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Business News

Cincinnati Fares Poorly When Examining Centralization of Jobs Throughout Region

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.

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.

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.

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News Transportation

Support Continues to Grow for Daily Train Service Between Cincinnati and Chicago

Midwest Regional Rail ServiceOhio is surprisingly one of the nation’s least-served states by intercity passenger rail service, but All Aboard Ohio is working to change that.

Perhaps best well known for their fruitless advocacy for the 3C Corridor – an intercity passenger rail line that would have linked Ohio’s largest cities – All Aboard Ohio has regained relevancy as of late. While continually advocating for improvements on existing Amtrak service across the northern reaches of the state, the non-profit organization has also become increasingly involved with efforts to establish rail service between Columbus and Chicago, and Cincinnati and Chicago.

Columbus currently has no connections to the capital of the economically robust Great Lakes region, but Cincinnati does, albeit ever so slightly. As of now, Cincinnatians can get to Chicago via the scrappy three-day-a-week train service offered on Amtrak’s Cardinal Route. In addition to not being daily service, trains infamously arrive and depart in the middle of the night.

This is something, however, that area leaders and All Aboard Ohio officials are working to change. One potential example, they say, is to extend existing service offered on Amtrak’s Hoosier Route. The combination of Amtrak’s Cardinal and Hoosier routes offers Indianapolis daily service to Chicago. From there, the hope is to make gradual improvements to bring the service up to 110mph speeds.

“There is a buzz and excitement in southwest Ohio about connecting to Indy and Chicago that is palpable,” explained Derek Bauman, SW Ohio Director for All Aboard Ohio. “Even those that have not necessarily been fans of previous rail projects see the necessity of connecting to Chicago – the business and commerce epicenter of the U.S. between the coasts.”

The energy Bauman speaks of was recently seen at an area meeting held by All Aboard Ohio at the Christian Moerlein Tap Room in Over-the-Rhine. According to Ken Prendergast, Executive Director of All Aboard Ohio, such meetings are typically pretty dull, but this was not the case in Cincinnati.

“Our free local meetings are usually less extravagant than our statewide meetings, and are more akin to briefing or coordination gatherings,” Prendergast told UrbanCincy. “They generally only draw a dozen or two dozen people, so this meeting’s attendance was pretty good.”

All Aboard Ohio welcomed Cincinnati City Councilwoman Amy Murray (R) as their special guest. Over the past few months Murray has taken on a bit of a leadership role in the discussion about establishing daily rail service to Indianapolis and onward to Chicago. Her leadership has also come at a time when Hamilton County Commissioners, in a surprising fashion, voted unanimously in favor of studying the establishment of such service.

Bauman says that All Aboard Ohio has been working with the OKI Regional Council of Governments on a potential scope and funding plan for a feasibility study on the manner, following the unanimous vote from Greg Hartmann (R), Todd Portune (D) and Chris Monzel (R). He says that the group has also been meeting with local jurisdictions and business leaders to grow support even further.

“A big part of this is educating stakeholders on what our competitor regions throughout the Midwest are doing,” said Bauman. “For example, Detroit has three Amtrak roundtrips a day, Milwaukee has seven, St. Louis has five, and even Carbondale, IL has three. Simply put, we are being left behind.”

Some of that recent outreach has included both Hamilton and Oxford – communities that sit along the existing Cardinal Route and would be prime candidates for stops in a case where service is enhanced. To that extent, both communities, in addition to Miami University, have expressed their support for the effort. Now, according to Bauman, the next steps are to reach out to Xavier University and the University of Cincinnati.

“As we continue to work with business and government leaders toward establishing at least daily service to Cincinnati, coordinating with our regional institutions of higher learning will be a growing and vital piece of our advocacy partnership focus,” Bauman explained. “Bringing back proper inter-city rail services will be transformative for our region and positively impact the lives of people.”

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Business News

Tiny Living Space Concept Intrigues Capacity Crowd at Niehoff Studio

Last month UrbanCincy worked with the Niehoff Urban Studio to host our annual fall event. This year the partnership focused on the idea of tiny living, or living in a space that is less than 400 square feet.

According to the information presented at the event, the average tiny home is, on average, about 243 square feet. They can be either completely mobile, as in mounted on a truck, or somewhat permanent such as constructed out of shipping containers. They can also, but rarely are not in the United States, constructed as normal practice with standard materials.

The event saw a larger than expected turnout with well over 100 attendees. Food truck Bistro de Mohr was on hand to serve hungry patrons. The main room hosted a display of different tiny living arrangements.

Presentations were given by a local design firm named Department 7, and Dan Elkin who is developing a tiny home project in Detroit. Following the formal presentations, a panel discussion was held that was moderated by UrbanCincy.

The panel included Vince Sansalone with SAID-DAAP, tiny home owner Natalie Hendricks, artist and designer Joe Hedges, architect and UrbanCincy contributor Bradley Cooper, and University of Cincinnati professor Leah Hollstein. The panel’s discussion was very engaging and ranged from the reasons for developing tiny houses, which includes demographic shifts in the way Millennials view housing, to how tiny houses can fit into the urban fabric of cities. The group also discussed the various challenges for developing ways to make tiny houses legal in cities.

Overall the event was informative and engaging. Participants came away asking for more information about tiny homes and the audience generated good discussions with the panel conversation.

Cooper also distributed a survey about living preferences on tiny houses to those in attendance. Cooper is assembling the information as part of his application to develop a tiny living project through the Haile Foundation’s People’s Liberty Fellowship grant. If you were not able to complete that survey in person, you can do so now online.

UrbanCincy, as a public outreach partner for Cooper’s project, will provide regular updates on his efforts.

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News Opinion

CNU22: The Nation’s Strong Urbanist Movement is Rooting for Cincinnati

The journey to Buffalo was filled with smoke and flames. As the towering inferno that was our Megabus burned away into chard wreckage along the Interstate highway, I looked on as firefighters doused the flames. The highway was closed, but we were whole. No deaths or injuries. Not a single piece of luggage singed. We rode school buses to a nearby town, Fredonia, and hopped on a local bus line that stopped at many small New York towns.

At last in the distance, bending around Lake Erie, I could see the silhouette of a skyline next to rows of turning wind turbines. I struggled with my iPhone, trying to catch up on the CNU preview episodes of the StrongTowns podcast. This being my first Congress, I had no idea what to expect.

The bus arrived, we checked into our hotel, went to get our badges. The whole day had been wild. Was the bus fire even real? We sat in on a session about urban retail where we found Cincinnatian Kathleen Norris of Urban Fast Forward. It was great to see a familiar face.

Ken Greenberg’s opening plenary was fantastic. He was able to highlight the challenges of urbanity in a way that made sense to everyone. And after the session we were able to speak with the new Chair of the CNU Board, Doug Farr. We met people and new friends, most of them Canadian.

We arrived at the Hotel Lafayette just in time to snap a group photo with the CNU NextGen pub crawlers. That night I had already met so many people and discussed with so many people urbanism and Cincinnati.

The next few days I attended sessions; many of which were informative, but it was a very different experience than a typical conference. There were so many conversations, ideas and new people.

We hung out in an old grain silo. Silo City as Buffalo natives called it. It was like old school Grammar’s (circa 2009) on a massive scale.  A news reporter approached us for an interview. I bravely stepped forward. It was on everyone’s mind, what could we say about Buffalo?

Buffalo is a rust belt city, more the style of Detroit or Cleveland than Cincinnati. Its downtown still quieted by the abandonment and neglect. Its old factories still silent. I have no compass to gauge its trajectory or past mistakes, although signs of that are visible. Cincinnati’s downtown has it good compared to Buffalo, at least from what I had seen.

The CNU NextGen peeps were playing bocce ball on a parklet outside the hotel. Inside the hotel, attendees were spouting ideas; debates and even a late night show happened. At one point we may have even crashed a private party hosted by James Howard Kuntsler.

I met a native who was volunteering at the Congress and we engaged in a lengthy discussion. He was a software developer who had moved to San Francisco, then back to Buffalo, then to New York City, and eventually back to Buffalo. He said he always had an interest in growing his home town and that now, he felt, was the right time to start setting down roots.

Before I left I also had the opportunity to visit Allentown where I dined at the Anchor and had some trademark buffalo wings. During our stay, I also had dinner at a spiffy Italian restaurant a few blocks away. I didn’t stay very long at the final party at Larkin Square. Our bus back to Cincinnati was calling. Fortunately this time it did not catch on fire.

Randy asked me to write about my takeaways from the Congress. I attended some great sessions, and I met a lot of people – many of whom are heroes in the small world engaged in urbanism – but I think my greatest takeaway is this:

We are not alone. There is a whole network of people who have the talent, the ideas and the drive who are making this change on a national scale. These people may not always agree, but from what I heard, they are all on the same page about Cincinnati. They’re encouraged and they’re all rooting for us.

Categories
Business Development News

Cincinnati Posts Population Gain for Second Consecutive Year

Cincinnati has added about 1,000 new people since the decennial census in 2010, according to new estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The modest increase comes from two consecutive years of population gains that followed an immediate downward revision after the 2010 Census. The increase also means that just Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton were the only big cities (more than 50,000 people) in Ohio to post gains.

Columbus and Cincinnati, meanwhile, were the only big cities to post population gains for the past two years.

The population estimates are derived using the 2010 Census as a baseline and then factoring in new permitted residential construction and mobile homes, and subtracting out the estimated number of homes lost each year. As a result, all of the annual estimates should come with a grain of salt.

Ohio Cities Comparison

With that said, Dayton’s population gains appear to be an anomaly, while the increases in Columbus and Cincinnati appear to be more rooted. In any case, the news for Ohio’s big cities is not good as the rest all lost population, especially those in the northeastern part of the state.

Columbus continues to stand out from the rest of Ohio’s big cities in terms of its population trends. In this latest estimate release, Columbus posted the fifteenth largest numeric population gain of any municipality in America; and it comes on the heels of equally impressive gains in prior years.

Some observers, however, would attribute some of the gains in Columbus to its unusually large municipal boundaries that include what would be far suburbs in other Ohio regions.

While Columbus has been growing by about 1.5% annually over the past several years, Cincinnati has been growing annually by about 0.25%.

When compared with other peer cities, Cincinnati’s gains look even more tepid.

Peer Cities Comparison

Of fifteen other cities competitive with Cincinnati, the city bested only five of them in terms of population growth, while being significantly outperformed by most all others. In this comparison, even Ohio’s best performer – Columbus –fares only reasonably well against the field.

For Cincinnati’s peer cities, national trends appear to hold true. Southern cities continue to grow at the fastest clip, but their growth rates are leveling off. In our comparison, Austin, Atlanta and Tampa have all experienced significant declines in annual population growth since the 2010 Census. Charlotte has also experienced a similar trend, but appears to be holding steady more so than its Sun Belt peers.

Meanwhile, while many Midwestern cities continue to lose population, they are doing so at a slower rate or have stopped the losses entirely.

As we previously examined on UrbanCincy, the Cincinnati region continues to grow by about 0.4% annually. The City of Cincinnati’s 2013 gain represents approximately 12.5% of the total regional population growth, and half of Hamilton County’s increase last year.

In a nutshell, Cincinnati is over performing regionally, but under performing amongst its peers. If Cincinnati were growing as fast as Charlotte or Austin, the city would be adding around 9,000 new people every year.