Cincinnati’s efforts to transform its center city are being noticed nationally, and the recent sale of Tower Place Mall is just the latest action made by the City that is turning heads elsewhere. The question now is will Cincinnati hit another home run with Tower Place Mall as it has with Fountain Square, Washington Park, The Banks, Smale Riverfront Park, and Fort Washington Way? More from Bloomberg Businessweek:
The city has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into a major transformation that’s still under way. It began in 2006 with the reopening of downtown’s central Fountain Square after a $49 million renovation. Developers have spent more than $600 million on new apartments, restaurants and a park in the half-mile space between the Bengals and Reds stadiums. A $322 million, 41-story office tower that’s now the city’s tallest opened last year. And on Monday, a 156-room boutique hotel had its grand opening following a $51 million renovation.
Also in the works is a streetcar connecting several popular downtown-area spots slated to open in 2015 and a $400 million downtown casino set to open in the spring. In the nearby Over-the-Rhine historic district, dozens of shabby but beautiful buildings have been transformed into bars and restaurants popular among yuppies and hipsters, and a once crime-prone park underwent a $48 million overhaul to become one of the city’s favorite spots for concerts, outdoor movie viewings and flea markets.
As those projects thrive, popular retailers like Banana Republic, Victoria’s Secret and Chic-fil-a fled from Tower Place mall, which sits in the heart of it all. Just a handful of businesses still operate at Tower Place, and foot traffic is low even during the holidays.
In September, city officials stood in Price Hill alongside state officials to announce plans to demolish up to 700 vacant and blighted buildings in Cincinnati. The funding for the ongoing effort comes from a state-wide program called Move Ohio Forward, which gives demolition funding to cities from money the state won in a settlement with large banks last year over the home foreclosure process and lack of property upkeep by the banks.
City officials estimate that there are currently 1,300 vacant and blighted properties awaiting demolition. The $5.84 million grant, when matched with $5.34 million from the Hamilton County Land Reutilization Corporation and $3.49 million from the City, will provide enough funding to cover just over half of the total amount of demolitions mandated its own ordinances. The final amount of demolitions, officials say, will vary from neighborhood to neighborhood.
“The Moving Ohio Forward Grant Program provides unprecedented blight abatement opportunity for the City to clear dangerous, obsolete buildings from neighborhoods, make way for redevelopment, and eventually raise property values,” Edward Cunningham, Property Maintenance & Code Enforcement Division Manager, told UrbanCincy.
In an effort to further control what happens with the cleared sites, the City of Cincinnati will work with Hamilton County’s new Land Reutilization Program in order to acquire tax delinquent properties. Once the buildings are demolished, the City will determine if the land can be used as parks, community gardens or rehabilitated into new housing. So far, however, only enough funding for lot restoration on 200 parcels has been identified.
In cases where the lots are private properties, and are not able to be acquired, it will be up to the property owners of the vacant lots to decide the future of their property. According to Cunningham, property owners will be allowed to maintain the lots, create parks, parking or new infill construction.
More Comprehensive Plan for Demolitions Needed
Property demolition has been used by many cities including Cincinnati as a method of addressing problem vacant buildings that have been condemned because they are hazards to human health and unsafe to occupy. While the debate on the impacts of foreclosure and vacant property is far from over, some of these buildings are “too far gone” in the eyes of building inspectors that they legitimately need to come down. And according to Cunningham, the buildings being demolished under this program are buildings that are beyond repair.
Once the demolitions are completed, one-by-one, it will create more land between occupied houses thus negatively impacting the completeness of the neighborhood’s form. Without a strategic plan, vacant and unmaintained lots could end up degrading neighborhoods in the same manner as blighted homes; however, vacant lots tend to be easier to maintain and do not pose as much of a risk as a standing structure.
Furthermore, demolitions made through this program on private land will place the cost burden on the property. Should the property owner not pay the assessment for the work, then the property could be foreclosed by Hamilton County, which would then open the land up to redevelopment. This process, however, does take a considerable amount of time and offers no guarantee of redevelopment.
Projected Housing Units in Five Year Demolition Pool by City for Ohio’s “Big Eight” Cities. Source U.S. Census Bureau.
The challenge of increasing amounts of abandoned and blighted housing is not symptomatic of Cincinnati alone, as many older industrial cities are facing the similar problems. A recent report from the Brookings Institute found that Cincinnati might have close to 8,000 buildings eligible for demolition in the next five years. The report also stated that while the demolitions have the potential to stabilize neighborhoods, excessive regulations and costs prevent cities from demolishing the amount of housing that should be demolished on an annual basis.
To overcome these hurdles the report makes a series of recommendations for cities to devise their own strategic demolitions plan.
“Planners, urban designers, and residents must together evaluate how demolishing a particular building will affect the texture of its block or area,” the Brookings Institute stated in Laying the Groundwork for Change: Demolition, urban strategy, and policy reform (2012).
Cities such as Cincinnati need to have a level of transparency in place that allows for neighborhood input on the reuse of the newly created vacant lots. It is not merely enough to encourage neighborhoods to help identify future uses for vacant lots as the city is doing now, it should be required.
As previously profiled on UrbanCincy, Cincinnati’s population decline is systemic and although vacant building demolition is more a testament to the large supply of housing versus demand, absent a strategic demolitions plan, the city should be mindful that stabilizing neighborhoods relies heavily on preserving existing housing or building new housing capacity and offering incentives or neighborhood upgrades that would attract new residents.
The purpose of the report, the Sierra Club states, is to bring light the more than $200 billion worth of transportation projects that advance each year, and identify which of those meet higher national goals of “reducing oil consumption, increasing safety, improving public health, and saving local, state or federal government – and citizens – money.”
The State of Ohio had only two projects that made it into the Sierra Club’s 2012 report, and both were from the Cincinnati region.
The first was the Eastern Corridor project which was identified as one of the nation’s worst projects, with the report stating:
The Eastern Corridor Highway in Cincinnati, Ohio was first proposed in 1999 when the price of gas was $1.14. The project is currently under study, with plans to convert a road into a 10-mile, four- to six-lane expressway. The Highway poses a significant threat to the scenic Little Miami River. The route parallels the river and plans to cross it in an ecologically threatened area, where numerous rare, threatened and endangered species live. Furthermore, the highway will slice the historic village of Newton in half, which would disrupt the community and its tax base, adding traffic and pollution. The village’s mayor has been an outspoken critic of the project. The highway project is expected to cost upwards of a billion dollars.
The second area project that made it onto the environmental organization’s list is the Cincinnati Streetcar, which they called one of America’s best transportation projects.
The Cincinnati Streetcar is a new electric streetcar project that will connect key communities in the city’s urban core while improving neighborhood accessibility, stimulating development, and creating jobs. The streetcar system will go from the River to the Zoo, University, and hospital area. There are currently more than 500 vacant buildings along the streetcar’s 4-mile route. The streetcar will help attract residents and businesses to these rehabbed buildings, putting people to work and boosting the city’s tax revenue. Streetcars will increase accessibility and active transportation in the region by creating denser, more walkable, mixed use development. The streetcars are designed to accommodate both wheelchairs and bicycles and will serve as a complement to the city’s existing bus transit. Construction began in February 2012 and the streetcar is expected to open in 2014.
The full report identifies a wide range of projects including highways, bridges, mass transit, active transportation, aviation, aquatic, and multi-modal investments. Projects of all varieties made it onto both the good and bad lists, but the Sierra Club largely favored transit and active transportation projects over highways and bridges.
“Americans are struggling with the health, climate, and economic costs of our oil-centered transportation system,” the report states. “Our transportation investments should provide an opportunity to further reduce our dependence on oil, reverse climate disruption, and save money. Because transportation infrastructure lasts for decades, the impacts of transportation investments are felt for many years to come, with huge consequences for America’s ability to move beyond oil.”
The City of Cincinnati will announce proposed amendments to its tax abatement program for buildings built in adherence to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. Sponsors of the changes say that the amendments will further incentivize developers to reach for even higher LEED certifications.
“I think this change by the City will convince people to invest a little more upfront to get to a higher LEED level,” Marc Hueber, president of John Hueber Homes, which has built 22 LEED-certified homes in Cincinnati, stated in a prepared release.
Mayor Mark Mallory (D) makes a statement at the ribbon cutting for Over-the-Rhine’s first LEED certified residential project in 2009. Photograph by Randy Simes for UrbanCincy.
First approved in 2009, Cincinnati’s incentives offer a 15-year, 100% tax abatement valued up to $562,792 on new residential construction; and a ten-year tax abatement on improvements up to a maximum of $562,792 market value, and are considered to be among the most generous in the United States.
Once of the constant criticisms, however, of LEED incentives is that builders go after low-hanging fruit and end up more often than not developing properties at lower LEED levels. Cincinnati’s present incentives do work to combat that by removing the value limit for new and rehabilitated residential structures that achieve LEED Platinum certification.
Community leaders will gather with members of the development community tomorrow in Northside at 10:30am to announce the proposed changes, and city officials will be on-hand to answer any questions about the amendments to residential and commercial abatements.
Following the announcement, council member Quinlivan says that she intends to bring up the amendments in City Council’s Strategic Growth Committee at noon, and act to implement the changes at that time.
“The City of Cincinnati’s LEED tax abatement is an innovative model—and currently unparalleled in scope—to support energy and resource efficiency in homes and buildings,” says Doug Widener, director of community advancement for the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). “The program serves as a model for other cities and the proposed changes ensure that it remains at the forefront of such municipal efforts nationally while continuing to drive conservation and innovation locally.”
State and local governments are paying huge prices to companies as they desperately struggle to attract and retain jobs in their communities. New analysis, however, suggests that those incentives may not be paying dividends, and shows that the payouts may actually be more damaging than helpful long-term. In a region like Cincinnati, where its downtown traverses two states, three counties and four to five cities, the problem of wayward incentives is even more apparent. More from the New York Times:
A portrait arises of mayors and governors who are desperate to create jobs, outmatched by multinational corporations and short on tools to fact-check what companies tell them. Many of the officials said they feared that companies would move jobs overseas if they did not get subsidies in the United States. Over the years, corporations have increasingly exploited that fear, creating a high-stakes bazaar where they pit local officials against one another to get the most lucrative packages. States compete with other states, cities compete with surrounding suburbs, and even small towns have entered the race with the goal of defeating their neighbors.
Nationwide, billions of dollars in incentives are being awarded as state governments face steep deficits. Last year alone, states cut public services and raised taxes by a collective $156 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning advocacy group. Incentives come in many forms: cash grants and loans; sales tax breaks; income tax credits and exemptions; free services; and property tax abatements. The income tax breaks add up to $18 billion and sales tax relief around $52 billion of the overall $80 billion in incentives.
