The changes that have been taking place in Cincinnati over the past decade have been felt and noticed by many. There is a palpable buzz surrounding the Queen City these days.
For those who live outside the city and may not have been back recently, or for those out-of-towners who have not yet been able to make a visit, it could be difficult to even recognize some places now.
Here’s a look at some of Cincinnati’s more visually impressive transformations, but it is certainly not all encompassing. Simply drag the arrow bar back-and-forth to compare the old and new images.
Clifton Heights at W. McMillan Avenue and Ohio Avenue:
Evanston at Dana Avenue and St. Francis Way (formerly Woodburn Avenue):
Over-the-Rhine looking south on Vine Street near Fifteenth Street:
Over-the-Rhine looking north on Vine Street near Fourteenth Street:
The Banks at Freedom Way and Walnut Street:
Smale Riverfront Park along Mehring Way at Main Street:
Avondale on Burnet Avenue near Northern Avenue:
Columbia Tusculum at Delta Avenue and Columbia Parkway:
College Hill on Hamilton Avenue near Elkton Place:
If you are having difficultly viewing both the before and after images, try to just drag the arrow bar back-and-forth instead of clicking on the images in an attempt to reveal the after.
In partnership with the Cincinnati Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Cincinnati Independent Business Alliance, Xavier University is starting LaunchCincy Juntos, a series of entrepreneurship workshops in Spanish (“Juntos” is the Spanish word for “together” or “united”) aimed at helping immigrants foster their ideas for starting a new business.
Hispanic LaunchCincy Event [Provided]
The group has organized four workshops to-date, with three having already taken place. Two were held in Price Hill and the third was held in Madisonville. The fourth planned workshop will take place in Norwood on June 14, and organizers say that more will follow suit.
Translated from English to Spanish by three undergraduates at Xavier University – Gali Zummar, Ronal Vieira, and Laura Forero – the first of these four workshops lit the flame for certain business ideas, and attendees were given specific assignments to develop their ideas further before their next class.
Noting that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans, and currently lead the nation in terms of business creation, Xavier University and its partners say they want to reach out to the Latino community in Cincinnati to help create a better environment for Spanish-speakers to get their ideas onto paper and, hopefully, into business.
With immigration from Spanish-speaking nations maintaining its steady flow into the United States, Spanish is increasingly important for every aspect of American society, including business.
One example where Cincinnati’s struggles became quite clear was the relocation of Chiquita’s headquarters in November 2011. In addition to poor air service, Chiquita management cited the lack of Spanish-speaking professionals in the region as compared to Charlotte.
“Only 5% of the population speaks another language, which is very low, however 5% of two million is 100,000 people,” Alfonso Cornejo, President of the Cincinnati Hispanic Chamber, exclaimed during Episode 18 of The UrbanCincy Podcast when describing a new initiative focused on addressing this issue called Cincy Bilingual Talent. “If you can capture 3% of those 5% of them, then we’ll have thousands of people in the system who speak a lot of languages.”
X-Link plans to expand their Spanish-speaking program into Carthage this fall, in partnership with the Catholic Charities of Southwest Ohio and Su Casa Hispanic Ministries.
After an eclectic parade on Monday and a kick-off party last night, the 11th annual Cincinnati Fringe Festival officially gets started today with its first round of performances.
The 12-day event has become a national draw over the years, and organizers expect more than 8,000 people to attend this year’s festival. As expected, the 2014 rendition will boast an impressive collection of 38 unique productions and more than 160 performances at a dozen venues tightly clustered in Over-the-Rhine.
“This year’s festival is one of the biggest ever,” said Eric Vosmeier, Producing Artistic Director at the Know Theatre. “We had a record number of FringeNext applications, our high school artist version of the Fringe, and subsequently added an additional slot to FringeNext because the applications were so strong.”
Cincinnati Fringe Festival [Provided]
Cincinnati Fringe Parade [Provided]
Know Theatre [Randy Simes]
Vosmeier also said that he is excited about the three international acts, two from the United Kingdom and one from Israel, at this year’s festival.
The growth and increasing popularity of the Fringe Festival has seemingly mirrored that of the neighborhood is has called home. That trend, however, is now also posing some problems as available, low-cost venue locations are harder to come by.
“We’re thrilled that the neighborhood has reached a critical mass of stable and thriving businesses, but the challenge this poses to our festival is real,” Vosmeier explained. “There was a time when empty storefronts were always available. There was a time when neighborhood landlords shared space at low or no cost – I remember a couple of years when my venue rental costs were $0.”
Vosmeier says that venue costs for this year’s festival were closer to $8,000, and says that organizers are looking to do everything in their power to keep the nearly two-week event in this area of Over-the-Rhine for the foreseeable future, but also realize the challenges they faced this year will probably not be going away.
Fortunately, he says, long-time supporters like Coffee Emporium, Art Academy of Cincinnati and Urban Sites continue to come through with a number of guaranteed venues each year.
The hard work put in by volunteers and Know Theatre employees is something that has helped make the festival a favorite for participating artists who are treated to the country’s smallest application fee, free housing, no participation fees and the opportunity to learn from other artists during the festival’s workshop and development series.
“We have tried to create the most artist-friendly festival possible,” said Vosmeier. “We have ample, but not the biggest box office payouts, but because we make it nearly free of costs for artists to play with us, they see the value in coming to Cincinnati’s Fringe.”
Such treatment has not only benefitted the artists, but also the festival itself. According to organizers, rolling out the welcome mat in such a way has helped foster an “extremely loyal” set of artists that are always looking to participate in Cincinnati’s annual Fringe event. Those loyal artists then, in turn, become ambassadors to other artists, of which 90% are referred by past artists.
Vosmeier also says that the return of these artists year after year better positions the city when those individuals consider relocation.
“I am currently talking with three individual artists who are seriously contemplating a move to Cincinnati, and it’s all due to their experiences stemming from the Cincinnati Fringe Festival,” Vosmeier emphasized. “Artists can be fickle and to have helped create a festival that makes an artist think ‘I might like to move to Cincinnati’ makes us feel like we’ve accomplished something pretty extraordinary.”
After organizing the festival for many years, however, Vosmeier has said that he will step down from his leadership role at the Know Theatre after the last performance concludes next Saturday.
“Working on this festival has truly been one of the privileges of my career. I love virtually everything about it,” Vosmeier told UrbanCincy. “We certainly have challenges each year. But in the end, this event fills us with so much joy and appreciation for our city, these amazing artists, and our audiences that it’s hard to focus on anything but the unique pop-up community that we create for twelve ridiculously invigorating days.”
After opening earlier this month, BoBa Cha has been attracting a healthy crowd for its bubble tea offerings at 1606 Main Street.
The small Over-the-Rhine bubble tea shop is owned by Ingrid Huang and Andrew Lui. The couple previously owned Tea N’ Bowl in Clifton Heights, and said they wanted to open a shop closer to where their customers were coming from.
Huang and Lui moved to Cincinnati from California to raise their family and open Tea N’ Bowl in April 2007. The restaurant offered both the bubble tea in which they now focus, but also healthy Asian food selections. They won a Best of Cincinnati award in 2012, but after seven years their bubble tea had become so popular that they thought it was time to consider a new concept.
1606 Main Street (Google Street View)
BoBa Cha Exterior (Provided)
In Chinese, cha (茶) means tea and boba (粉圆) is a slang term that stands for the tapioca pearls typically found in bubble tea, which was popularized in Taiwan in the 1980s.
With their family and cultural roots in mind, Huang and Lui said they were looking for a new location with a steady stream of customers that would also serve as a place that would bring the community together; where friends and families can meet with no worries.
“We decided to move to OTR to make our place more accessible and now focus, 100%, on making the bubble tea better and healthier, and using fresher ingredients than before,” Huang explained.
The new shop does not serve any food, but the owners have set up an arrangement with Maki to deliver sushi to the location should customers chose to order it. In addition to the fresh ingredients, the primary focuses of BoBa Cha is on the overall health benefits of the tea they serve.
“The common thing [among flavors of tea] is antioxidants that help to clean the body and help metabolism,” said Huang. As a result, they are also offering more tea bases like Oolong, Jasmine, Green Tea, Black Tea, Golden Tea, Thai Tea, as well as organic herbs like Lotus, Ginseng, Dandelion Root, Peppermint and others.
In addition to their new Over-the-Rhine shop, BoBa Cha has a drink cart that can be found on Fountain Square every Tuesday and in Washington Park each Wednesday. Huang also says that they hope to bring the cart to Findlay Market on Saturdays and Sundays in the near future.
The owners say that BoBa Cha will close down during the cold winter months, but that they are working on arrangements with area Asian restaurants to sell their tea while they are closed for the season. In the meantime, however, the couple says they are excited to be in Over-the-Rhine.
“Right after opening we felt the welcome and support of our neighborhood,” Huang explained. “It made us feel like we were a big part of the community and so far.”
Located inside a 154-year-old building that was renovated in 2008, BoBa Cha is open Monday through Friday from 10am to 8pm, and on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 8pm.
Cincinnati has a migration problem that is two-fold. First, it lags behind most major metropolitan regions in North America when it comes to attracting international migrants. Second, and perhaps more significantly, is that the region has a stagnant domestic population.
This is not because domestic migrants are any more or less important than international migrants. But rather, it is because stagnancy is a major problem for cities.
As many demographers and social scientists have pointed out, focusing public policy on retaining existing talent is a bad approach. In fact, large movements of people out of one region can be a very positive thing. That is, of course, if it is balanced out by a large influx of people into that same region. This is the case for North America’s largest cities, and is also evidenced at a larger scale in California.
Net Total Migration – U.S. Cities (CityLab | Atlantic Cities)
But beyond that, older Midwestern cities with a large cluster of high-quality universities also seem to export more people than they import. That, in and of itself, is not the problem.
“This notion of the university as a “factory” gets very close to the truth,” Aaron Renn, owner of The Urbanophile, wrote in 2010. “A friend of mine noted that if we treated steel mills like universities, Indiana would be obsessing over “steel drain” and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on programs to try to keep steel from leaving the state.”
Renn went on to say that the notion of doing such a thing would be ludicrous, and that it is important to understand the details of what is really going on when it comes to a region’s migration patterns.
“Migration does matter. Any city that thinks it can be blasé about this is fooling themselves,” wrote Renn in a separate piece. “On the other hand, surface numbers only tell us so much. We need to understand the dynamics going on underneath the hood.”
By most comparative measure, Cincinnati actually does very well compared to many places at retaining its population. The problem is that it does very poorly at bringing in new people from outside the region.
Based on five-year estimates from the American Community Survey, this stagnation can be clearly seen.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the areas of the Cincinnati Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) which have the highest percentage of people living there that were born in another state are near state borders. Since the Cincinnati MSA stretches across three states, you can see that movement of Ohio residents to southeastern Indiana and northern Kentucky has boosted numbers in those locales.
On average, approximately 68% of the 2.2 million person Cincinnati region was born in the state where they currently reside. Meanwhile, Uptown and Cincinnati’s northeast suburbs appear to be the only parts of the region that are actually attracting newcomers to the region.
Regional Nativity Rating (Map by Nate Wessel for UrbanCincy)
Cincinnati MSA Nativity Rating (Map by Nate Wessel for UrbanCincy)
Cincinnati Nativity Rating (Map by Nate Wessel for UrbanCincy)
Another key finding here is the utter lack of movement of people into or out of Cincinnati’s western suburbs, which have a native born population between 80-100%. This number is roughly comparable to most rural areas in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.
The Cincinnati region, however, is not alone when it comes to a stagnant population.
The numbers are even worse for the Cleveland MSA, which, on average, has a percentage of native born population higher than the average for Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. This is in spite of the Cleveland MSA attracting more international migrants than any other in the three-state region.
Even though Cincinnati continues to post modest annual population growth, it continues to be on the outside looking in when it comes to North America’s most economically successful cities. If Cincinnati wants to just focus on attracting existing Americans to the region, then it should look to Houston, Dallas or Atlanta, which are all hubs for domestic migration.
This scenario, however, seems unlikely since each of those regions is positioned uniquely in terms of their economy or their geographic location. So, if Cincinnati is to really ramp up its population growth, it better look at what other metropolitan regions are doing to make themselves more attractive to international migrants.
Perhaps Mayor John Cranley’s new, yet-to-be-unveiled initiative can help with this. But does he or his administration actually know what is going on underneath the hood?
