A few months ago we decided to add Hamilton as one of our focus areas. The city is an historic urban center in the overall Cincinnati region, and has its own identity and news. Like many old cities around the United States, Hamilton has experienced some tough times, but is experiencing its own unique turnaround story.
In Hamilton, that turnaround has been focused along the Great Miami River. With the city’s central business district on one side, and charming historic districts surrounding it on both sides of the river, it makes complete sense that attention is focused there.
The positive momentum in Hamilton has been years in the making. The city posted a 2.6% population gain between 2000 and 2010, and never quite experienced the massive population loss many other old industrial cities did.
In addition to establishing one of the best urban school districts in Ohio, the city has long focused on establishing itself as a center for independent artists, and has looked at the Great Miami River as an exceptional opportunity to breathe new recreational opportunities into the city center. Quite simply, the progress is exciting.
A recent video put together by the City of Hamilton, Greater Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, Community First Solutions and Foster & Flux illustrates exactly what is trying to be accomplished in the City of Sculpture.
The video is a refreshing change to the many promotional city videos that pop up nowadays. There is an honesty in this one that embraces Hamilton’s industrial past along with its people. The nearly three minute video, entitled We Are Hamilton, also includes a script that was produced by a local writer and carefully narrated in coordination with the imagery.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has awarded $15.4 million to Strategies to End Homelessness. The money was part of a larger $1.8 billion nationwide distribution to support services for the homeless, and providing housing and emergency shelters to those that have been living on the streets.
The funds for Cincinnati will go to support 16 local agencies, establish a new rapid rehousing for families program, and two new permanent supportive housing projects for the chronically homeless.
Cincinnati Strategy to End Homelessness [Provided]
Strategies to End Homelessness was established in 2007 by the City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County to lead a comprehensive system of care amongst 30 non-profit organizations working. The organization says that their goal is to work with these organizations to reduce homelessness 50% in the city and county by 2017.
Pointing to accomplishments like a centralized emergency shelter hotline, homelessness prevention, street outreach, and establishing emergency shelter and housing solutions; leadership says that the community has been able to increase the number of people served in supportive housing programs by 100% since the organization was formed nearly eight years ago.
Kevin Finn, President and CEO of Strategies to End Homelessness, explained to UrbanCincy that the HUD funds they just received are extremely limited relative to the need, and are awarded on a competitive basis. In fact, he says that there was no guarantee that the community would get any assistance at all.
Due to the nature of the program, Finn says that the majority of the funds will work as renewal funding for existing programs at existing agency partners.
Homeless Population in Cincinnati [Provided]
“This funding is competitively awarded by HUD and was earned by organizations in our community that have successfully helped many people out of homelessness and back to self-sufficiency,” Finn wrote in a prepared statement. “If we are going to reduce homelessness, we must offer successful housing solutions; HUD funded these programs based on their proven results.”
The new rapid rehousing program will work through a partnership with the Family Housing Partnership that includes Interfaith Hospitality Network, Bethany House Services, Salvation Army, and YWCA to build new rehousing capacity that is specifically made available to families. Nationally, HUD has found that 37% of all homeless people belonged to a family, and that 1.6 million children experience homelessness each year.
Finn says that the permanent supportive housing program will work similarly, but instead coordinate with the Talbert House, Over-the-Rhine Community Housing, Center for Independent Living Options, Freestore Foodbank, Excel Development and Caracole to determine where new capacity is most needed.
Strategies to End Homelessness will work with these organizations, for both new programs, to sort out exactly how much funding to distribute to each participating organization over the next six to eight months, with the funding from HUD being delivered approximately a year from now.
A December 2014 Salon article, using statistics from an April, 2013 Brookings Institute report shed light on an increasingly-present paradox in the American economy – America’s next generation of workers prefers urban living, but jobs tend to be decentralized and located far from most region’s urban center.
The report found that from 2000 to 2007 the share of jobs located within two miles of a major urban area’s central business district declined 2%; and that by 2010, a nationwide average of 43% of jobs were located at least 10 miles from the CBD. Only 24% of jobs, meanwhile, were located within two miles of most regions’ primary downtown.
Percentage of Jobs Within 10-35 Miles of CBD [Provided]
The pattern is more acute in Cincinnati than in most other metropolitan areas, where a robust urban turnaround has been taking place. Compared to the national average of 22.9%, only 17.7% of the region’s jobs were located within three miles of the CBD, which in Cincinnati’s case would also include Uptown. Furthermore, 52.8% of the region’s jobs, approximately 452,000, lie between 10 and 35 miles from downtown.
In the first decade of the new century, which was defined nationally by the huge job losses of the Great Recession, the Cincinnati region lost a total of 76,845 jobs. Of those, 67,122 were within 10 miles of the CBD. While total jobs declined 8.2%, the jobs within 10 to 35 miles of downtown Cincinnati increased 3.3%, with both other areas experiencing declines.
While these recent gains tend to buck the national trend, the Cincinnati region’s employment remains more sprawled than the average American metropolitan area. But while the region has fewer jobs than average within 10 miles its CBD, the Cincinnati region has more jobs within 10 to 35 miles than all but three Midwestern regions (Detroit – 77.4%, Chicago – 67.4%, St. Louis – 62.1%). Columbus and Cleveland come in at 35.4% and 46.5%, respectively.
What this seems to indicate is that Cincinnati has a lower reliance on jobs from manufacturing and agricultural industries than most of its Midwestern peers.
Cincinnati Regional Job Distribution (2000-2010) [Provided]
The Brookings Institute went on to find that the Great Recession stalled this trend across the board, as hard-hit industries like manufacturing and retail tend to be the most decentralized. Yet, from 2000 to 2010, 91 of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation saw the number of jobs within three miles of their CBD decline.
Washington, DC, which serves as a national economic outlier for its massive job and wage growth, was the only metropolitan area that saw downtown jobs rise as both a percentage and gross number.
Researchers say that the land-use and zoning policies of each metropolitan area affect the geographical characteristics of jobs within that area. While metropolitan areas with over 500,000 jobs tend to be more decentralized, large metropolitan regions like Chicago, Atlanta or Detroit include large secondary clusters of employment outside of their traditional downtown.
While talented young workers increasingly show their preference for walkable urban communities, jobs continue to decentralize throughout the United States. This distribution creates problems for the region in terms of building and maintaining infrastructure. It also does not bode well for more sprawled regions, like Cincinnati, in terms of being able to attract a new workforce to take the place of aging Baby Boomers.
Construction crews recently began installing the first overhead wires for the Cincinnati Streetcar. The initial installations took place just over a week ago in Over-the-Rhine. It marks the first time in more than 50 years that overhead streetcar wires have been in place over Cincinnati streets.
During the early discussions about this starter line for the modern streetcar system, skeptics had charged that the overhead wires would serve as an eyesore and a target for vandals. While it is too early to tell if vandals will have any interest in tampering with the overhead wires, it is now evident just non-intrusive overhead wires are for modern transit systems.
Unlike the systems from over a half-century ago, sleek poles support a single neatly strung wire over the street. Also unlike overhead wires of past, this wire will be strung approximately 19 feet above the ground in order to make it more resistant to tampering, and to keep the live current safely away from pedestrians and cyclists below.
Accordingly, the construction of the starter streetcar line is also bringing all new traffic signals and utility poles to the streets along the route.
Following the same pattern as track installation, the first overhead wires were installed along Elm Street near Washington Park. The overhead wire system will carry a 750-volt direct current that will provide the power to run the streetcar vehicles, and project officials say that it will be installed in a slight zig-zag pattern above the streetcar track in order to make sure the pantograph on the streetcar vehicles wears evenly over time.
The above video was put together by CitiCable in its ongoing documentation of streetcar construction work.
River West Working Group has announced that the western leg of the Ohio River Trail through Cincinnati has been awarded a $1 million Federal Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality grant. An additional funding commitment of $261,000 from the City of Cincinnati’s Bicycle Transportation Program brings the total to $1.3 million.
Project leaders say that the money will be put toward construction of the first phase of the bikeway and greenway project along Cincinnati’s western riverfront.
“We greatly appreciate the initiative of the City’s Department of Transportation & Engineering in developing and submitting the grant application, and the support of Mayor John Cranley, who set up the bike program funding that seeded the Federal grant,” said Tom Croft, co-chair of River West Working Group.
Phasing Strategy [Provided]
Ohio River Trail West [Provided]
Ohio River Trail West [Provided]
Croft, a Price Hill community activist, also credited the work of ODOT, OKI Regional Council of Governments, State Senator Bill Seitz (R), and Representatives Bill Blessing (R) and Lou Terhar (R).
The first phase of work will extend roughly 3.7 miles downriver from the planned Price Landing park to the Gilday Recreation Center. The recently allocated funds will go toward constructing more than half of this phase of work.
The river alignment of this trail makes it unique to any other east/west corridor on Cincinnati’s west side in that it does not traverse steep or extended hills. Such an orientation will allow cyclists the opportunity to get to the trail and have a level path into the city center.
Due to the relationship of the project to the existing freight railroad lines, project leaders say that additional coordination is needed before the group is able to move forward with the third segment of work within the first phase of construction activities.
“We are not going to announce work on that until we have negotiated some type of agreement”, Dave Zelman, co-chair of River West Working Group told UrbanCincy.
Further complicating matters is that the City of Cincinnati recently worked with the freight railroad companies to rebuild the four tracks along that stretch in recent years. Regardless, neighborhood leaders and project proponents are confident that the work will progress and serve as a major benefit for the communities along the corridor.
“The Ohio River Trail West is a big factor in the ongoing revitalization of our western Hamilton County neighborhoods, many of which are underserved by this kind of amenity,” concluded Zelman. “It will encourage access to the Ohio River and its surrounding hillsides, our greatest natural assets.”
