-Rhine, that’s the next big challenge for PH builders. It is possible, but it is just another design challenge because you have to deal with existing structures. For historic buildings, specifically those in OTR, those are going to have more aesthetic and cost challenges.

What’s your short-term goals?

The official mission is to accelerate the adaptation process of PH principles to home residential construction. And then we’ll send segue into commercial, and that means mixed, urban living. I have a particular affinity for urban spaces. I am from the most inner city you can ever be in Valencia. So that’s all I know, basically.

Endgame?

Getting a large organization — like 3CDC — in charge of redeveloping a lot of buildings, getting in with them — that’s the goal. But all my energy right now is focused on building that first house. Nothing more. Who knows from there.

If you’re interested in building your own passive house, visit Ronald’s website or shoot him an email at vieirarxu@gmail.com.

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Arts & Entertainment Business News

Brewery Event to Tell Neighborhood Development Tale

Brink Brewing Company [Provided]

Craft brewing has taken the nation by storm and as evidence from the Ohio Craft Brewers conference held here in Cincinnati a few weeks ago, the phenomenon shows no sign of slowing down. One factor that has eluded many speculators predictions of “Peak Craft Brew” is the fact that many craft breweries come in different shapes and sizes. Even locally, whereas Rhinegeist and Madtree push for more distribution, smaller scale breweries have opened with the focus on neighborhood Main Streets like Brink Brewing in College Hill.

This trend is the focus of the Congress for New Urbanism’s Midwest Chapters first regional event. Titled, ” The New Neighborhood Brewery,” the event will focus on neighborhood craft breweries and their impacts on building neighborhood revitalization efforts throughout the Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky and Dayton regions.

“We’ve seen the positive impacts craft brewery scene has had on local neighborhoods and we want to get to the heart of what is their formula for success,” said Jocelyn Gibson, the Event Organizing Committee Chair, “Our hope is that this event will spur more communities to consider craft breweries as a tool for neighborhood success”

The event will take place on Friday March 3, starting at 12:20 PM at the Woodward Theater in Over-the-Rhine. It will conclude with a panel discussion and happy hour within viewing of the annual Bockfest Parades march down Main Street. Tickets are $25 a person and can be purchased via CincyTicket.

The event will be feature speakers from the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District, local brewers, real estate experts and neighborhood advocates. It will also provide continuing education credits for the American Planning Association.

The Midwest chapter of the CNU is dedicated towards advancing the issues of revitalizing urban neighborhoods in cities and towns across the region. The organization has three central goals including reclaiming public space for people, reactivating and reconnecting vibrant neighborhoods and championing urban development that is enduring, adaptable and human scaled. The chapter committee is in the process of becoming a regional chapter of the organization spanning from western Pennsylvania to central Indiana and from Lake Erie to Lexington Kentucky.

Woodward Theater is located within a block of Cincy Red Bike, Metro bus routes #17,19,24 and 16. And is two blocks north of the Cincinnati Bell Connector Hanke Exchange Station at 12th and Main.

 

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Business Development News

New Downtown Coworking Space More Than Just A Number

Conference Room (Photo provided)

1628. What’s in a number? Is it a year, an address, or something else? Actually it is the name of downtowns newest co-working location. 1628 is named for a year of several noteworthy events including the setting of “The Three Musketeers,” and the founding of the oldest educational institute in North America, the Collegiate School. But most importantly it is the year that the word coworking was first published in a book by John Jackson called, “The Worthy Churchman.”

Coworking spaces are typically an open office environment where entrepreneurs and other different business owners can work together in shared space. Members typically get access to an office setting, Internet connections and a community without signing a lease for their own office.

Tamara Schwarting, founder and CEO of 1628 is positioning the space to go beyond the typical definition of coworking. The venture out of a desire to run her own business, TLS Consulting Group in a space other than her home or a coffee shop.

“I found myself as a mid-career consultant with over two decades of corporate experience.  I started my first year in consulting as an independent professional working from home or coffee shops,” Schwarting told UrbanCincy, “However I found myself longing for the community and efficiency of an office, I built 1628 to reflect the desires of others who like me want a workplace designed to inspire.”

1628’s facilities are targeted at the mid-career professional looking for a more sophisticated location and could be a sub-contractor to one of Cincinnati’s many corporate headquarters.

Located along Piatt Park at 11 Garfield Place and next door to Cafe Paris, it is centrally located just two blocks from Fountain Square, a Cincinnati Bell Connector stop and across the street from a Cincy RedBike station at the Public Library.

What sets 1628 apart from other coworking spaces is the quality of its amenities for members. These include five conference rooms, each equipped with Smart TV’s, speakerphones and iPads, secure Cincinnati Bell FiOptics in addition to quiet rooms, a kitchen and a media room for breaks. At capacity the space can hold anywhere between 40-50 people at one time and has flexible space for events.

1628 opened at the start of this year and interested parties can learn more about the space through their website.

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Business Development News

$98M Health Sciences Building to Create Striking Landmark on UC’s East Campus

SE Aerial View of Health Sciences Building [Provided]

The University of Cincinnati has begun work on the new 110,000-square-foot Health Sciences Building in Avondale.

Located along Panzeca Way, immediately north of the massive Eden Avenue Parking Garage, the contemporary four-story building will house classrooms, labs and office space for the College of Allied Health Sciences. According to project manager Dale Magoteaux, classrooms will be located throughout the building, while lab and office space will be located in the building’s south and north wings, respectively.

The dean of CAHS, Tina Whalen, says that department heads closely coordinated with building designers to ensure that the needs of students, researchers and faculty were met, while also ushering in a new landmark building for the university’s east campus.

“We are thrilled that Perkins+Will has created a signature building for the college that will highlight our many educational, research and clinical service initiatives,” Whalen said.

The standout design for the $98 million Health Sciences Building will be further accentuated by the fact that it will be fronted by a nearly 1.5-acre green space that will create a natural entryway to the Kettering Lab Complex.

University Architect Beth McGrew says that the green space is part of the university’s larger commitment to creating a healthy and equitable campus environment.

“This is why green space is being created, as well as abundant natural light in the new structures, to provide a more enjoyable work place,” McGrew explained. “Along with this will be new classrooms to make space among the colleges more equitable with more opportunities for sharing.”

The schedule calls for the project to be completed in the fall of 2018, which is the same year the College of Allied Health Sciences will celebrate its 20th anniversary.

The project is part of a much larger program that is upgrading the surrounding collection of buildings through renovation or demolition and rebuild. That program of work is expected to be completed within the next three years.