City Blights

City leadership still doesn't understand the key to preservation is to preserve right-of-way. The amateurish approach of Cincinnati and Hamilton County in regard to municipal planning causes more demos than anything. If the City didn't have block after block, street after street, sitting to rot for a decade or more without a more effective way of motivating absentee landlords, no one would think to knock anything down.

There are two significant issues pertaining to the Cleveland fanbases: 1. Having a sense of pride about mediocrity. I don't see Cleveland fans demanding much of their teams outside of competitiveness. 2. Relishing the role of National Sports Victim. Philadelphia does its fair share of whining, but Cleland probably takes the cake in this category. Cincinnati had their former franchise QB walk out on them with four years left on his contract and that city still doesn't weep like Cleveland did over Lebron. St. Louis has a perennial winner downtown and that city still could use a professional cleaning crew. Cleveland should focus on expanding the Rapid and forming a cohesive flow of self-sustaining neighborhoods within 3 miles of downtown.

Since when did black life mean anything in Cincinnati anyway? The Enquirer is following suit. This is not new in any way, shape or form to the community. Cincinnati once had a black homicide rate of 45 per 100,000 and people were still saying the city wasn't that dangerous because it wasn't Detroit. Detroit annually has a homicide rate hovering around 40 per 100k, and that city is 82% black at least. Knowing these numbers, how much more violent is Detroit than Cincinnati for black people? I'll let you do the math. Mark Curnutte, Mr. I'm too good to cover the Bengals did the writeup. He's not quite Peter Bronson, but it all makes sense now that I know what alleged professional writer thought to type up a civic distraction of this magnitude.

There is not a single bit of this that I understand. Please elaborate. College kids? Young adults that still lean on their families for considerable financial assistance? The parents of these groups aren't putting their kids into Section 8 housing, they're paying market rate. That doesn't mean those young people value that living space any more than poor people living a few doors down on Section 8. The poorest of America's poor inhabited OTR exclusively from 1960-2008. Now I fear that there are some that are so excited about OTR's potential that they might forget how unjust it would be to push the poor aside for the educated and wealthy's next pet project. If you want every unit in OTR to be 100k and up with four-figure rents sprinkled between, I want solutions from you on how to treat the poor with some human decency. Shoving them off to Price Hill creates no long-term competitiveness for Cincinnati and diminishes any tax relief the city may see with increasing property values and investment payoff on OTR's edifices. Could you imagine being black, growing up in OTR, being pushed off to the Westside & turning on the TV to see affluent whites pointing the finger at you and bored youth with zero opportunity for the stagnation of the neighborhood prior to 2008 and 3CDC? This has already happened and will happen more as the area continues to gentrify.

This is a landlord problem, not a subsidized problem. There are plenty of people who don't have direct fiscal responsibility over their living arrangement because others take care of it for them, and they abuse their living space. The people picking up the tab are not poor and the bill is not cut-rate. We shouldn't hope that OTR becomes a place where the working class has no place.

Are you referring to Section 8 tenants?

^We still have to remember, Cincinnati is poverty-stricken, has been for ages, and anything that can happen probably will in our not-always-so-fair city.

This is more or less what I was putting out there in my post yesterday regarding Cranley. Whichever path his handlers choose for him, he'll land on his feet in some office he doesn't deserve and won't serve well. Cincinnati politicians are great at losing locally and winning an even more influential office via graft and voter incompetence.

Cranley was on council for almost a decade. He is a democrat who will have support from conservatives. Brad Wenstrup, as an unknown white male republican, was able to put up 45% against Mallory. Cranley poses a very real threat to Qualls and to the streetcar project, but hopefully the project will be too far along to stop by the time a new mayor is sworn in. However, it would be frustrating to have a Mayor opposing expansion. This is pretty much what I just said. Cranley will show well in a general election, but he won´t win. There´s winning, and there´s almost winning. Southern Ohioans who´ve been watching Cincinnati sports for the past 20 years should understand the difference. There´s also being prepared for an attack and there´s panicking. Let´s not be afraid to be excited about the Streetcar and make that a focus of our gospel.

Qualls is a known, trusted commodity in the town. If Cranley ran against her for the big seat, the only good he could do himself would be to make a decent showing to up his stock for a job other than Mayor of Cincinnati.

This is why lobbyists make such a nice living. Politicians have been studying this for years, in fact, there are several books written about this dating back to the 19th century. I'm not even touching political theory and how long philosophers have proposed that the educated control the ignorant via more ignorance.

1. The locals are just as brainwashed as the national audience into believing Cincinnati is a small town. A city close to 1 million would change that pretty quickly. Just look at the NYT article. Keith "I cover Ohio for a living" Schneider believes Louisville is bigger than Cincinnati because of unigov definitions. 2. During the MetroMoves campaign, there were still a lot of County politicians and other loudmouths that represent areas outside Cincinnati proper claiming that their communities would not benefit enough to justify cost of construction. Having one city changes that. 3. Green Township and Delhi aren't strong enough to defeat the areas that would support a single-city vision such as Colerain, North College Hill, Finneytown and Mt. Healthy, all westside communities. These communities don't have half the anxiety about integration, racial, social, empirical or political, that Delhi and Green Twp. have.

If Cincinnati had a unigov, it would have a light rail network.

The Cincinnati-Cleveland rivalry is immaturity at its worst. In the writer's article, she frames the Reds game by saying, "we watched the Reds get beat up by the Astros". The Reds are a first-place team, but you wouldn't know it by reading that sentence. I certainly noticed a little tongue in-cheek throughout the article, and it isn't the first article by the Plain Dealer to praise Cincinnati and throw soft jabs at it simultaneously. Cleveland writers can't help themselves I suppose. Not a big deal, but always interesting (frustrating) to see how parochial Ohioans can be.

Delta isn't doing any more damage to CVG than the airport's board allows. Even during CVG's heyday, we knew Delta needed to share the throne with other carriers, and the airport has been reluctant to make this happen via drastic measures. They consistently say they're trying to attract an LCC, but every airport in America has done better at it in the past 10 years than CVG. No coincidence. CVG is rife with corruption and it's a shame for Cincinnati. Most of the board members are semi-retired, upper-class tax breaks waiting to happen that could care less or have no idea what it means to have a LCC in your region.

PG is a shill, this was obvious before his election and everything he's done or said post-installation has proven this. His "no" vote has nothing to do with Duke. PG knows the Streetcar is reality and no longer a maybe. Sittenfeld wants to give the appearance of fiscal responsibility for his pals on the Westside and possibly a future in Columbus. Clown all the way.

Cunningham has been crusading against urban Cincinnati for a long time. The anti-streetcar push may have been his peak of broadcast ignorance, and now the embarrassment of defeat both at the polls and on the ground in OTR has forced him to hop on the new bandwagon. The one that says the City of Cincinnati is exciting again. It was already beautiful and rich with culture. Bravo to all the small-business owners downtown that fed Willie his words without a bib or a bottle.

I'm always amazed how mediocre European states understand commuting patterns better than the State of Ohio, a province of 12 million with two cities that would be the 2nd and 3rd largest metros in a prominent country like France. This isn't a knock on France, but even the infrastructure present in lesser nations makes you wonder what's in the water in Ohio.

The problem with choosing a 30 minute flight over a 4-hour drive is that by the time you add the 1.5 for check-in/boarding, exiting the airport & getting from an airport to the city center or your actual destination, you're at three hours. From the City of Cincinnati to the City of Cleveland is 4:20. Five is definitely too long, four is making good time. 3.5 is outrageously good considering Columbus to the City of Cincinnati is about 1:40 by itself.

This must be a typo.... It doesn't even make sense, especially that you follow it with saying more people will be walking around. Just to be clear, the entire Cincy metro is 2.2 million, not 3.2 (that's about minneapolis's size) Corrected that major typo, read above. As for the Cinti metro, it says in my post that the "immediate region" is 3.2 million. Dayton is part of the immediate SW Ohio region even if the Census Bureau is confused.

Precisely. If you aren't happy with the way the City runs things or the way they've allowed developers to carry on, organize your thoughts, do your research and present your case as a professional. It's not just Mark Mallory's city, or Mike Brown's, or any other administrator. Claim your stake.

We're Cincinnatians, we have no choice but to believe our own echo is the smartest and most rational voice in the room. Just look at the Banks thread. There's a complaint about the building materials about every fourth comment. The Smale thread is starting to sound like a neighborhood council meeting. Cincinnatians, the laziest perfectionists you'll ever know. Most of us on this forum are not employed by Carter Dawson or in some position of power relating to The Banks. We didn't get to make the decision on The Banks' architecture, so all we can do is talk about it here. The fact that it's turned into an echo chamber just shows that the majority of us are disappointed in the architecture. By contrast, I think most of us are very impressed by the Riverfront Park. If there's some way that we can force Carter Dawson to do a better job on Phase II of The Banks, please let us know. No one said you can´t complain if you don´t feel satisfied with something in life. The frugal exterior clearly stems from cost and lack of interest on the part of developers to overrun on building materials. Labor is costly nowadays. This does not excuse the City from acquiesing such a downgrade from the universally accepted vision of the early 2000s that was far more ornate and representative of an enclave. However, because you are tired of the incessant complaints about architecture as if there weren´t factors that catalyzed this change or that subsequent phases have a real possibility of being more elaborate does not mean that you aren´t disappointed in some aspects of Phase I. It just means you´re tired of hearing the same things.

EDIT: I meant less lazy, not more. Replaced with ambitious. That's what I get for writing while tuning out drone-like colleagues. The more there is to do downtown, the more ambitious Cincinnatians will be at pursuing entertainment. I can see patrons walking (or taking transit) from Broadway Commons to OTR or from the riverfront to Broadway Commons. Downtown Cincinnati is no one-trick pony, and it´s only becoming more complex and entertaining. I maintain that an NBA-ready arena was the best use of the Broadway Commons site. An arena would have provided foot traffic for OTR before and after games & concerts and would´ve been a strong bet to undercut nearby metros from hosting sports tournaments (Dayton, Indianapolis) and major concert dates (Cleveland). It would have stimulated the downtown housing market in a major way by proximity alone, not to mention all of the new establishments to feed demand. I could have even seen the NBA becoming interested in a market with such a dynamic downtown and 3.2 million in the immediate region.

It's not that I don't recognize or care that the Banks architecture is mediocre to date, it's that the project is designed to be a port of renaissance for the core of Cincinnati, and it's doing just that in its unfinished phase. The Banks is attracting a demographic Cincinnati has starved for in it's core, which are suburbanites or would-be suburbanites with plenty of expendable income. It has the region, not just the city, excited about seeing downtown again, whether their last trek was 3 years ago or three weeks. The project is proving itself multidimensional, so there's no reason to feel poor architecture outweighs that value or merits undying ridicule with all of the positives the Banks has contributed to the community. Holistically, Phase I architecture isn't as important as it seems. Just as one could see proper infill in other major Eastern cities, one could also stumble upon pro-modern disasters and shameful faux-historic/modern hybrids. I'm not upset that Cincinnati has a couple blocks of cheap that are raking dough as opposed to blocks and blocks of cheap in a residential neighborhood (like Corryville) that would diminish any feel of community and be the catalyst for a dozen or more Second Empire demos.

Now all we need is a better airport (with rail service)! It's so good to hear Cincinnati's downtown outperforming other cities based on recent development and decisions/policy enacted by the current guard. DT Cinti was already a step ahead of most, but that had more to do with the dense market environment weaved by generations of yesteryear.