Category: News

Original stories from the UrbanCincy team.

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Mayor Mallory highlights successes, commits to transit in seventh State of the City address

Mayor Mark Mallory (D) focused on the positives during his seventh State of the City address, and he challenged Cincinnatians to get involved in projects or policies they want to see become reality.

As part of that challenge, Mayor Mallory identified a formula for success built on five elements – pride, commitment, investment, partnership and promotion.

“Every neighborhood should celebrate its own history,” Mayor Mallory urged during the roughly 47-minute address. “We need to do more to celebrate our history in order to create more pride in Cincinnati. Pride inspires people to commit to improving our city. Pride also gets people to invest in making this city a better place.”

Mallory then turned his attention towards the region’s urban core and defended why his administration focuses so much on time and energy there saying it is the economic engine for the entire region.

“There is no West Chester without downtown Cincinnati. There is no Mason without downtown,” Mallory exclaimed. “There is no sub without the urban…it all works together. A strong and healthy and vibrant downtown Cincinnati benefits the entire region.”

Mallory drove the point home by categorically identifying downtown Cincinnati as a success story which has landed several new headquarters recently, and has seen dunnhumbyUSA grow from a staff of three employees in 2003 to a projected staff of 1,000 employees in 2014.


The design of Cincinnati’s modern streetcar vehicles (coloring scheme not final).

The mayor continued by saying that the many companies and residents moving to the region’s urban core are doing so because of the investments being made by City Hall. One of the most high-profile of these investments is the Cincinnati Streetcar, which the mayor highlighted and identified a five-phase expansion plan in conjunction with two regional light rail lines.

The future phases of modern streetcar extensions include a route running from Over-the-Rhine to Uptown, a line running from Uptown to Walnut Hills, a center city loop serving Newport and Covington, and a line extending from Over-the-Rhine to Union Terminal. The two regional light rail lines would service the I-71 and I-75 corridors.

Mayor Mallory then took the opportunity to announce that Spanish-based Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (CAF) will manufacture Cincinnati’s five initial modern streetcar vehicles at their United States facility in Elmira, New York.

“Before we are even finished with the first phase, we have started work on the second phase,” Mallory revealed. “I have already asked for federal funds to study which route will be used to connect to our assets in the uptown area like UC, the hospitals, the zoo, and the EPA.”

The mayor shifted directions and emphasized the importance of public safety, using recent progress in Over-the-Rhine as success stories.

“It used to be that on Sunday mornings people would come to Over-the-Rhine to buy a week’s worth of drugs,” said Mallory using the Gateway Quarter as his example. “Now, on Sunday mornings, people come to Over-the-Rhine to eat check and waffles at Taste of Belgium.”

Mayor Mallory concluded the speech by highlighting the importance of becoming a more global city to the crowd of more than 350 people.

“In China, they are talking about our emergency preparedness. In Saudi Arabia, people are looking at Cincinnati for potential business investment. In Germany, people are talking about our cutting edge efforts in the area of sustainability. And right now, all over the world, people are talking about the World Choir Games.”

“We have created an international presence, and because of that buzz, we were able to attract the World Choir Games. Make no mistake, this is the greatest opportunity to showcase the city that we have ever had…and we earned it.”

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News Opinion

Is Cincinnati in the midst of a contemporary golden age?

Cincinnati is a city that lacks significant amounts of either in- or out-migration. This results in a relatively stable population base, and relatively predictable social trends. What it also means is that people often linger on the “good” or “bad” times they remember most.

The Cincinnati of today is one notably different from the Cincinnati of the past 20 years, however, many Baby Boomers reminisce about the golden years of downtown – that is the time when new office towers were being constructed and both the Reds and Bengals were winning.

Between 1970 and 1990, downtown saw the construction of 29 new buildings with at least ten floors. During the same time, the Reds won three World Series championships and the Bengals went to two Super Bowls. One could argue that these were the most recent boom times in Cincinnati history and, as a result, those that experienced the time period first-hand have written a narrative that it was a high point followed by precipitous decline.


2012 Reds Opening Day outside of Great American Ball Park. Photograph courtesy of The Banks.

This narrative was mostly true until the past half-decade. Cincinnati’s 21st century got off to a tumultuous start, but has otherwise been defined by success throughout the urban core. New hotels, office towers, residential midrises, nightlife, and shops have sprung up all throughout the Central Business District, and Over-the-Rhine is in the midst of one of the most dramatic urban transformations in American history.

At the same time, non-urban enthusiasts have been reinvigorated by the success of the Reds and Bengals on the field which has been now joined by the emergence of the University of Cincinnati as a major division one athletics program.

The combination of these two seemingly non-connected movements was perhaps most evident on Reds Opening Day this past Thursday. It was estimated that the largest crowd in history – 100,000 – gathered for the93-year-old Findlay Market Opening Day Parade. Many of those baseball revelers then conveyed at The Banks for what turned into a massive block party outside Great American Ball Park where a record crowd gathered to watch the Reds beat the Marlins on day one of the 2012 season.

Several new office towers, residential midrises and hotels are scheduled to be built in the coming years. This is in addition to the ongoing work on the Cincinnati Streetcar, Horseshoe Casino, Smale Riverfront Park, 21c Museum Hotel, and continued transformations in historic Over-the-Rhine.

All of this bodes well for continued success throughout the rest of the decade. And while it may still be early, Cincinnati’s Gen Xers and Millennials may eventually look back on the time between 2005 and 2025 as the golden years for their generation in the Queen City. The Baby Boomers established Cincinnati’s center city as an economic powerhouse regionally, and it appears that their children are positioning Cincinnati to be a diverse, resilient city for generations to come.

The city’s back. Back the city.

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Arts & Entertainment News

The Heights Music Festival returns this weekend

Music fans will get the chance to see over 90 performances this weekend across five venues in Uptown. The Heights Music Festival, formerly known as the Clifton Heights Music Festival, will return on Friday and Saturday for its sixth installment.

Street musicians, stand-up comedy, and other unique activities will be featured in addition to bands such as The Minor Leagues, Skeetones, State Song, Mad Anthony, Eclipse, The Kickaways, Josh Eagle & The Harvest City, Evans Collective, The Yugos, Sassy Molasses, and The Ohms.

Shows will be held at Rohs Street Cafe, Baba Budan’s, Mac’s Pizza Pub, Christy’s Biergarten, and Roxx Electrocafe. One pass will give attendees access to all venues. A two-day pass is $10 in advance ($12 at the door), and one-day passes are also available for $5 in advance ($8 at the door).

A new addition to the festival is the Day Fest, starting at 3 p.m. on Saturday, when all venues are open to people of all ages. All other shows, starting at 7 p.m. each night, are for ages 21+.

You can find a full schedule and purchase tickets online at The Heights Music Festival website.

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Business Development News Transportation

Cincinnati Mayor Mallory heralded as national leader in smart growth movement

Smart Growth America recently produced a series of video interviews with mayors from around the United States. The series, officials say, is intended to highlight prominent elected officials that are taking on leadership roles in promoting smart growth.

The first of those videos features Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory. In the video, Mayor Mallory discusses the need to invest in urban centers and make smart infrastructure investments that will trigger job creation and community development.

Specifically, Mayor Mallory touts the recent completion of phase one work at The Banks and ongoing revitalization success in Over-the-Rhine. The approach being taken by Cincinnati is one that intrigued officials at Smart Growth America.

“Thinking about land-use, transportation, housing, environmental, economic development and city planning, and redevelopment projects holistically can be challenging,” Thomas Madrecki from Smart Growth America told UrbanCincy. “But the rewards are that much higher, because when executed successfully, all of those pieces of the puzzle are working together.”

Madrecki says that once that initial buy-in is achieved at a local level, support for smart growth projects like the Cincinnati Streetcar becomes a better reality. Accomplishing that initial task, however, does not necessarily mean that funding and regulatory issues will not also pose problems.

“In a place like Cincinnati, I think that’s very obvious, where you have something like the streetcar take longer to get off the ground because of withdrawn funding promises,” said Madrecki. “Smart growth strategies often require upfront investments that will engender future economic gains while saving the city money on infrastructure and utility costs, but it takes money and the political will to deal with setbacks and opposition.”

Madrecki continued by saying that Mayor Mallory has shown the latter quality in spades, and has quickly become a national leader in the smart growth movement.

As Cincinnati moves forward with additional phases of development at The Banks, and additional renovation work in historic Over-the-Rhine, smart growth champions believe that even additional investment will be needed in Cincinnati’s urban core to help those respective neighborhoods reach their full potential.

One of the greatest challenges going forward for a Midwestern city like Cincinnati will be maintaining the momentum built by Mayor Mallory’s steadfast approach.

“Everyone likes to talk about the ‘next thing,’ but there has to be an element of seeing things to fruition and making sure they fully develop. When that happens and people see the economic and community payoffs, I think it will set a precedent and make future endeavors more likely to succeed right away.”

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Business Development News

City’s latest CED designation supplies Northside with creative new growth tools

This post originally ran on CincyVoices, and was written by guest contributor James Heller-Jackson.

With its eclectic mix of locally-owned businesses, the Northside neighborhood is already known as a prime Cincinnati food, retail and arts destination in the region. Empty storefronts that would also make great restaurants have remained largely empty because of the lack of liquor license availablity- until now. On February 29, the Cincinnati City Council voted to give Northside “Community Entertainment District” status after a unanimous vote the day before by City Council’s Livability Committee. The neighborhood joins Price Hill and Pleasant Ridge with CEDs. Once the designation is in place it allows new restaurants to open with a liquor license, thus reducing startup costs by an estimated $30,000.

This is a huge win for Northside. For the last couple of years, Northside’s business district, while hanging in there in the midst of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, has had to turn away small businesses wanting to open in the neighborhood, merely because of the lack of liquor licenses available and the premium $30,000-plus cost of the very few licenses that were available on the open market.

The new designation changes that game. The Northside Community Entertainment District designation gives creative tools to the Northside neighborhood to enable new growth. Rather than a business having to reach out to a broker to maybe, just maybe, find a license at a relatively huge cost, a process that often takes years, they can now call the State of Ohio directly. In Northside’s new Community Entertainment District, up to 15 additional liquor licenses are immediately available to food establishments, all at a dramatically reduced cost of $1,500, and all directly available from the State with no outside brokers involved. These licenses are not transferable. If the business with the new license were to move out of the Northside district, they would forfeit that license. These licenses are not available to a business that only wants to open a bar; these are licenses that are available only to food establishments. This is helpful for Northside and small businesses.

The original 2005 Community Entertainment District legislation was not initially geared towards anything but for-profit developers to obtain. Last year, the not-for-profit Pleasant Ridge Development Corporation could not the CED’s original application fee of $15,000. Many thanks go to Cincinnati City Councilmember Laure Quinlivan, who worked hard to change the Cincinnati municipal code to make the fee downwardly flexible, thus opening the possibility of designation to not-for-profits. This change to the fee structure allowed Pleasant Ridge to apply for the status without outside funding, making Pleasant Ridge the first Cincinnati neighborhood to apply for and win the designation.

Already, Pleasant Ridge has new businesses that wouldn’t be there if not for that designation. As well, the neighborhood of Price Hill recently won CED status, and several new businesses have either already opened or they are about to open. So far, the two neighborhoods that have won the designations have benefited immensely. Over-the-Rhine, Madisonville and Westwood have also applied for Community Entertainment District status but have not yet received it.

Northside Entertainment District Map

Northside’s new Community Entertainment District covers not just the traditional business district, it also targets a wide area south of Blue Rock Street.

The Northside Business Association (NBA) first started working with Laure Quinlivan’s city council office early last year after hearing of the possibility of Northside applying for and winning this important designation; the designation would not have been possible without Laure and her staff’s efforts. Also, Berding Surveying needs to be thanked, as they donated their services to the effort to produce the required survey and map. Once Northside’s required application package was completed, as a matter of transparency, the plan was presented at open Northside Community Council and Northside Business Association public meetings for comment. Community support was widespread, and the package was sent along to the city council’s Livability Committee for consideration.

NBA president Isaac Heintz has this to say about the designation: “The Northside Business Association pursued the entertainment district designation to provide Northside with another tool to help retain existing businesses and to attract new ones. The designation of the entertainment district can only help to continue the positive trajectory of the neighborhood and the growth of the Northside community.”


Northside’s “South Block”, along Spring Grove Avenue, is ripe for redevelopment. The Landman Building, right, was recently stabilized and environmentally remediated and is ready for build-out. The building just to the left is now a LEED Silver building with several newly-occupied residential and business condos.

The new district covers much of the existing Northside business district along Hamilton Avenue from the Ludlow Viaduct in the south to just below the Northside Library in the north. In the southern end of the district, Blue Rock Street and Spring Grove Avenue are both included, roughly from Colerain Avenue on the west side, to Crawford Avenue on the east.

There are currently a lot of existing empty storefronts and industrial spaces in the new entertainment district’s map. Residents and small business owners in the area would love to see that change. Imagine once-forlorn Northside blocks now teeming with urban life. By enabling these new licenses, the hope is to see more development in the district. This new development will include not only the new food establishments benefiting from the designation, but additional retail, arts, office and residential spaces, all serving to increase the vibrancy, diversity and uniqueness of all that is Northside.

James Heller-Jackson is a Northside resident and a member of the board for both the Northside Business Association and Northside Community Council. Pictures provided by the Northside Business Association.