Civvik

Cincinnati is definitely not Southern. But, surprise, is also not Midwestern. If you put a gun to my head, I'd have to say it's mid-atlantic Eastern. (Think northern Virginia.) Hilly Verdant Almost subtropical, but not quite Access to the north, south, and Appalachia Cincinnati's setting looks much more like Charlotte, Washington or Knoxville than Columbus, Indianapolis, or Chicago. The Ohio river valley is unquestionably where the continental climate zone peters out into the subtropical climate zone. But that would stand to reason since that's where the last glaciers stopped and receded. They must have only gotten that far for a reason. (Or one of many reasons.) One might say "but wait, if I drive south on I-75 or east into appalachia, it doesn't get any warmer." But as you drive south or east, you generally go up in elevation (Cincy 482'. Lexington 971'.) And if you drive north or generally west, you get into the continental climate zone.

Schools, I'm guessing. Like my boss (who lives in Orlando proper) says "I do live in a good school district. We just make it bad by not sending our kids there."

Correct me if I'm wrong (no, seriously, correct me if I'm wrong), but I recall the county's conservative commissioners insisting that The Banks be "family friendly." Perhaps this was in some way worked into their acceptance of more county subsidy for the project.

You ain't kiddin.

IMHO this chick torpedoed all her credibility just by loving Deconstructivist architecture. /puke But that's just my opinion.

Tell that to Norwood. A city in a resource-rich western nation that is about as fiscally solvent as Albania.

Does anyone have recent photos of this?

Don't take it to heart. Most of the people on these boards are armchair enthusiasts, and tend to get overexcited. People "on the inside" and many who are just here observing know that these things tend to sit for ages, then move fast, then sit again, then change overnight, etc, etc.

-The Banks plan was very much not just an illustration. You should educate yourself on the history of that planning process. -Again, if you want examples of truly good infill development, look at Charlotte. And to say that public buildings are the most ornate...do you work in this industry?

The prices quoted in the article have to be wrong. A 3700 sq.ft. condo in The Edge is listed at about $1.3 million. How can you offer the same sized unit in this building for $400k? Maybe, The Edge is just a nicer building in a nicer area (although I personally prefer the SW side of the CBD) but that cant account for a $900k difference in asking price. I hope I am wrong. If I am I will be the first to make an offer. A $125/sf to $300/sf variation in residential construction is realistic. Imagine the difference between drywalling and finishing versus specialized finishes and labor, plus location/view premiums.

I am ususally pragmatic about design (and I'm a designer), as long as fundamentals are held true: Block Structure, Pedestrian Orientation, Public Space, Scale. But the Banks area is the heart of the heart of Cincinnati. Whatever happens there will resonate ten times louder than anywhere else, save perhaps Fountain Square. I'm mainly concerned that with one developer and a very large program, they've a tendency to lose their discipline and value-engineer the buildings down to something less appealing. It's hard to describe what that means. But I can point to a lot of Atlantic Station and say "that's underwhelming" and point to a lot of Charlotte infill and say "that's top quality." In the same breath, they also may use the same architect for more than one block. That would be baaaad, bad. You really want to use different architects for different blocks and buildings.

I thought it was a silly request. A 30 story tower on the Banks would be over kill and I agreed with John Schneider's thoughts on his dissenting vote. This is a common tactic - Get approval for the maximum amount of development that you could ever hope to do, because you don't have to ask for more later in an ammendment. I have been mum on The Banks for several years now. But honestly, I am disappointed. I have watched it go from something rather unique that honored downtown, to basically a blank slate for Carter to build another Atlanta project. (And if you've been there, it's underwhelming.) Great care was taken in the original plan. The only thing that remains now is the block structure.

Nope, sorry. Not just yet. I think you will see northern cities stabilize. But sunbelt cities have a good generation of growth left. Orlando, where I live currently, is experiencing crushing growth. This is the kind of city where growth isn't driven by industry, it *is* the industry. The problem with Cincinnati isn't that it's low growth or low demand. Jesus. You all back home really don't want the kind of growth Orlando has. The American civilization does not have the tools to accommodate it in a responsible way. It's awful. Case in point: We made a really great growth plan for part of a county that was based on a connected regional street network, new urbanist principles, and good green space preservation. It is now collapsing under A) population projections that are double what even our densest villages can handle and B) private land ownership issues. Anyhow, the problem isn't that Cincinnati doesn't have the demand for XYZ. It's the the financial and development industries don't have the incremental format for matching their rate of development with a low rate of growth. Like a cheap whore, they want to be in, out and over, usually with a return-on-investment of less than 10 years. If you unravel the financial yarn ball, it is getting paid for, ultimately, by a bunch of pension funds, and those investors, who may end up being your teacher or your grandma, want a certain rate of return on their retirement plan. That's why you don't really see a "medium" pace of development in an American city right now. There's either little guys like Middle Earth, or it's a massive condo tower or project like The Banks. That middle ground financial model just doesn't exist very often. Migration patterns are starting to indicate that the Baby Boom generation in the north won't retire to the sunbelt like the generation before them. So that's one thing going for the North. Another isn't warming, it's water. Water scarcity will limit growth in the sunbelt long before warming does. Another thing that isn't talked about much is local backlash. Floridians are so clusterfucked over growth and hurricane insurance that there are some very, very severe referendums coming up that could more or less paralyze the development industry. Sorry for going on a huge tangent. Sometimes I like to dig a little deeper into a comment I see.

I philosophically agree that you shouldn't have to fork over your land so the government can sell it to someone else. Market forces should motivate someone to sell, not a planning initiative. However I can tell you that there are two problems with this: 1) An intelligent market is a myth. There is no such thing as an intelligent market force. Pure capitalists love to say that "the market will work out such-and-such issue naturally." Translated: "Private forces with more power than you will decide the fate of this land." 2) In a vacuum, the idea of inviolate land ownership rights is fine. Utopian, even. However, America is but one country competing with many others who do not share the ideal of inviolate land ownership rights, and have the flexibility (sometimes abusively, sometimes not) to be as strategic and competitive as they want when it comes to modifying or redeveloping their cities. This puts us at a competitive disadvantage. That is not to say that we should or should not change our values. The fact simply exists.

As interesting as the site may seem, this project was ill-conceived and I still think it will never happen the way it was originally envisioned. Some day it might be a mix of office and residential, with some complementary retail. But the visibility just isn't there for intense retail, and the idea of some kind of town center in that saturated market is kind of silly at best. I say this as an urban planner from Cincinnati who lived in Oakley. There are surprisingly a lot of hot spots in Cincinnati right now, including Oakley itself, but this site isn't one of them.

You are correct, if you going into a private firm usually the money is a little better but the hours are a lot more. Usually the money is a lot better. Salary almost always depends on the size and location of the jurisdiction that's hiring you. Rural and small town jurisdictions usually pay less than those in large metro areas or large cities. And private sector is not that much more than public, often with fewer immediate benefits, less time off, and an expectation of more hours worked and/or late nights and/or travel. I personally am a private sector urban designer and I get 120 "flex" vacation/sick hours a year. My friend is a planner for the state, and gets 190 vacation hours and 80 hours of sick time. In my private sector experience, I have seen a notable number of planners hit mid-career and go into the development sector to increase their income. I would estimate that there is an income "cap" as a planner of about $125,000 plus benefits. Flip that 15 or so years of experience into working for a developer and I think you start at that salary and go up from there. I would say, though, when it's all said and done that the difference between public sector and private sector planning isn't so much about how much you make or even what you do, it's about which "driving force" do you want to work under: Having to justify everything you do politically, or financially.

You couldn't do something quite as wide as what is envisioned in those old postcards of other cities, as those medians are probably 50-75 feet wide. A traffic lane being 10-12 feet, you could still do a nice median with 2 lanes in each direction and a parking lane. Unfortunately the ROW on Central Parkway is about 20 feet to narrow to get in a really nice broad median park and still have 2 traffic lanes and a parking lane in each direction. But, that's good in a way, too, because it pulls the building walls in more and makes it feel more substantial. Central is calling out for a redesign, but more so it's calling out for a re-imagining. I don't think it really knows what it wants to be, or what its activities are. In that sort of fuzzy sense, I don't blame the city for not investing a lot in it yet. I think they are focusing their limited resources on the right spots...for now. If/when the streetcar goes in, if it's successful I think you will see a lot more attention paid to Central Parkway.

Because when you have to listen to doubleplusgood developerspeak bullshit for enough years, you begin to understand what they are trying to say, without actually saying it, which they would never, ever do.

This person is saying that the developers are going to adhere to the design guidelines outlined in the Banks plan that was produced several years ago, only it will be denser and with more modern architecture.

I have not lived in Cincinnati for a few years now after graduating from UC's planning program, but I can tentatively say that this is the death knell to the OTR as we knew it as a ghetto. There are too many properties being purchased and consolidated, and with the completion of Fountain Square, I would predict that Vine will gentrify up to Liberty in the next 5 years. However I don't think the entire OTR district will "boom" so to speak. Cincinnati's housing absorption rate is not very fast. The OTR district has an enormous stock of buildings, way more than a 2-million-ish midwestern metro could absorb in even 10 years. Being optimistic, I would hope that OTR becomes a very vibrant restaurant and cultural district, fulfilling the dream of having a large, continuous flagship urban neighborhood that Gaslight Clifton, Northside and Mount Adams have attempted to be but couldn't-quite because of their limited size and geographic/topographic isolation. I don't see OTR as becoming a true built-out 24 hour urban neighborhood for 15-20 more years. However, if things continue to go well for it, I think in that 20 year time frame the district has the potential to rival any in the midwest, if only because it is so completely intact. You simply cannot build today what OTR offers. In fact I think that a lot of people in Cincinnati's leadership can't quite visualize how dramatic this change will be. Because of the intact historic density, at an optimum population level it would be difficult to tell on the street if you were in Cincinnati or Chicago. All it will take is the patience to let Cincinnati's population fill it up. I think what 3CDC is attempting to do by going up Vine is not so much providing a new "development beachhead" but attempting to use development as a "smart bomb" (forgive the insensitive analogy) to plow the blight right in half.

jesus christ, who did their renderings. my sister could do better than that. these people need to talk to me.

I'll try to follow up my gripes with some constructive criticism: 1) They're burying the retail facades behind tightly packed groves of trees, hundreds of feet from the street, about 4 feet above street grade. That is a recipe for disaster in Cincinnati, which does not have the foot traffic or perceived safety to have hundreds of people curiously poking their way to the storefronts. Even mighty Chicago sees a great decrease in foot traffic to the stores that are behind Water Tower park, away from Michigan Avenue. They should have focused the retail activity as close to the streets as possible. 2) The tree groves is a silly way to pack greenspace in the square. They needed to listen to the experts and not the public on this issue, picking this battle instead of the "move the fountain" battle. They needed to evenly distribute the trees as not to create visual barriers to parts of the square or create a "Dark Forest" effect. Having an even distribution of trees on the street would help formalize the space as well. 3) They should focus as much as possible on getting the 5/3 property facade redone in lighter colors or glass. The 60's facade is like a stormcloud over the whole space. 4) There might not be much they can do about it, but a 4 or 5 step change in grade from the street really kills the flow to a space. Maybe one step, or two? I suppose the parking garage necessitates raising it up that much, but I almost think the square in its current configuration deals with this change in grade better than trying to create a more traditional square.

Ah yes, one of the few drawbacks of democracy: design by committee. I hate this design. Its lopsided; there is no meaning or coordination to the tree placement, the tree groves now serve no purpose, that ridiculous second fountain seeps energy from the focal-point-power of the original and the big gaping hole it demands in the tree pattern will be stark and sun-blasted. It's cheezy and jumbled; the combination of double-glazed glass structures from the 80's, an oddly placed jumbotron a-la Times Square, the euro-kitsch colorful awnings on the drab 5/3rd tower monolith...come on. And I know they have a parking garage underneath...but who the hell honestly thinks that moving the change in grade back a few feet from the sidewalk is going to "level" the square with the streets? You're still going to hit a little mound of steps as soon as you try to engage the space. Great spaces are powerful, and commanding, with no question of what is running the show (Monument Circle, Indianapolis) or serene and inviting, evolving over time (Paris, anyone? or Central Park?). This feels like exactly what they did to Union Square in San Francisco. They took a dated, wierd square that needed to be redesigned and turned it into International Street at Kings Island.

I graduate in 05 in urban planning at Cincinnati. I've worked in a real estate office and for an urban design firm in Chicago. I need a new internship in January that gets me out of Ohio. Any takers? I've also worked Chris's mom, several times into a frenzy.