Category: Up To Speed

Links to keep you up to speed on what’s happening in Cincinnati and what we can learn from other cities.

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What can cities today learn from failed ancient cities?

What can cities today learn from failed ancient cities?.

It is always fascinating to study what exactly led to the collapse of previous civilizations and the cities they built and inhabited. Often we study what it is we can learn in order to maintain the civilizations we have built, but not our cities. A team of University of Cincinnati researchers have been looking at exactly that in the former Mayan city of Tikal. More from Next City:

When Lentz and a group of colleagues looked, they were able to piece together a picture of how Tikal survived as an urban center. For hundreds of years, they found, the Maya managed their resources sustainably. But that wasn’t enough to keep the city from collapsing in the face of climatic change; the changes Tikal’s residents made to the land may even have made them more vulnerable.

“They expanded to the carrying capacity of their landscape, leaving no resilience where something bad came along,” Lentz said. “When you make changes to your environment, sometimes things happens that you don’t expect. When the droughts came, because they had exploited the environment to the full extent of their technological capabilities, they just were not able to respond.”

The last monument went up around 869 A.D. By the end of the century, the city was likely largely abandoned.

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What should take the place of the former Queensgate Correctional Facility?

What should take the place of the former Queensgate Correctional Facility?.

Hamilton County’s former Queensgate Correctional Facility is currently on the market. The historic warehouse building has sat vacant since the jail operation was shut down six years ago. The site sits close to the Central Business District and the building evidently has tremendous views of the downtown skyline and Ohio River. A buyer has not yet been identified, so it is unclear as to what the future holds for the 152,000-square-foot complex…so what would you like to see in its place? More from the Business Courier:

The Queensgate Correctional Facility closed in 2008 due to budget cuts. It housed low- and medium-security prisoners. It sits directly west of the former Hudepohl brewery property, which the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority purchased for $650,000 in May. The Port Authority is still working on a plan for repositioning that property. The former jail property includes five buildings. The largest is an eight-story, more than 128,000-square-foot building that served as the jail. The smaller buildings served as staff services space, administration space and a recreation building.

…the property has only been on the market a few weeks and he’s already had interest from a couple developers. The building could be redeveloped as residential space, used as warehouse space, or it could potentially be used as a jail again if the county is interested in reopening it.

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Should Cincinnati look to Chicago’s new ARO for affordable housing guidance?

Should Cincinnati look to Chicago’s new ARO for affordable housing guidance?.

Cincinnati has experienced rising property values in a handful Census tracts in recent years, while dozens remain below median values for the region. So unlike New York or San Francisco, the gentrification taking place in Cincinnati is not what typically comes to mind when the topic is discussed. A more apt comparison may be Chicago where a more extreme version of rising property values stand in contrast to swaths of the city that remain mired in poverty, and new policies are moving forward to address the matter. More from NextCity:

The new ARO would require that at least 25 percent of affordable units be built on site, removing the ability to opt out totally. City neighborhoods would be classified into “downtown,” “high-income” and “low-moderate income,” and the in-lieu fee for the remaining 75 percent of units, if a developer chooses that option, would rise to $175,000 downtown and $125,000 in high-income areas; it would fall to $50,000 in the rest of the city. Developers would also be allowed to meet the affordable unit requirement by building or rehabbing on other lots within a mile of the main site. The aim is to create affordable units in the neighborhoods where they’re most scarce, rather than to continue to concentrate them in the city’s poorer communities.

That goal reflects what makes Chicago’s affordable housing crisis different than the ones in a handful of coastal cities that have dominated national coverage. In many Chicago neighborhoods, depopulation, disinvestment, segregation and crime have kept housing values relatively low, even just a few miles from the booming downtown. Meanwhile, communities on the North Side — as well as a handful to the south and west of the Loop — have seen rapid gentrification and skyrocketing rents. That dynamic has led to a dramatic increase in economic segregation.

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American cities should be more concerned about spreading poverty, not gentrification

American cities should be more concerned about spreading poverty, not gentrification.

Gentrification is one of those topics that is difficult to write about. Simply mentioning the word or hinting at its existence is sure to stir the pot and draw a wildfire of comments, both defending and condemning it. What is often left out of the discussion, however, is that the gentrification we all imagine in our minds when we hear the word is essentially confined to just three metropolitan regions in America. As a result, the bigger concern for most cities should actually be their widespread poverty. More from Vox:

That share of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods isn’t huge — around 8.9 percent of all Americans living in poverty in 2010, according to US Census Bureau data. But the population of high-poverty neighborhoods has doubled since 1970, from 2 to 4 million. Over that same period, the US population as a whole grew by around 50 percent. In addition, the number of high-poverty census tracts in cities nearly tripled from 1,100 to 3,100.

As City Observatory highlights, we often think of gentrification as a big threat to urban areas, driving up the cost of living for people living in poorer areas and eventually forcing them out. You would think that’d lead to a lot of these neighborhoods rebounding out of poverty, albeit with mixed consequences for people there originally. But it appears the bigger threat by far is neighborhoods remaining mired in poverty and new neighborhoods falling into it.

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Is crowdfunding the future for real estate investment?

Is crowdfunding the future for real estate investment?.

Real estate in America has largely followed predictable funding patterns over time. This, however, appears to be shifting. In one recent example in Washington D.C., a pair of young developers are looking to empower a community with the opportunity to invest in developing a property in their own neighborhood. Some believe that this kind of deal could change the way real estate deals are brokered in the future. More from CityLab:

Real estate developments are typically financed by wealthy investors who live in the suburbs, or by Wall Street funds even farther away. In a neighborhood like Washington’s H Street Northeast corridor, this means that local projects often can’t find backing, or that far-flung investors put up safe, formulaic products in their place: say, “the glass shiny office/condo building that’s horrible,” Dan Miller says, grimacing.

This model – with its broken connection between a neighborhood’s desires and its investors’ bottom line – seemed to the brothers illogical. Why couldn’t people in the community invest in real estate right next door? Why couldn’t the Millers raise money to purchase a property on H Street from the very people who live there? The neighborhood is a quirky mix of barbershops and hip beer gardens. It’s not the kind of place that investors from wealthy Chevy Chase, Maryland, quite get.