See What I'm Sayin'?
From the Post: Challenge in OTR is changing vision of how it can work
By Dan Hurley
Post columnist
Over-the-Rhine is the most contested piece of real estate in the region. How can we understand the forces at work in 2007?
Modern Cincinnati, defined not by governmental boundaries but by functional interactions, is a region composed of 15 counties stretching into three states, all tied together by I-275, what the early literature referred to as the "circumferential highway." The dynamism in this metropolitan region is located on the edge, just inside, or just beyond, the beltway.
Over the past 35 years, the international airport on the southwest edge has turned Boone County into the economic magnet drawing businesses once scattered throughout the region to its industrial parks. As the airport expanded into a major hub operation for Delta and DHL in the 1980s, national and global corporations established their regional and national headquarters near the airport, along the beltway.
In Ohio, the northeast corridor has seen a similar, if not quite so dramatic, transformation. Beginning with the development of Blue Ash in the 1970s, and then extending northward into Warren County in the 1990s, businesses traded the status symbols of downtown skyscrapers for leafy suburban corporate campuses.
Centripetal forces dominate life in this "Edge City." Although taken as a whole, Greater Cincinnati is a slow- growth region, but a demographic explosion is occurring on the outer edges. Warren and Boone Counties each grew 23.6 percent in the last five years, while Hamilton County in the center lost 4.6 percent of its population. On the edge, fields planted in corn or soybeans three years ago now sprout $500,000+ subdivision houses and "lifestyle malls."
The underlying dynamics of life in this emerging metropolitan environment drive people apart and isolate them from each other. Since they first appeared in the 1870s and '80s, neighborhoods have organized around the principle that "I want to live with people like me." The division along race lines is obvious. Boone County is 94.5 percent white, and only 2.4 percent black and 2.5 percent Latino.
Warren County reflects the same pattern with 92.9 percent white, 3.2 percent black, 2.7 percent Asian and 1.5 percent Latino. Hamilton County, on the other hand, is 71.9 percent white, 24.8 percent black and 1.5 percent Latino.
But socio-economic patterns are almost as dramatic. In Warren County, the median household income in 2003 was $61,885, and only 5.1 percent of the residents lived below the poverty line. In Boone County, the figures are $57,609 median household income with 7.1 percent below the poverty line. In Hamilton County, on the other hand, the median household income is $43,994 with 11.5 percent below the poverty line.
Over-the-Rhine sits far from this vibrant edge near the center of the old city. The present and the future of OTR can only be understood if the metropolitan framework is kept in mind.
Too often the dilemma of OTR is posed totally in terms of its housing stock. On the one side are people who love the "architecturally wonderful" 19th century buildings and want to rescue, restore or renovate them before they completely deteriorate and have to be demolished. But recovering and modernizing these old buildings is expensive, and the low-income people living in the area, as well as their advocates, worry that increased property values will drive up rents and force them out of their homes. Developers counter that with fewer than 8,000 people living in the OTR (down from 45,000+), so many vacant buildings exist that displacement is not inevitable.
The problem with that formulation of the issue confronting OTR is that it ignores the dynamics of the larger forces at work. After 150 years of developing a metropolitan region, which assumes that people should live in neighborhoods that are physically separated from retail, commercial and industrial functions, and in which all the residents come from a narrow cross-section of society, we have lost our skills for living in mixed-use areas.
Even a cursory examination of any OTR street reveals what makes it different than Florence or Fairfield, and it goes far beyond architectural styles. In any OTR streetscape developed between 1840 and 1880, buildings with retail spaces on the first floor and residential flats above sit next to buildings intended to function as warehouses, livery stables and industrial workshops. In addition, 150 years ago, native-born and immigrants, Protestants and Catholics, whites and blacks lived next to each other.
This was not the "good old days." Tensions existed, and civil disturbances such as race riots, bank riots and religious riots plagued 19th century Cincinnati and all American cities much more than they do today.
What is ultimately attractive about old inner-city neighborhoods like OTR goes far beyond the architecture of the buildings. It is the implied promise of an anti-suburban lifestyle. For that to happen in a "revitalizing" OTR, an environment will have to be created in which middle-class people will move in and not insist on driving out low-income residents.
Success will not be measured simply in terms of the number of rehabbed buildings, but will require that everyone recognize that the vision demands creating a residential place that reflects a set of social principles and interactions that has not existed for 150 years. New social skills and values will have to be consciously embraced by everyone - the middle-class newcomers, developers, low-income people and the advocates for the poor.
Dan Hurley is the assistant vice president for history and research at the Cincinnati Museum Center. He is also the staff historian for Channel 12 News and the executive producer of Local 12 Newsmakers. Reach him at dhurley@cincymuseum.org.