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Arts & Entertainment News

Art to Inspire at September’s SSOM Event this Sunday

SSOM Music LineupNine years ago the organizers of Second Sunday on Main (SSOM) envisioned an event that would act as an economic development tool but was disguised as a street festival.  Today, that vision has more than come to fruition, as it is now a hub for local goods, food and entertainment.  This month will be no exception, with a full lineup of performers, artists, musicians, dancers and vendors.

Caitlin Behle, SSOM organizer and UrbanCincy contributor, explained that each month’s event has a distinctive theme.

“Last month was very game-oriented and playful, whereas this month will be more arts-driven,” Behle told UrbanCincy.

This month’s event on September 14 will also serve to honor “Dance on Main” which has been a notable theme for past SSOM events after Frank Hibrandt, a long-time Main Street resident, developed Dance on Main as an annual staple of SSOM where dancers of varying styles would perform at multiple stages weaved throughout the event.

Those searching for food and drink will not be disappointed as the event hosts a bustling beer garden and some food trucks for sustenance.  The featured food vendors this month are Red Sesame Korean Barbecue, Dojo Gelato, Urban Kitch’n, and Roll With it Café.

As is usual, there will be plenty of opportunities to view and participate in art activities this Sunday. Art pieces will be created by the Art Academy of Cincinnati mARTket and the group ArtWalks will be painting the crosswalk at Main and Woodward Streets. Attendees will also have the opportunity to create art of their own at the Kennedy Heights Arts Center’s Postal pARTners postcard creation station, kids’ craft table (Higher Branches), and at the Art Beyond Boundaries’ “ArtSpire” artist workshop at 2pm.

Enjoy the Arts has teamed up with SSOM to weave performing art into this month’s event that will include the following:

12:00-3:15 Mini concerts featuring Elementz, Know Theatre, Young Professional Choral Collective, Cincinnati Ballet’s CBII dancers, DANCEFIX at HBDC, Baba Charles and the Samba Parade Drummers, and more, MOTR Stage
12:00-5:00 Live music in front of Rock Paper Scissors featuring local acts Kate Wakefield, Brianna Kelly, Edison, and ADM. From 3-5 audience members can “take the stage” with ADM to create their own music and have it looped and incorporated into the live set. 1301 Main St.
1:45 Zvedza (experimental jazz), MOTR Stage
2:30 Celebrity Chef Series – Sous Chef Jimi Dean (The Rookwood), Beverage Wizard Rom Wells (The Rookwood, Cheapside Cafe), Mr. Pitiful’s
3:30 Folk Soul Revival (Americana), MOTR Stage

Second Sunday on Main is located on Main Street between Thirteenth and Liberty Streets in Over-the-Rhine. It is conveniently located along the #17, #19, #24 and #16 Metro bus lines. There is also ample free bike parking available immediately surrounding and within the event area.

Categories
Business Development News

Cincinnati Gentrified at One of Nation’s Fastest Rates Immediately Following Housing Boom

Vine Street [Travis Estell]

During the housing boom years between 2000 and 2007, many cities saw an influx of new housing and new wealth into their core neighborhoods. It was a trend that was consistent throughout America as wealthier individuals looked to move back into the cities that had been abandoned in prior decades.

This trend was more pronounced in some cities – Atlanta, Washington D.C., Denver, and Seattle – than others. But for the most part, the majority of the cities were gaining wealth relative to their regional average. Following the burst of the housing bubble, however, virtually every city saw this rate of improvement slow down.

According to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the majority of 59 cities studied now fall between either a one percentile decline or one percentile increase between 2007 and 2010. This is in contrast to the housing boom period which saw cities like Atlanta and Washington D.C. move up 8.7 and 5 percentiles respectively.

“During the housing boom, a number of large cities in the United States experienced redevelopment in their lower-income neighborhoods as higher-income residents moved in, a process known as gentrification,” wrote researcher Daniel Hartley. “Since lending standards have tightened with the onset of the housing bust and the financial crisis, we wondered whether gentrification has continued after the recession in places where it was happening before.”

The results of their research found that only a select handful of regions reasonably continued to see relative wealth growth in their principal cities. The findings also detected one region that bucked the trend and actually increased its gains over the housing boom period.

“Another interesting case is Cincinnati, which barely changed in income ranking from 2000 to 2007 but has increased at a pace similar to Denver or Washington during the 2007 to 2010 period,” the research team noted.

Hints of such activity were realized in December 2013 when UrbanCincy uncovered that census tracts all over the city were experiencing wealth increases.

While the gains in wealth may seem like a positive thing for the city, not everyone is so thrilled about the changes taking place in Cincinnati.

“It seems to me what this information really indicates is how, when people experiencing poverty are systematically removed from a certain area, and housing stock is renovated with the goal of selling to wealthier people, property values increase,” says Jason Haap, an area teacher and prominent advocate for the city’s homeless population. “The fact that Cincinnati has seen gentrified growth during a time of slow economic growth in minority communities further exacerbates the situation.”

One of the tools in order to prevent the displacement Haap mentions from happening is including ‘set asides’ in new developments for affordable housing. The Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC) has done this a bit in Over-the-Rhine at projects like Mercer Commons and Bremen Lofts, but there is no official city policy or requirement to do so.

What also factors into the relative changes studied by the Federal Reserve Bank is the widespread poverty and low income levels of those living within city limits. Thus, even nominal improvements would show up as a potentially significant increase.

We do know, however, that some housing prices, particularly in the city center where demand is highest, are starting to get out of hand. Most new apartment developments in the Central Business District now feature rents of $2,000 or more per month, and in one recent case, a three bedroom flat on Sixth Street rented for a whopping $4,600 per month.

In such cases it is leaving many now wondering if these prices are not only driving out existing residents but, paradoxically, also preventing many new potential residents from moving in.

“Demand in Cincinnati’s core is insatiable, and supply is only coming online at a trickle,” explained Derek Bauman, an urban development consultant and chairman of Cincinnatians for Progress. “Without urban housing supply, we may miss the coming wave of new residents. At nearly $2 per square-foot rents and $250-$300 a square-foot sales, we may not have Manhattan prices yet, but we’re damn near Brooklyn.”

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Month in Review

Month in Review – August 2014

Check out UrbanCincy’s top five stories from August 2014:

  1. Initial $2M Phase of Cincy Bike Share On-Pace for September Opening
    Many of the system’s 35 stations are now installed around Downtown and Uptown Cincinnati.
  2. Will Main Street Follow in Vine Street’s Footsteps and Return to Two-Way Traffic?
    Since its conversion back to two-way traffic, Vine Street has also blossomed with dozens of new businesses. As a result, there have been several other examples of this type of conversion throughout Over-the-Rhine, including sections of Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets.
  3. MOVE Coworking Aims to Offer Non-Traditional Workers Healthy, Active Workspace
    The “active collaborative environment” that mixes the traditional shared working space with a fitness training facility.
  4. Will Saks Fifth Avenue Remain in Downtown Cincinnati Following Collapse of its Kenwood Move?
    Saks could remain in its current downtown space or move to another larger retail space in the urban core.
  5. Apple Street Market Cooperative Hoping to Fill One of Cincinnati’s Food Deserts
    When Save-A-Lot closed its Northside store in November 2013, however, it got the attention of the Cincinnati Union Coop Initiative (CUCI) and sparked an effort to open a community-owned grocery store in its place called Apple Street Market.

 

Categories
Up To Speed

Could Closing the ‘Corporate Inversion’ Loophole Rebuild America’s Infrastructure?

Could Closing the ‘Corporate Inversion’ Loophole Rebuild America’s Infrastructure?.

With Burger King and Tim Hortons moving forward with a merger that would shift the American fast-food chain’s headquarters to Canada, a new wave of conversation has come up about a practice used by many corporations to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The tactic is called ‘corporate inversions’ and it is estimated that the practice costs America a lot of money. But what if some kind of program could be set up that would allow companies to bring that money back home while also allowing them to see a more direct return? More from Next City:

One could imagine Apple and Facebook would be very interested in helping speed up the creation of a high-speed rail system that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles. That Coca-Cola and Starbucks would see the value in improving the country’s water infrastructure. Or that Ford and GM would see the benefit in better roads and bridges.

Currently the stockpile of cash held abroad to avoid American taxes is estimated to be $1.95 trillion. What if instead those profits were brought back to the U.S. with a percentage invested in infrastructure? At just two percent, this deal could pay for all of the country’s currently deferred maintenance.

Categories
Business Development News

Second Phase of Newport on the Levee to Come More Than 15 Years After First

View of Lot B Development [Provided]

Newport on the Levee was the talk of the town in the late 1990s. It was to be one of the most prominent development projects in the urban core for some time, and transform Newport’s riverfront into a place that would attract tourists year-round.

There were also lofty visions that the development of Newport on the Levee would spark a wholesale redevelopment of the Northern Kentucky river city, including virtually every neighboring property and the development of the 1,000-foot-tall Millennium Tower.

These ambitions, however, were never fully realized. Newport on the Levee experienced a number a setbacks and never fully embraced the mixed-use nature that would ensure its success, Millennium Tower was cancelled almost as quickly as it was proposed, and while surrounding development has taken place, it has come at a much slower pace than envisioned.

Earlier this month developers took the next step forward with a plan to build on the long vacant Lot B next to the Purple People Bridge that would aim to address those issues.

According to Capital Investment Group (CIG), the investment would total $80 million and add 238 residential units, 8,000 square feet of street-level retail space, a 150-room hotel and an 800-space parking garage.

Newport city officials and CIG representatives say they intend to start construction in July 2015 and wrap-up a year later.

While this is good news for Newport on the Levee, it is certainly not when or how developers and city officials had originally envisioned the riverfront development taking shape.

In 2000, the plan was for Newport on the Levee to include a mall with a movie theater complex, an aquarium, a state-of-the-art 3-D IMAX theater, and a second phase of development that would begin just two years later and be anchored by a 200-room hotel.

Problems arose almost immediately when the 3-D IMAX shut down just two years after it opened in 2001. The retail portions of the mall also never seemed to live up to expectations, perhaps following in Tower Place Mall’s footsteps and illustrating that enclosed shopping malls tend to not work in urban settings.

As a result, the mall portion of the development has seen a constant cycle of tenants in and out, and more recently the replacement of most retail inside the mall structure by office tenants. Several restaurant operations have even relocated across the river to The Banks development. The former 456-seat IMAX theater has since been filled by the successful Newport Aquarium.

Shortly after the opening of the first phase of work at Newport on the Levee, city officials also pursued the USS Cincinnati submarine in an effort to dock it along the shore of the Ohio River next to Newport on the Levee. Those plans never materialized and now only a portion of the submarine vessel will be returning to the region – at a location in a future phase of Smale Riverfront Park along Cincinnati’s riverfront.

During all of this Newport Aquarium has been a particularly bright spot for the development. It is consistently named one of the nation’s best aquariums and is a constant draw for tourists and locals alike – attracting more than 11 million visitors since it opened 15 years ago.

With the Great Recession now in the past and new competition from The Banks, Newport officials and developers are looking to jump start things once more. The second phase of Newport on the Levee may be more than a decade behind schedule, but it will add a critical component that was sorely missing from the original development.

Full-time residents and a hotel at the site will help drive more business to shops and restaurants operating outside of the typical weekend hours popular for tourists. The revived talk of extending the streetcar system across the river also shows a new sense of collaboration and possibility that did not exist in the lead up to the new millennium.