OTR is mentioned in this AP story.

 

Empty neighborhoods fill Rust Belt

By Dan Sewell and Frank Bass • The Associated Press • May 4, 2009

 

CINCINNATI - Meet the forgotten housing crisis.

 

While most attention has focused on the wave of foreclosures sweeping mostly middle-class, suburban Sunbelt neighborhoods from California to Florida, the nation's emptiest neighborhoods have remained concentrated in the same place for nearly a generation: the mostly minority, poor, urban neighborhoods of the American Rust Belt.

 

An analysis by The Associated Press, based on data collected by the U.S. Postal Service and the Housing and Urban Development Department, shows the emptiest neighborhoods are clustered in places hit hard during the recession of the 1980s - cities such as Flint, Mich.; Columbus, Ohio; Buffalo, N.Y.; and Indianapolis.

 

To read more: http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090504/NEWS/905040359&s=d&page=2#pluckcomments

 

I thought this caption said it all.

 

Resident Larry Young, dressed in military fatigues, stands on the stoop of a boarded-up building on Race St. in Over-the-Rhine. Rushing from around the side of the rundown building, Young asked a visitor excitedly, "Are you going to buy this?" In Over-the-Rhine about 2 of every 3 homes are vacant or used by squatters in some stretches.

Associated Press/Al Behrman

 

^Lame.

Can't believe they didn't mention the CLE in a foreclosure article about the "American Rust Belt"

looks like 2-3 homes won't fall "victim" to gentrification then right?

It would be nice if they mentioned the hundreds of new units being constructed in Over-the-Rhine

^ That's not how the media works. They make their bang and bucks on twisting the facts, hiding the good news, and repeating the bad stuff over and over, to the extreme. Just think of how they made the swine flu out to be the sequel to the 1918 Spanish Flu. Or about how in Cleveland, every news story about downtown has to include mention of the shooting at Perk Park.

 

OTR is indeed on the up and up with new construction!

They make their bang and bucks on twisting the facts, hiding the good news, and repeating the bad stuff over and over, to the extreme.

 

From the article:

 

An analysis by The Associated Press, based on data collected by the U.S. Postal Service and the Housing and Urban Development Department, shows the emptiest neighborhoods are clustered in places hit hard during the recession of the 1980s — cities such as Flint, Mich.; Columbus, Ohio; Buffalo, N.Y.; and Indianapolis.

 

I'm familiar with this. This was an experiment by HUD to track vacancies outside of the decennial census count. They wanted to get more up-to-date information. It turns out the USPS keeps records of vacancies by address on their courier routes. They also keep record of when addressess "disappear" (ie the house gets torn down or is boarded up or something..not sure which). So HUD worked with USPS to set up a database on this, which is available somewhere on the HUD website (I recall surfing into it once) Anyone can use it. It looks like the AP did actually work with the data to track vacancy.

 

As for OTR, well, they could have done Price Hill instead. It also could be that the renovation action at OTR hasn't overtaken the vacancy rate yet, too.

 

 

Yes, if they knew Cincinnati at all they would realize that Price Hill would be a much better neighborhood for this kind of reference.  Many professionals around the country see the ball rolling on the next great urban neighborhood revitalization in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.

^Not really.

If OTR is empty, at this point it's by choice.

 

By that I mean the powers at be (3CDC) obviously prefer vacant buildings to tennaments full of subsidized housing.  While the article isn't necessarily false, it was just bad timing and lazy journalism to not dig a little deeper into the details.

 

The Gateway Quarter is still relatively small in relation to the rest of OTR, but give it a few more years. 

How does this account for teardowns or this simply vacancy of a building still standing? Toledo and Detroit have been big on teardowns for decades (I know it was big in the late 90s), Cincy came to this late and I'm not sure Columbus has come to grips with the poor quality of many of its neighborhoods.

From todays Dispatch.....

 

Urban ghost town

The emptiest neighborhood in the United States sits just south of Westland Mall. . . .

Tuesday,  May 5, 2009 3:13 AM

By Mark Ferenchik [email protected]

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

 

The area, anchored by the desolate Wingate Villages apartment complex, leads the nation in having the most vacant housing units in areas with at least 1,000 homes.

 

For the first quarter of the year, nearly 70 percent of the houses and apartments were vacant, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data.

 

Of Ohio's major metropolitan areas, Columbus usually is considered the most stable because the city and its suburbs continue to grow.

 

But there are holes. Many Columbus neighborhoods, racked by poverty, foreclosures, crime and blight, continue to empty. There are more than 5,300 vacant homes citywide, according to the most-recent numbers.

 

At Wingate Village, only one in five units -- 352 of 1,712 apartments -- is occupied. And that's up from last year's 12 percent occupancy rate, said Bert Hyman, a project manager for property owner Matrix Realty.

 

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/05/05/VACANTHOODS.ART_ART_05-05-09_A1_RMDOR6K.html?sid=101

My biggest question is: At what point did Cincinnati become part of the "Rust Belt"?  I've never seen it lumped into that category before.

Here is an exceprt from todays Dayton Daily News article on the topic:

 

The analysis also identified a census tract in northwest Dayton that was more than 40 percent vacant — making it the fourth emptiest neighborhood in Ohio and ninth in the nation. Of the 1,739 residential units in the neighborhood, 705 were vacant in the first quarter of 2009.

 

  Link to story....and dont forget to visit the always entertaining readers comments section.

 

 

How does this account for teardowns or this simply vacancy of a building still standing?

 

Teardowns dont count as vacant from what I recall as the address goes away.

 

Which leads to an interesting phenomenon of a tract made up of vacant lots and a few hold-outs would, technically, not have much vacant housing since what's left is ocuppied.

 

I guess there is a continuum going on:

 

Mostly occuipied--->inreasing vacancy---->40%-50% vacant and teardowns start---->mostly empty land & a few hold-outs.

 

So I guess for these high-vacancy tracts they are in "stage 3".

 

An alternative scenario is what happened in parts of West Dayton, where houses were torn down, but replaced with new houses.  In some cases entire blocks of new houses.  So addressess that appeared as vacant  "disappeared" as the abandoned stuff was torn down....but then reappeared as the new units went up.

 

 

 

 

The Dispatch article mentions the fact that the big empty Cbus neighborhood is caused almost entirely by an almost empty apartment complex. OTR would shaped by the fact that it would have had massive numbers of extent addresses from 50 years ago when the various buildings were subdivided into apartments rather than single family homes.

where are census tracks 9 and 16 in Cincy? 

^

9 and 16 are outlined in red.

 

^

9 and 16 are outlined in red.

 

 

From the map, it looks like tract 9 extends all the way East to Sycamore St...

I think that is Tract 10?    Between Vine and Sycamore?

 

 

Hmmm, as I suspected, I live in tract 9.

^'

do the stats seem plausible to you?

 

@@@@@

 

Comparing the OTR tract numbers over 20 years using the census and HUD/USPS numbers.  The census numbers seem lower, or imply a lower increase in vacancies if you project a trend line, compared to the last number from HUD.

 

 

…and total units.  This is more plausible, showing a steady decrease in number of units, either due to demolitions or combining units, since we are mostly talking about apartments here?

 

 

 

Me and the so were down in Cincy this Sunday for a cig run to Covington.

 

On the way back I detoured to OTR to check out the area in light of these stats.  Still a lot of people on the street hanging out, but you can see the gentrification action in the southern part of the neighborhood.

 

Yet it was pretty noticeable there are a lot of vacant buildings here, too, if you look beyond the "streetcorner society".  Im guessing just from looking that these stats are accurate for that tract south of Liberty.

 

Why that is is another question.  It could be because that 3CDC group bought up the property and is holding it or it could be that plus straight abandonment &/or condemnations

I was looking for an article and I figured I'd clean this thread, but after doing so I  don't know how to move it out of the "To Be Cleaned" queue. Oh well, I'll just bump this interesting, but sad, thread.

Since when were Cincinnati and Columbus considered rust belt cities?

but whats worse? large targeted abandoned tracts or abandoned 'holes' of homes and buildings spread around the whole city? this happens for different reasons of course, but i would say the latter is much worse. that is, i don't think something like having like a large plat of wingate tract homes emptied out constitutes a major crisis for columbus, nor is otr's slow redevelopment really a major drag on in cinci (that one is more just kind of an embarrassment issue being close to downtown) vs something like cleveland's much more widespread depopulation patterns. i guess i'd rather have a big hole or two to fix on my boat than have leaks all over the damn place.

 

 

The term "rust belt" is just a negative replacement for the "manufacturing belt." Although Cincinnati often escapes association with the rust belt, I have some old planning texts which show Cincy as part of the manufacturing belt.

 

So I think it's perfectly fair to lump Cincinnati with the rust belt. If you want to look on the bright side, I guess this just shows that some rust belt cities are still kind of growing.

Probably. But it's a term with decent historical context, and it's not like all of the Midwest is included in the rust belt either. For example, few if any people are going to be putting Indy, Kansas City or Minneapolis in the Rust Belt. Even Chicago tends to escape the label. So it's not just about bias against Midwesterners.

The term "rust belt" is just a negative replacement for the "manufacturing belt." Although Cincinnati often escapes association with the rust belt, I have some old planning texts which show Cincy as part of the manufacturing belt.

 

So I think it's perfectly fair to lump Cincinnati with the rust belt. If you want to look on the bright side, I guess this just shows that some rust belt cities are still kind of growing.

 

My College Geography book showed the manufacturing belt go down past Dayton, but not actually reach Cincinnati

^Chicago certainly escapes the label (it's loved by the media, not hated on), but it did get hit hard for a few years by deindustrialization (as opposed to multiple decades in Rust Belt cities). Indianapolis probably was more Rust Belt than Columbus. Keep in mind it has the government economy, but not the education economy. The whole state of Indiana may have been Rust Belt at one time save for the college towns.

 

I have no clue about Minneapolis or Kansas City. I think by the western edge of the Midwestern region, the label never stuck. It's biased more towards the eastern Midwest. Or more accurately today, it's all the Great Lakes cities except Chicago. It also should include parts of Ontario. The Great Lakes have seen way more than their fair share of economic collapse...

 

The label was never applied those places, nor to other places that never had dominant heavy industry, like Indianapolis.  Traditionally, it even included New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and most of southern New England, stretching west to Chicago and Milwaukee and north to the "Golden Horseshoe" region of Ontario.  Obviously, however, regional definitions are always somewhat nebulous.

 

In my opinion, the Rust Belt moniker is passé for most cities in the region.  Even Cleveland and Buffalo have made significant inroads into diversifying their economies.  In the Cleveland metro area, for example, manufacturing is no longer the largest employment sector, though it is still above the national average.  I'm less familiar with places like Toledo, Dayton, and Detroit.  If the economic mix and culture in those places is still similar to what it was in the 70s and 80s, but simply in smaller volumes, then maybe the label still fits.

Chicago is totally a part of the Rust Belt - The South Side is probably as rust belt as any part of a major city in the entire industrial complex. The Daleys have successfully made us think Wrigleyville and the Loop when we think of Chicago rather than the hulking factories of the South side. The Rust Belt moniker came about after the recessions of the 70s and early 80s as the big hulking factories rusted away. Other than Toledo and Dayton, I'd say that rusting in this recession seems to be concentrated in the smaller towns and cities of north central Ohio - stretching in belt from Canton on toward the Tri-State NW corner of Ohio.

Columbus does have (or had in some cases) some industrial areas throughout the old city. That includes parts of the south, west, and northeast sides and the downtrodden neighborhoods to prove it. We're also right between Cincinnati and Cleveland, so they probably just went with a general area vs. splitting it up into several distinct places.

This is an interesting article from 1995 about Cleveland.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/cleveland-days--joke-city-of-the-rust-belt-reborn-in-steel-and-glass-1577024.html

The Mill Creek valley is a quintessential Rustbelt landscape.  And I love it.

 

I personally don't have a problem with the term.  In fact I find it quite evocative and almost poetic in a melancholy sort of way.  It's a that low evening winter sun catching on the side of an old factory.  Or a bright morning and blue sky over a row of old wood houses and a corner store at the end of the block.

 

Or it could be the broken overcast of winter of some urban/industrial landscape. 

 

I guess this is really just an aesthetic appreciation vs the economic hardship that's behind these scenes. I aknowlege that , too. 

 

Yet do people willingly leave these places?  I think, or like to believe, that they don't.

 

 

^"What's the difference between Cleveland and the Titanic? Cleveland has a better orchestra."

 

classic.

 

LMAO!!! I have to tell that to my cousin. I think he still plays French Horn for the Cleve Orchestra.

Since when were Cincinnati and Columbus considered rust belt cities?

 

I don't think Columbus was ever really Rust Belt (it's just surrounded by the Rust Belt region). Cincinnati certainly used to be Rust Belt and the media labeled it as such, but most the economic damage has already been done (hence why it's doing better than other Midwestern cities in this current recession). But keep in mind the damage was pretty immense. The heritage of Rust Belt is there in various areas of demolitions and abandonment. Cincinnati is at the "Pittsburgh" stage (former Rust Belt that has moved onto other things), but with what seems to be more stable population. My guess is that the writers never bothered to see if Cincinnnati is still Rust Belt or not.

 

Basically, I'd say the Ohio cities that can be labeled Rust Belt today are Cleveland, Toledo, and Dayton (also nearly all of the small cities in the state such as Springfield, Lima, Mansfield, Canton, Middletown, Youngstown, Warren, Lorain, etc.). The cities teetering on Rust Belt are Cincinnati and Akron (they're getting out of it). The city that was never Rust Belt is Columbus. It's an education and government economy.

 

Thanks