Posts tagged “opinion”

The Myth of the Suburban Revival

Recent economics data released from the Brookings Institute have shown that job sprawl has spread outside of metro downtowns, including Cincinnati. Planning theorists however are at odds as to what this means with New Geography’s Joel Kotkin claiming the “triumph of suburbia” over the center city. However; his assertions seem to be based on several false assumptions in the market and does not take into account the millenial generations preference for walkable neighborhoods. Is this a City vs. Suburb debate or as Robert Steuteville claims a walkable vs. auto-dominated debate? More from Better Cities & Towns:

In his analysis, Kotlin ignores many inconvenient facts and trends that don’t fit his narrative of an inexorable, historical march to lower density in generation after generation. Real estate values have declined in the automobile-oriented suburbs relative to compact, mixed-use neighborhoods. There’s a growing preference for rental housing, and multifamily development has recovered far more quickly than single-family development. Multifamily development has taken on a new character in recent years. In the 1990s it was garden apartments in the suburbs. Now it is being built in urban, transit-served neighborhoods.

EDITORIAL: Long Trail of Referendums Limit City’s Budget Options

By ―

Congratulations, Cincinnati, on earning the honorable distinction of being one of the worst budgeted cities in the country. However the city did not earn this coveted distinction by lack of competent leadership, instead it was earned through the gradual tying of hands of government officials through a series of voter referendums.

To start, Cincinnati’s budget woes did not come from one single project or expenditure; it came instead through a series of political promises, bad decisions, and some funding conditions that are beyond the city’s control.

Most recently, the State of Ohio cut over $20 million in funding to Cincinnati when it reduced its Local Government Fund. Additionally, the elimination of the estate tax fund subtracted another estimated $15 million from the city’s projected revenues. If these funds were in place, the budget would be balanced and the recent parking modernization and lease plan would not need to be on the table.

Realizing as early as 2006 that the City’s budget position was headed in a fiscally unsustainable direction, City Manager Milton Dohoney proposed to spin-off Greater Cincinnati Water Works into its own entity. The deal would have created a regional water district, similar to the Northern Kentucky Water District, and would have generated $6-12 million in annual revenue for the city with increases over time.

Cincinnati Skyline

In 2009 COAST and the Cincinnati chapter of the NAACP successfully led a campaign to put the issue on the November ballot. It may be difficult to recall but that’s because another issue dominated that year’s election, Issue 9. So as Cincinnatians for Progress and other Cincinnati voters rallied together to fight for rail transit in defeating Issue 9, Issue 8, which prevented the sale of Greater Cincinnati Water Works, passed with very little debate.

Again City leaders were forced to find another way to plug the budget gap. To address the budget shortfalls of 2010 and 2011, City Manager Milton Dohoney asked City Council to levy a trash collection fee to help address the budget shortfall. City Council rejected the idea, echoing the concerns of their constituents, which is reflective of representative democracy in action.

But that wasn’t enough for some, so in 2011 as progressives were once again fighting against another anti-rail ballot initiative, Issue 48, Issue 47, the referendum banning the city’s ability to levy a trash collection fee, passed with little debate. Again, both referendums came from the same two groups.

So in a classic stroke of misdirection, every strategy that the city has attempted to use to climb out of a budget deficit has been met with a referendum, making it more difficult or impossible to fix the problem.

The latest, the parking modernization and lease deal, may likely be met with yet another referendum. And signing the petition being circulated will put the issue up for a vote, but not before the City of Cincinnati is forced to lay off 344 employees, close pools and cut other services.

The reason this is happening immediately is due to the change in the City’s fiscal year, which now starts on July 1, and with the temporary restraining order placed on the City by Republican Party-endorsed Judge Robert C. Winkler with regards to using emergency ordinance procedures, City officials will now need to have a budget in place by June 30 to allow for the 30-day waiting period required. If new revenues are not found, then services will have to be cut.

The narrative that the City of Cincinnati is continually unable to balance its own checkbook does Cincinnati and the region no good, and is flat out untrue. The suburbs, the townships and the three states that Cincinnati is connected to need the city and the heart of the region to be vibrant, successful and attractive. Not for our own sake but because this city is still climbing out of the riots, still in fly-over country and still associated with the Rust Belt (undeservedly so).

City leaders have worked hard to retain and attract talent to the region, creating a new neighborhood in The Banks, building a new skyscraper, and rehabilitating Over-the-Rhine. Out-of-towners don’t think of West Chester when they hear Cincinnati any more than people think of Southfield when they hear Detroit. The condition, reputation and quality of the actual city itself is the magnet that draws economic growth to the city, to Sharonville, West Chester and even to Anderson Township.

The City has a right to govern itself by choosing the people that lead them not in the single-mindedness of an endless referendum cycle. That is the nature of representative democracy, one that our nation’s founding fathers recognized 225 years ago and one that we should preserve today.

GUEST EDITORIAL: Horseshoe Casino Fails to Deliver on Urban Design

By ―

The completed Rock Gaming/Caesars joint venture boasts a list of features one would expect of a casino: 354,000 square feet, $400 million price tag, restaurants, bars, a 2,500-space parking garage, and space for business meetings and conventions. None of these features should come as a shock to anyone that’s ever been in a casino.

The touted difference between Horseshoes Cincinnati and Cleveland and casinos elsewhere, is that these have been deemed “truly urban” casinos. Well, if locating in a downtown is all that’s needed to make something urban, then mission accomplished. But since a downtown is a living collection of buildings and spaces, whether something is truly urban has more to do with how it contributes or detracts from its location. And since casinos are not known to be particularly friendly urban creatures, the most recent example being CityCenter, it’s worth looking at some of the concerns expressed to the unnamed Las Vegas starchitect Dan Gilbert imposed.

Cincinnati Casino
The only actual limestone you will find on the site is the wall coping around the lawn- note the whiteness of the caps compared to the synthetic stucco below.

The first thing I think of when I look at the new casino from any angle is tan. Why in the world is it so tan? Color wasn’t something that was a key talking point for the casino, though the Urban Design Review Board has now made that a priority at The Banks, but the tan-ness of the building really dominates all other exterior features. This domination lies with the use of synthetic stucco to emulate limestone. The issue here is not with modern building technology, but that it was misused in both color and implementation.

The implementation failure lies in the lack of any ornament within the stucco. One of the main reasons for using limestone is that it is one of the best stones for showing carved detailed, as can be seen just blocks away at 30 E. Central Parkway. Why try to emulate a limestone building if the only way you do that is by using fake alternate panels and stopping there?

These two issues with the exterior of the building can be summed up in one way: the Messer Pendleton Bid Package required $5,033,623 for exterior metal framing/stucco, and $6,967,980 for interior wall framing and drywall and $2,268,821 for painting and wall coverings. The casino allocated an amount for the interior walls almost twice that of the exterior walls.

30 E. Central Parkway

The second oddity that stands out is the number of offsets, particularly on Reading Road. Offsets are a common feature of large single-story buildings, like Wal-Mart and Kroger, to break up the mass of these behemoths. But what’s the goal here? To confuse the pedestrian or neighbor across Reading into thinking that these are multiple windowless buildings? Admit you’re a grand building like Music Hall or Union Terminal. Walking west down Reading is like passing by massive stone boulders. There’s no beauty or nuance to the walls save for two large brick panel insets and foundation plantings.

“With the strong support of this very active, urban-focused community, our team has been working for more than a year to ensure that our project does not prosper alone but also benefits the surrounding neighborhoods and region. The outward facing design and pedestrian accessibility will rejuvenate this part of town, while putting thousands of people into good-paying jobs.”- Dan Gilbert- Chairman, Rock Gaming.

“Outward facing design” is a catchphrase that was repeated throughout the design process. What does that mean? To this project it means having one main entrance and restaurants with windows and a patio, quite the accomplishment for typically fortress-like buildings. But to say the design of the project is outward facing because of the openness of only 360 feet of the entire building’s facade and at only one of the intersections surround the site is like saying a restaurant near the entrance of a mall is outward facing because it’s on the exterior of the building.

Reading Road Quarry
Richard Rosenthal was right about his concern over a “gully-like” feeling down Reading. In fact, it’s a quarry.

Urban design was really were there was the most input from local groups on how the casino will most likely affect the everyday life in the public realm around the casino.

Terminated vistas – views that focus on a deliberately chosen object or scene – is a historical design concept used to draw people towards a building and create the appearance that destinations are closer than they appear, encouraging pedestrians to walk.

In the case of the casino, the site’s prow-shaped western end at the corner of Central Parkway, Reading and Eggleston creates the opportunity to terminate the view looking east down Central at the casino entrance and the developer has taken that opportunity. Again, as with the offsets, there is a lack of grandness to the view as the casino is dwarfed by the height of the buildings leading to it down Central, rendering it almost insignificant.

Central Parkway Vista

The view down Pendleton towards the casino would sad if it wasn’t so tan. No pedestrian connectivity, no windows, not even roof treatment. Nothing.

While the focus of activity for the casino will be at its entrance and new lawn for the county jail, the opportunity for Pendleton lies in what happens north of and down Reading.

From the site’s layout, you can see that building coverage isn’t great on either side of Reading Road for certain spans. And oddly enough, the casino chose to build near the street for the span west of Pendleton where there are no buildings on the north side of Reading, and then chose to back away from the street for its loading docks for the span east of Pendleton where there are buildings on the north side of Reading. And since Rock Gaming owns the stretch on the south side of Reading, it’s extremely doubtful that organic infill development ever occurs in this area.

To end where the casino does, urban casinos are not uses that fail for any reason other than over taxation. When the casino opens and rightfully provides a local opportunity to keep the poor man’s tax from leaving for Indiana or Las Vegas, let’s be careful not to confuse its popularity with quality.

This guest editorial was authored by Eric Douglas, a native of Grand Rapids, MI who currently lives in Covington’s Roebling Point neighborhood. Eric is a member of the Congress for New Urbanism and earned a Bachelors of Science from Michigan State University. Since that time he has worked for Planning, Community Development and Public Works departments in Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Detroit. If you would like to have your thoughts published on UrbanCincy you can do so by submitting your guest editorial to urbancincy@gmail.com.

Free parking crusader strikes Over-the-Rhine, channels inner Cool Hand Luke

By ―

Slashed meters and broken meter tops liter the normally beautiful Orchard Street in Over-the-Rhine, and many other streets throughout the historic neighborhood.

The epidemic of destroyed or stolen parking meters is plaguing this beautifully dense city neighborhood where on-street parking is an ever-increasing concern for new residents.

Residents began to notice the meters being vandalized in November 2012 when the city initially announced its intentions to lease its parking system to a private entity. The city insists that the vandalism and parking privatization is not connected. However, UrbanCincy’s investigative sleuthing has found that although the meters are not connected to city sabotage, they are instead connected to a lone vigilante who wants nothing more than to park…for free!


Cincinnati has its very own Cool Hand Luke!

“You shouldn’t have to pay to park,” exclaimed the culprit from a shadowy street corner.

The vigilante who goes by the name Free Space Man, agreed to speak to UrbanCincy only after we agreed to pay for his two-hour metered spot on Liberty Street so that he would not harm the meter. The vigilante described his day-to-day activities, meticulously choosing the meters to be vandalized and deciding on the best time of day to strike.

He says he travels the country, setting out to rid the world of working parking meters so he can park his 2007 Range Rover at metered spots for free. He came to Cincinnati when he heard about the parking privatization.

“I didn’t even know you had meters and now the city is selling them off. Parking should be free…why do they even charge? That’s the real crime,” Free Space Man said as he sliced off another parking meter at the corner of Elm and Green Street.

Attempts at trying to inform the vigilante on the revenues parking brings in to the city and how it allows businesses to turnover spots for patrons seemed to fall on deaf ears with this eccentric individual.

The vandal disclosed that his most brazen act of social defiance was in San Francisco, where leaders there attempted to install smart parking meter technology. One day, shortly after the new meters installation, a parking meter head was found at the foot of the mayors’ bed with coins still rolling out from its receptacle.

“That man was a menace to our town,” disclosed Tom Delegado, the mayor of San Francisco City Hall on foursquare. “He’s a terror to parking enforcement everywhere!”

Officials who have dealt with the villain have described him as squirrely and demented, and warn that the only defense measure is to throw copies of Donald Shoup’s 763-page book, The High Cost of Free Parking, at the bandit until he finally flees to another town, hopefully never to return.

Why hyper-local won’t save newspapers (and what will)

Newspapers have been desperately trying to figure out how to make the finances work as the ground shifts beneath them in an increasingly digital world. In Cincinnati, much like elsewhere throughout the country, local newspapers attempted to compete with bloggers by shifting towards “hyper-local” coverage, but it has yet to work. More from Per Square Mile:

Whenever a business or industry falls on hard times, people trip over themselves to propose turnaround plans. Newspapers are no exception, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be left out of the fray. My diagnosis? Too many newspapers have placed their bets on intensely local coverage, or hyper-local as they call it in the biz. That’s a mistake. To remain profitable, they need to concentrate on a particular topic instead of a geographic region.

That epiphany occurred to me Christmas morning over a bowl of cereal at my in-laws. I was flipping through the Houston Chronicle when I noticed the paper had branded their energy coverage, FuelFix. Not the best name, but it’s a sound idea. Houston is a major hub for the oil and gas industry, and Chronicle reporters have spent years, even decades reporting on it. Who else would be so positioned to cover the industry?

John Schneider on the ‘Cincinnati Process’

By ―

When millions of fresh eyes recently trained on our city, Great American Ball Park (GABP) bore no scars from its labored birth which required a divisive election, moving an interstate highway, and seven years from the evening it was sketched-out on a restaurant placemat until the first pitch was thrown.

Nested comfortably in Cincinnati’s new riverfront, GABP’s unlikely location in the former eastbound lanes of Fort Washington Way (I-71) entailed narrowing the highway by half and extending downtown’s street grid to the Ohio River shore. Consolidating the garage and roadway budgets for the Reds and the Bengals in one place gave us a flood-proof waterfront for the first time in our 225-year history and provided the foundation for The Banks.


The construction of Great American Ball Park on the riverfront allowed for the rest of the land to be lifted out of the Ohio River floodplain, thus leading to the development of The Banks and Smale Riverfront Park. Photograph by Randy Simes for UrbanCincy.

Proponents of an alternative ball park site at Broadway Commons park gathered signatures to place the stadium location question on the November, 1998 Hamilton County ballot. Shown how the Reds could be the keystone of a new neighborhood on the Ohio, the site at Second and Main won by a 2-1 margin.

Great American Ball Park wasn’t the first time Cincinnatians resisted progress. In the mid-Nineties, we actually voted not to build the Aronoff Center for the Arts. Influential arts patrons feared its construction would cause the abandonment of Music Hall. So they put a proposal to scuttle the project on the city ballot, and it passed. But the Aronoff was a project of the state of Ohio, which built it anyway.

Remember the ridiculous debate about moving the Tyler Davidson Fountain? Many influential Cincinnatians opposed 3CDC’s total renovation of Fountain Square a few years ago, which was the decisive building block for a 24/7 downtown. Getting property owners to underwrite Downtown Cincinnati Inc. also took some doing, but the central business district is now clean and safe with energized stakeholders.


Not building Great American Ball Park at Broadway Commons has allowed for that site’s development into the new Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati in Pendleton. Photograph by Randy Simes for UrbanCincy.

We argued about expanding our convention center, but that eventually got done too. More meetings came to Cincinnati, a spiffy new hotel opened, another will open soon, and money flowed into our economy.

So tell me, had the naysayers prevailed, which of these civic assets would we happily do without?

Such is The Cincinnati Process. We reflexively enforce the status quo, yet we often succeed spectacularly in spite of ourselves. Detractors can easily challenge any public proposal if they set their minds to it. They can exploit uncertainty. They can delay and drive up the costs. And they have the referendum as a ready tool. Successful sponsors learn to right-size their projects for local appetites, adapt in response to new information, and gain supporters as complex issues are resolved. The ironic result is that the most criticized ideas—the ridiculed ones, the ones they said would never happen—those are often the ones able to run the gantlet and exceed expectations.

The circumstances that shaped our 21st century waterfront were so rare and of such scale they won’t be repeated in any of our lifetimes. Fortunately, agile planning and execution has given us momentum and confidence for seizing other opportunities for improving our city. Going forward, Cincinnati can have progress or The Process but probably not both.

This guest editorial was authored by John Schneider, who led citizens’ efforts to build Great American Ball Park and the Cincinnati Streetcar, and was originally published in the November 15, 2012 print edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer. The editorial, however, was never published on the Internet until now with permission from the Cincinnati Enquirer. If you would like to have your thoughts published on UrbanCincy you can do so by submitting your guest editorial to urbancincy@gmail.com.

Afghan Whigs return to Cincinnati to ring in 2013, possibly end career

By ―

Cincinnati’s Afghan Whigs reunited in 2012 for a world tour that began with a dozen dates in Europe, Israel, Australia, and Canada, appearances at various summer festivals including Lollapalooza 2012 in Chicago, and ended with a fall tour of the United States. The band did not appear in Cincinnati until late in the tour, and by all accounts the band’s October 25 performance at Bogart’s was a dominating one, centered around material from 1993’s Gentlemen and 1996’s Black Love.

The New Year’s Eve show differed dramatically from their October appearance, with a 9-piece stage band and almost no overlap in the set list. A horn section and backing singers enabled faithful performances of songs from 1965, the Whigs’ final and most technically ambitious studio album. Although the band performed much material from 1965 elsewhere in 2012, the band largely skipped over these songs at the October 25 performance in anticipation of the special New Year’s Eve show.

The Afghan Whigs play at Bogart’s on New Year’s Eve. Photograph by Travis Estell for UrbanCincy.

The full instrumentation of the 1965 tracks and the three closing songs from Black Love, played in sequence during the encore, were the show’s highlights. Conspicuously absent were “Milez is Dead”, “Honkey’s Ladder”, “Debonair”, and a number of other well-known songs that in place of ballads and other scattered material could have avoided the lull that marred the midpoint of Monday night’s show. Further, the PA mix was completely different – the searing sizzle of the guitars heard in October was pulled back and at times obscured by muddiness coming up from the bass guitar or some other source.

Hanging like a cloud over Monday night’s show was the knowledge that it was probably the final live performance by the Afghan Whigs, ever. Singer Greg Dulli announced that possibility late in the evening, soon after asking for a show of hands from people who traveled to the show from outside of Cincinnati. With hundreds hands raised, Dulli paused for a moment as if he might start a natives vs. visitors shouting match resembling the Ohio vs. Kentucky shouting heard each year at the Riverfest fireworks.

Instead, he never called on Cincinnatians and let the uncomfortable silence speak for itself – a slap at the local radio stations, other media outlets, and local music fans who never supported the band in their heyday or during the 2012 reunion. Aside from CityBeat, no local media source made anything more than a casual mention of the 2012 tour, and with the demise of WOXY, The Afghan Whigs are heard today only on low-wattage WAIF and WNKU.

Anecdotally, I have not heard the Afghan Whigs even once in public – either at a bar or at a party – since moving back to Cincinnati in 2007. The band’s failure to become the Next Big Thing in the 1990s is discussed ad nauseam on seemingly every Internet discussion board and YouTube comment section, but the failure of Cincinnati to embrace them then or now is another. Neighboring cities like Cleveland and especially Detroit have always celebrated their native sons, but Cincinnati seems determined to ignore The Afghan Whigs as much as they do James Brown and the legacy of King Records.