Randy is an award-winning urban planner who founded UrbanCincy in May 2007. He grew up on Cincinnati’s west side in Covedale, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s nationally acclaimed School of Planning in June 2009. In addition to maintaining ownership and serving as the managing editor for UrbanCincy, Randy has worked professionally as a planning consultant throughout the United States, Korea and the Middle East. After brief stints in Atlanta and Chicago, he currently lives in the Daechi neighborhood of Seoul’s Gangnam district.
The second of three planned presidential debates for the 2012 Election is scheduled for this evening. This debate will have a “town hall” format and will take place from 9pm to 10:30pm. One item that was not mentioned once by either Governor Romney (R) or President Obama (D) in the first debate was cities. Cities are where abstract issues debated at the national level, meet reality. Things like health care, education, gun control, infrastructure, immigration, budgets, and voting rights all must be faced at the local level, with no one else to pass the issue along to.
So with that said, which issue facing cities would you like to hear the presidential candidates address this evening in New York? More from Forbes:
Here’s hoping tonight’s debate format will shake things up a bit. The “town hall” style brings in actual real people who offer us the best chance yet of introducing some new topics into the conversation. And there are a lot of them. Immigration, the drug war, privacy, drone strikes, sanctioned assignation, to name just a few. To get a jump start, we reached out to Forbes’ million-plus followers and asked them what they want the candidates to debate tonight. We’ve already got some great responses at #Prezquestions – delivered with the kind of no-BS bluntness we hope those lucky enough to get to ask questions tonight deliver, too.
The 2012 World Choir Games were long anticipated and oft-hyped, but now that the proverbial dust has settled, the event’s true impact is coming into focus.
According to a new report issued by the Cincinnati USA Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB), the 2012 World Choir Games attracted 15,000 participants from 64 different countries, and drew more than 208,000 spectators at some 200 different events.
Some of the biggest events included four sellout performances at the Aronoff Center for the Arts, two sellout performances at Music Hall, the opening and closing ceremonies at US Bank Arena, and the Celebration of Nations Parade on Fountain Square which attracted an estimated 30,000 attendees.
The 2012 World Choir Games was a resounding success, but the lack of coordination at the MarketGarden left many mobile food vendors with a bitter taste in their mouth. MarketGarden photograph by Thadd Fiala.
“This was a once in a lifetime event for the city, and we left nothing to chance,” said Cincinnati City Manager Milton Dohoney. “The 2012 World Choir Games has changed us and readied us for better things.”
Thanks in part to all of the visitors for the international choir competition; Cincinnati’s year-to-date occupancy rate is up approximately two percent from 2011, while revenues are up nearly five percent, according to Star Travel Research numbers.
Out of the various sub-regions within the Cincinnati market, downtown Cincinnati remains the strongest hotel market with a 63 percent occupancy rate demanding an average of $76 per room.
While nearly all objective accounts point to a resounding success by city officials and community leaders in hosting the 2012 World Choir Games, some say the event had sore spots from which it can learn. One example, in particular, was the MarketGarden which was established to host local food trucks and carts in a centralized marketplace.
“People were really vying to become part of this, and we were thinking it would be a pretty substantial event with lots and lots of people,” explained Café de Wheels owner Thomas Acito. “Unfortunately it was really dead, and we discovered by the third day that there was food being given out for free at the Duke Energy Convention Center for participants.”
The lack of coordination left many of the vendors that signed up for the MarketGarden with a bitter taste in their mouth, wishing for better organization between the big event and the smaller food market.
The hope, Acito said, was that there would be a real density of potential customers as there is with events like Oktoberfest and Taste of Cincinnati. At this time, however, the city does little coordination between mobile food vendors with the larger events.
The struggles with MarketGarden notwithstanding, the Cincinnati USA CVB is touting the intangible effects of the games.
According to the report, the games garnered 1.4 billion impressions throughout the world, with approximately 900 million of those coming from throughout the United States. The combined publicity value of all of those impressions is estimated to weigh in at $32 million.
Without confirmation it is difficult to speculate about what might be the next major event Cincinnati will host, but all indications seem to be pointing at a Tall Stacks Music, Arts & Heritage Festival in 2013, or the 2015 MLB All-Star Game.
Those who haven’t been living under a rock for the past five years know that a lot has happened in Cincinnati’s center city during that time frame. On Sunday TBS’ announcers spoke highly of the transformation that has occurred in downtown Cincinnati since the Reds last playoff appearance in 2010, and with the eyes of the baseball world focused squarely on the city this evening, it seems as though the nation will get a front row seat to that progress. More from the Associated Press:
Less than two years ago, little more than a giant parking lot occupied the half-mile between the stadiums of the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals along the Ohio River.
After more than $600 million in new development between the two stadiums, there are now six distinct bars and restaurants, a popular riverfront park and high-end apartments that are touted as being “Cincinnati’s premier live-work-play destination” and charge rent in the thousands…A few blocks over is a new $322 million, 41-story office tower that’s the tallest building in the city, and a 20-minute walk away is the trendy Over-the-Rhine historic district that used to be best known as a haven for crime and the site of the city’s 2001 race riots. Now dozens of bedraggled buildings in the district have been renovated into popular bars and restaurants and a once crime-prone park has undergone a $48 million makeover to become one of the city’s best venues for concerts, outdoor movie viewings and flea markets.
Developers of The Banks hope to break ground in early 2013 on the next major phase of construction work at the $600 million development.
Following the success of the $91 million Phase 1, newly revealed designs for the riverfront development call for an additional 300 apartment units, more than 60,000 square feet of street-level retail and more than 400 parking spaces at the block southeast of Race and Second streets, said Libby Korosec, spokeswoman for The Banks development team. The structure is one building, but appears to be two, sitting on a three-story foundation.
The next major phase of construction at The Banks is planned to get started in early 2013. Rendering provided.
The Banks development team has until now been quiet about the design for the second major phase. According to principals at the Preston Design Partnership, an Atlanta firm selected by Carter for Phase 2 design work, the designs have received approval from Cincinnati’s Urban Design Review Board after two “productive” meetings over the course of the summer.
“The review board liked the concept, but they thought we had watered down the idea across all of the elevations in terms of its 3D massing,” said Edsel Arnold, senior design principal with Preston Design. “They also wanted us to look at how the structure appeared within the city skyline view, and were worried that some of the original color on the building would look too cold in front of the city skyline.”
Taking the board’s comments into consideration, Arnold said that the team went back to the drawing board to better match color schemes with the surrounding cityscape and build upon their design concept.
Building reflects city’s grid, riverfront
The end results include more gray and light blue colors to match existing buildings in the Central Business District. With a strong emphasis placed by the UDRB on integrating the designs of Phase 2 with the city skyline in mind, the colors were considered a critical element.
Arnold said the three-story base of the building will include brick to match that of other nearby structures and also offer some variation in the building’s use of materials. The two structures that will rise from the base will largely be made up of grayish-blue glass and vertical white columns.
Preston’s concept was influenced by the unique convergence of Cincinnati’s orthogonal grid street system with the organic curves of the central waterfront, Arnold said. It was this design concept that led to an eye-catching curved glass façade on the north side of the 10-story structure.
“Being from Atlanta, we were struck by the way that the city comes out of the plain and comes out to the water’s edge,” Arnold explained. “We decided it would be fun to play a strong curve along one of the walls, and let the other three sides play up more of the grid system of the city.”
To that end, the remaining three walls will be flat, as is true with most buildings in downtown Cincinnati. And a popular design element carried over from Phase One, balconies, will be incorporated onto the building’s western and southern façades to take advantage of city and river views.
From here, the design team will return to the design review board for final approval later this fall.
“We don’t have a schedule set for Phase 2 yet, but we are pleased with the progress being made on the development overall,” Korosec said.
Developer still seeking hotel, office deals
Project officials also say that they continue to work on negotiations for a potential operator for a hotel tower and tenants for an office tower planned to be built within the footprint of Phase 1 work. Townhouses planned to front along the Schmidlapp Event Lawn are also pending financing.
Once complete, the $2.5 billion public-private development partnership will transform Cincinnati’s central riverfront with 3,000 new residents, 1 million square feet of commercial space and 300,000 square feet of hotel space. The first major phase of construction work was completed in 2011 and has been considered a major success by city officials and the development team, with 100 percent of its apartments leased and about 92 percent of its 96,000 square feet of retail space occupied.
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New research shows that all of those studies constantly released about the best and worst cities for (fill in the blank) may actually have an impact on people’s perceptions of those places. The analysis finds that people throughout the United States have poor perceptions of the Midwest and cities like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee. More from The Atlantic:
What we found is that our initial perceptions about cities are in fact often grounded in statistical reality. The positive or negative opinions of our survey respondents were correlated, often quite strongly, with such metrics as change in population, housing prices, and cost of living, and inversely correlated with measures like crime and unemployment. On the other hand, measures such as sales tax and traffic congestion appear to have little influence on people’s perceptions of different cities.
