Category: Development

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Business Development News Transportation

Oakley businesses prepare for a construction-free holiday shopping season

Construction crews are currently finishing the Oakley Square streetscape, and officials plan to have all traffic lanes re-opened by this weekend well in advance of the critical holiday shopping season.

What began as a $50,000 grant request from the Oakley Community Council to study ways to improve the safety and walkability of the public square has leveraged enough other sources to include sweeping improvements throughout the neighborhood business district. A previously dangerous and confusing five-direction intersection has been reconfigured for the safety of pedestrians and drivers. Streetscape improvements around Oakley Square including rain gardens, street lighting, outdoor dining space, street signs and meter posts, street trees, pedestrian crossings and other traffic calming measures are now complete.

The Cincinnati Park Board says that it will be putting the finishing touches on their contribution to the project by completing the much anticipated Geier Esplanade Park over the next four weeks. Once complete, the park space will include an expanded lawn, movable outdoor furniture, and a multi-use stage area. Combined, these elements are expected to become the social and civic hub of Oakley.

Michael Cervay, director of Cincinnati’s Department of Community Development, says that remaining water main work on Madison Road and streetscaping throughout the district will be put on hold until January 2011 to allow businesses in the district to have a construction-free holiday shopping season.

“The City’s goal is to work with residents and businesses alike to create thriving places, such as Oakley Square, that act as amenities to our neighborhoods,” he explained. “Construction work is pausing through the holiday season to assure an even more positive shopping experience.”

The improvements have sparked several businesses to expand or invest in the district. Sonoma American & Mediterranean Grill which opened on Oakley Square last month hiring 20 new employees, and the historic 20th Century Theatre recently launched a restoration project of the theatre’s historic tower.

“This project was a huge part of why we chose to invest in Oakley,” detailed Sonoma American & Mediterranean Grill owner Ryan Kassis. “It shows a long-term commitment to the neighborhood and added the character that we were looking for.”

Although business owners acknowledge that weathering the construction has been a challenge, the result they hope will be a re-energized Oakley Square that is safer, greener, cleaner, and poised for long-term success.

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Business Development News

Connect with fellow urbanists at Soapbox’s panel discussion on urban pioneers

Urban neighborhoods often suffer before they ultimately make a triumphant comeback. Whether the neighborhood is Brooklyn or Over-the-Rhine, urban neighborhoods rely on critical populace that is willing to take a chance when others are not. These people are what we call urban pioneers.

This scenario is the topic of Soapbox’s next speaker series event to be held at the Niehoff Urban Studio in Corryville. Urban Pioneers – The Cult of Personality will gather four of Cincinnati’s most relevant urban pioneers who have helped to transform once downtrodden neighborhoods like Mt. Adams, Northside, and Over-the-Rhine.

Organizers say that guest panelists will include Neil Bortz, Matthew Wirtz, Maureen Wood, and Terry Chan who will discuss what it takes to succeed in bringing a vision to reality by revitalizing parts of a city one building at a time. The discussion will be moderated by the former director of UC’s School of Architecture & Interior Design Michaele Pride.

While organized by Soapbox Cincinnati, the speaker series is sponsored by the Niehoff Urban Studio and heavily attended by the those involved in the Urbanist movement in Cincinnati. Founder of the Cincinnati Urbanist movement and poltics teacher at UC’s School of Planning, Terry Grundy, further explained the intricacy of urban pioneers to UrbanCincy.

“Someone — though more generally a small group of people — has to take a chance on a fine old neighborhood with lots of potential that’s lost population and become poorer over many decades,” Grundy explained. “Call the people who do this urban pioneers if you will but, whatever you call them, they’re the people whom we look back on years after a neighborhood has been turned around and say, “They’re the ones who got it all started.”

Grundy says that these initial urban pioneers are often followed by a group of “semi-pioneers” who move in before the neighborhood has fully turned around, but only after the initial risk was taken away.

“This second wave of people who come into rebounding neighborhoods is almost always made up of the key demographic groups that are attracted to urban life and are remaking older American cities: young professionals, the group we call the Bohemian Cluster (gays and lesbians, artists, musicians, true bohemians), empty nesters, and New Americans (immigrants from other countries). Some resurgent neighborhoods have a strong showing of members of one of these groups while others have a mixture of two or more. We know, for instance, that young professionals often enjoy living in neighborhoods with a strong contingent of the Bohemian Cluster.”

Urban Pioneers – The Cult of Personality if free to attend, but organizers are requiring reservations be made online in advance. The event will take place on Wednesday, October 27 from 5pm to 7:30pm at the Niehoff Urban Studio (map).  Registration and happy hour will begin at 5pm.

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Business Development News Politics Transportation

Free interactive workshop at Union Terminal to gather public input on transportation investments

Ohio officials kicked off the first of eight state-wide public workshops yesterday in Columbus. The interactive workshops are structured to get resident input on public policy surrounding transportation investment.

The second of eight meetings will be held in Cincinnati today at Losantiville Cafe inside the famous Union Terminal building. At today’s free event guests will be treated to presentations by Cincinnati Vice Mayor Roxanne Qualls and John Deatrick who will discuss the economic development impact of The Banks development for which he is overseeing.

Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) organizers say that part of the focus will be on how to better create jobs through transportation investments. Officials say that the discussions are part of ODOT’s Go OHIO Transportation Futures Plan which is examining how the state invests in all modes of travel and shipping including highway, air, rail, transit, water, pedestrian and bicycle. From there officials hope to better align those various modes of transportation investments with job creation, economic development and overall quality of life.

“Transportation has always been a driver of jobs and economic development for Ohioans,” described ODOT director Jolene M. Molitoris.

The U.S. Department of Commerce reports that approximately eight percent of Ohio’s private sector jobs was linked to the manufacture of exported goods in 2008, with approximately $45.6 billion in total export value during the same time according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

ODOT officials believe that the state’s seventh highest ranking nationally for value of goods exported to international markets, the nation’s fourth largest interstate highway system, the fourth most tonnage of goods moved through its waterways, and the third most active freight rail mileage in the nation speak highly to the ability to leverage transportation investments into economic development.

“The timing for this effort couldn’t be better with a report out of Washington showing that infrastructure investments can and will raise economic growth and productivity,” said Molitoris.  “Low construction costs mean we can do more than ever before with our resources and at the same time create more good-paying Ohio jobs.”

The free event at Cincinnati Union Terminal (map) will take place from 6pm to 8pm with registration at 5:30pm. Reservations are not required, but those interested in attending are encouraged to RSVP by emailing go.ohio@dot.state.oh.us.

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Development News Politics Transportation

Induced Traffic Demand Works Both Ways

There is a popular saying that circulates in urban planning circles: “Widening roads to solve traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.”  Planners have shown over the past few decades that adding lanes to roads, while temporarily increasing flow, does little to address congestion because over time traffic demand continues to climb.  To understand it better, we have to understand the basics of traffic.

There are a few factors that determine a road’s level of service for automobiles.  There are capacity, the amount of cars that can fit on the road and maintain an adequate service, and flow, the rate at which cars pass the area under study.  Adding lanes increases capacity, but as development increases, so does demand.  This translates to more car trips and more cars on the road, which in turns leads to traffic engineers recommending adding more lanes.  The cycle repeats over and over again. David Owens highlights this in his book, Green Metropolis:

“When a city’s streets or highways become crowded, for example, the standard response is to create additional capacity by building new roads or widening existing ones. Projects like these almost always end up making the original problem worse—while also usually taking years to complete and costing many millions of dollars—because they generate what transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new open roadway encourages existing users to make more car trips, lures drivers away from other routes, and tempts transit riders to return to their automobiles, with the eventual result that the new roads become at least as clogged as the old roads, though at higher traffic volumes, and the efficiency of transit declines.”

This cycle can be seen all across suburban America.  In the Cincinnati area, there are cases where planned road widenings do not even meet future demand.  Take for instance the planned expansion of I-75.  By 2020, when construction is slated to finish, the level of service for the highway is projected to be exactly the same as it is now.  Traffic Engineers explain that this is due to…rising demand from automobile use.  It is clear that as long as America continues to spend money on roads, we will continue to facilitate demand for automobiles.

Fortunately the same is true with rail transit.  As pointed out by “The Provost of Cincinnati” on the now defunct Phoney Coney blog, we need only to look at the expansion of the New York City subway out to Queens in the 1920’s as one of the many reliable examples where investing in rail transit promoted growth.

The same location in Queens in the 1920’s (left) and 1940’s (right).

Other popular cases include:

  • The Washington DC Metro spawned millions of dollars in Transit-Oriented Development from Richmond, VA and all throughout the system.  Just recently, a massive $107 million dollar TOD development has broken ground in Northeast Washington DC.
  • The Portland Light Rail and Streetcar lines revitalized the Pearl District, an aging and blighted warehouse neighborhood close to downtown (Sound familiar?).   The area has seen over $3.5 billion in development since 2001.
  • The Charlotte Light Rail spawned over a half billion dollars in TOD development along the line.

In all cases, ridership has met or exceeded projections.  If traffic engineers were applying their same thinking to these systems, they would be calling for expanding these systems further, which is what is happening.

As Dan Bertolet writes at Publicola, “…we will be faced with a choice: Continue to build more roads and thereby preclude progress on alternative transportation, or stop building roads and accept that there is a limit to the number of cars we can accommodate if we hope to a create a balanced, sustainable transportation system and the compact land use patterns that support it.”

The argument is clear, we Americans can choose to waste our money on continuing a lifestyle that has led to increased isolationism, increased obesity and stress, and longer commutes to nowhere — or we can invest in the convenience, sensible and more healthy alternative of rail transportation.

John Yung is an Urban Planner and advocate for pedestrian friendly-planning. Currently the Zoning Administrator of the City of Bellevue, KY he specializes in Land Use Planning, Form-based Codes, Floodplain Management and Urban Forestry. John is currently pursuing a Masters Degree from the University of Cincinnati’s School of Planning.

If you would like to sound off about something for UrbanCincy’s weekly op-ed column, please submit your ideas to urbancincy@gmail.com.

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Business Development News Politics

Hamilton County leaders eye land banking as potential cure for area’s housing woes

Our nation’s housing crisis and subsequent economic recession has led to an enormous increase in housing vacancy, abandonment, and foreclosures across the country. Hamilton County is no exception; the crisis has left many in the region homeless and has put a fiscal burden on local governments across the region, leaving them with the multifaceted challenges associated with widespread vacancy.

In many cases, property vacancy creates a domino effect that leads to further desertion and vacant properties within a neighborhood. This not only results in less tax revenue for cities; vacant property can also lead to increased rates of crimes such as drug dealing, prostitution, and arson. Because vacant property damages are so extensive, it is becoming more and more important for a metropolitan area to have a mechanism in place to transfer vacant property to owners who can/will pay taxes and redevelop the property.

A land bank is a tool that is growing in popularity, and on Tuesday morning local governmental and nonprofit leaders met to discuss how a Hamilton County land bank should be formed, funded and operated.

In April, Ohio Sub House Bill 313 was passed, enabling Ohio counties to create a Land Bank/County Land Reutilization Corporation (CLRC). The purpose of the CLRC is to facilitate the acquisition, reclamation, rehabilitation, and reutilization of vacant, abandoned, tax-foreclosed, and other real property. While there are still many steps that need to be taken before the CLRC is fully functional, county officials are hoping to have the land bank chartered by the end of the year.

Although no specific funding decisions were made at the meeting, there are multiple ways the CLRC can be supported fiscally. For example, the treasurer could recapture penalties and interest on delinquent taxes and assessments on behalf of the CLRC, the group could generate revenue from the resale of rehabbed property, and/or the CLRC could be authorized to issue bonds, accept gifts, and apply for grants. The recently announced NSP3 dollars can also be used to acquire homes for the CLRC.

Not only will the land bank help to address vacancy problems regionally, it will also give local CDCs and nonprofits a chance to obtain blighted property before private out-of-town investors. With a broad jurisdiction, the CLRC will be able to acquire both mortgage foreclosed and tax foreclosed properties. Moreover, the legislation allows land banks to waive delinquent taxes owed in order to clear the title on the property. This tax abatement component is crucial because often the taxes owed on abandoned property are more than the property’s actual market value.

At Tuesday’s meeting, there was a clear consensus that the land bank not just be a pilot program, but instead be a comprehensive and wide-ranging tool that helps to alleviate one of our region’s most pressing problems.

“The Board of County Commissioners want to ensure that the way this is set up is consistent with the community’s vision,” Assistant Hamilton County Administrator Jeffery Aluotto stated on Tuesday. “Land banking holds a great deal of promise as a means of addressing the increase in vacant housing stock we have seen since the recession, and the direct impacts that those vacancies have on the quality of life and economic vitality of our communities.”

With successes in Cuyahoga County and Gennessee County, Michigan, local leaders have high hopes for the potential impact that the CLRC can have on our region.

UrbanCincy will continue to follow this story as it progresses in the coming months.