Tag: planning

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Up To Speed

What should a shrinking city do with its vacant housing stock?

What should a shrinking city do with its vacant housing stock?.

Losing population isn’t fun, and a host of cities throughout the U.S. have been losing population since their collective peaks in the 1950s. Cincinnati is one of those cities. Along with the troubling finances this presents, it also creates the predicament of deciding what to do with vacant households left behind. In Cincinnati, and many others, the decision has been to tear down homes and hope for something better. More from The New York Times:

A recent Brookings Institution study found that from 2000 to 2010 the number of vacant housing units nationally had increased by 4.5 million, or 44 percent. And a report by the University of California, Berkeley, determined that over the past 15 years, 130 cities, most with relatively small populations, have dissolved themselves, more than half the total ever recorded in the United States. The continuing struggles of former manufacturing centers have fundamentally altered urban planning, traditionally a discipline based on growth and expansion.

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Up To Speed

Chicago leading a movement of increasingly popular participatory budgeting practice

Chicago leading a movement of increasingly popular participatory budgeting practice.

Under Roxanne Qualls’ (D) guidance, Cincinnati dove into priority-driven budgeting in 2012. The proposal had mixed reviews and ultimately City Council ended up ignoring much of what the public had to say in order to prevent any cuts to public safety. The concept of participatory budgeting, however, is gaining popularity nationwide, and Chicago is looking to implement it city-wide in the near future. More from NextCity:

Five years after Moore’s district first tried participatory budgeting, three other wards have followed its lead, picking up a practice pioneered 25 years ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Since 2011, nine city council districts in New York adopted it. The city of Vallejo, Calif. did the samelast year, as did one council district in San Francisco. The results are promising, with participation levels relatively strong and zero scandals to date.

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Arts & Entertainment News Politics

November’s URBANexchange Takes Place Tonight at Moerlein Lager House

We are hosting the November URBANexchange tonight at the Moerlein Lager House. This will be a special event as it comes on the heels of Tuesday’s election and our Urbanist Candidates Forum last week.

As we begin our second year of URBANexchange events, we hope that these can become more engaging. We received lots of positive feedback from the young people that packed the Niehoff Studio last Tuesday for our Urbanist Candidates Forum, and we want to build on that momentum.

Moerlein Lager House

As a result, please join us in the biergarten at the Moerlein Lager House this evening anytime between 5:30pm and 8:30pm, and share with us the policies and issues you would like this new city council and mayor pursue. You can simply jot down your ideas on the back of a business card, sheet of paper, or email it to our area manager and editor at john.yung@urbancincy.com.

As always, the event will be a casual setting where you can meet others interested in what is happening in the city. We will gather in the biergarten so that each person can choose how much or little they buy in terms of food or drink. Although we do encourage our attendees to generously support our kind hosts at the Moerlein Lager House.

Going forward we will continue to gather ideas, from those who attend our URBANexchange events, and occasionally submit them to City Council. We are thinking of it as a sort of as an urbanist wish list.

Our team of researchers and writers will also occasionally dive further into the topics and publish the information and ideas on the website.

URBANexchange is free and open to the public.

We will be situated in the northwest corner of the biergarten (near the Moer To Go window), but you can also ask the host where the UrbanCincy group is located and they will be happy to assist.

The Moerlein Lager House is located on Cincinnati’s central riverfront and is located just one block from a future streetcar stop. Free and ample bike parking is available near our location in the biergarten outside by the Schmidlapp Event Lawn.

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Arts & Entertainment Business News

VIDEO: Second Cincinnati Street Food Festival Grows in Popularity

The Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation (WHRF) hosted the second annual Cincinnati Street Food Festival three weekends ago along E. McMillan Street.

The event built on the success from the previous year and added more vendors with 15 total this year. There were also more activities, which helped to attract a diverse crowd from the neighborhood and the rest of the city.

As we reported prior to the event, a lot of interesting things are taking place in Walnut Hills. The WHRF has spearheaded a number of unique placemaking activities meant to engage the community, including the Five Points Biergarten and Buy 25 events.

In case you were not able to attend the 2013 Cincinnati Street Food Festival, WHRF staffer Andrew Stahlke put together another one of his tremendous videos. It is nearly four minutes in length and worth every second of viewing. The music included with the video is ‘Who We Are (Live United Mix)’ by Tracy Walker.

If you want to learn even more about what is happening in the Walnut Hills area, listen to our exclusive podcast with WHRF director Kevin Wright from March 17.

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News Politics

UrbanCincy Partners With Niehoff Studio to Host Urbanist Candidates Forum

Yesterday we highlighted the important planning efforts that will be affected by this year’s mayoral race. However the real legislative efforts will be carried out by the nine city council members elected on November 5th. Even though the newly elected mayor may have his or her own agenda starting December 1, often times council members are eager to begin working on their own priorities.

With a field of 21 candidates this year, we feel it is important for urban-minded people to hear what city council candidates have to say on some of the issues important to you, which is why tomorrow we are co-hosting the Urbanist Candidates Forum with the Niehoff Urban Design Studio.

Earlier this year we worked with the studio to host the successful Metropolis & Mobility event and are continuing that partnership this fall with the council candidates forum.

Forum Invite
In addition to the eight confirmed candidates listed on the banner, we have also received confirmations from Kevin Johnson, Shawn Butler and P.G. Sittenfeld.

This forum is an excellent opportunity voters interested in transportation, land use, sustainability and architecture to learn more about the Cincinnati city council candidates. We also hope this will help encourage your involvement in the public process going forward.

The forum will focus on issues important to urbanists. Some of those issues will include topics we typically cover on this site including transportation, economic development, sustainability and other planning topics.

The event is free and will run from 6:30pm to 8pm. Food and drink will be provided by neighborhood establishments.

The Niehoff Studio can be reached via the #24 and #78 Metro bus lines.