How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood | Hacker News Reader

How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood

politico.com

53 pointsrockdiesel46 comments

I grew up in Cincinnati and grew up with current staff members of both 3CDC and other active development groups in OtR. They have had good goals, overall, with active talk about in-fill development that at least gives lip service to gentrification concerns. However, they have also had decidedly non-diverse staffs, have held lots of non-public meetings even when the public was clamoring for meetings, and arguably just pushed poverty out of parts of OtR into other areas of the city.

Here's some articles that have a different perspective:

http://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/citywiseblog/3cdc-in-over-...

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/letters/2015/03/18/l...

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24138-econocide-over-the-...

The Brandery is a pretty big incubator, I bet there are some HN readers that have been through it or work there. Looking forward to hearing their perspectives. As far as the perspectives of the people that have lived in OtR through the 90s and 2000s, don't think you'll get many of them. I lived/played in OtR in 2001-2003 and grew up running around there in the 90s going to house shows, art openings (from the very first wave of incidental gentrifiers, one might say), boozey dive bars, the local goth club, etc.

I grew up in Cincinnati until my late 20s and before Over the Rhine was gentrified.

My experience in OTR was volunteering every weekend at Washington Park. I would talk to the folks who frequented the park; many homeless. They had stories and weren't much different from myself. Except I had a bigger safety net, wasn't as unlucky and made different bad decisions.

I remember how attendees of City Hall would walk past the homeless on their walk into the opera. It was sad. That's where I remember it all starting though. The "no loitering" laws and "no sleeping in the park" laws.

OTR is better for middle class and above people. But those people who used to be in OTR didn't disappear. They're somewhere and I hope they found another place to hang out.

Spike Lee's response to someone on the Gentrification in NYC is a great listen.

https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on-gent...

Somewhat reminiscent of Robocop where OCP privatizes Detroit to turn it around.

http://robocop.wikia.com/wiki/Omni_Consumer_Products

Went through the Brandery, lived in OTR for a year and a half. Ended up falling in love with that neighborhood. Truly a special place. The tech community there far exceeds expectations for a city it's size as well.

"In the process, it has earned the ire of longtime residents and homeless advocates, who say their desires, suggestions and dreams for the neighborhood—until recently 80 percent African-American—are seldom consulted and rarely implemented."

Yup. "Urban renewal means Negro removal", as James Baldwin once said.

Silicon Valley did this in Whiskey Gulch, the small piece of East Palo Alto that's west of 101. East Palo Alto was Silicon Valley's one black city. In the 1980s, Whiskey Gulch was mostly liquor stores and bars, hence the name. When I lived a few blocks away in Menlo Park, I'd hear automatic weapons fire from there most weekends. (This was the era of the MAC-11 machine pistol, "the gun that made the 80's roar".) It's the only place I've ever seen a fully armored fried chicken outlet; you got your chicken through a turntable in the armor glass.

That problem was solved in 1997 by leveling the entire area and building a Four Seasons hotel and an office building full of lawyers.[1] Amazon AWS recently moved in there. No more black people, and no more gunfire.

[1] http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/cover/1997_Mar_5...

it isn't just removing blacks, its removing anyone not wealthy enough to afford to stay. row housing in Chicago went this way as older units got bought up, modernized and it felt like it went one block after another. Taxes went up and if you didn't sell for the good sums offered those taxes usually ate into your limited income. The gated community mentality started in cities and while it went out into the wild it never really left.

to not take action eventually results in situations like what they fixed here. decades of indifference on the part of the politicians of the city including those representing the district is what put the residents into these positions. Take it this way, the city government and perhaps even the state all had ample opportunity to fix the situation and failed. The bureaucracy of the city likely doomed all effort and far too often activist simply cause an existing situation to persist.

the take away is, people should be demanding city governments do something before areas become so bad that draconian measures are all that is left.

Just playing devils advocate here: do you think the solution would have been different if it had been white people shooting each other?

Nope, Shivetya hit the nail on the head. It's more about economic and political capital. Lacking areas are more violent.

For context - Whiskey Gulch was just a small piece of East Palo Alto. East Palo Alto's black population has been displaced, but more so by Latino immigrants than the Four Seasons.

I'm from Cincinnati and have lived here my entire life.

Much of the area formerly referred to as OTR remains unsafe after dark. In addition to the gentrification, they've also successfully rebranded "OTR" to just be considered to be the 2 streets (Race and Vine between Central and Liberty if you're looking at a map) that are revamped.

The remainder of what used to be called OTR is still derelict buildings, soup kitchens, and other obvious signs of a blighted area.

I thought that the gentrification happened in the mid-90s. What happened? Not enough new residents? Things set back by riots?

It did start in the mid-90s with people buying and renovating townhomes on Milton and Liberty Hill. I'm sure the riots slowed it down, but the article does inaccurately assert the speed of the change as well as where it came from. A lot of the residential turn-around wasn't corporate sponsored.

In the mid-90s it was a place for upper middle class kids to go party. The riots wiped that out.

In the late-00s it became a place for upper middle class kids to live. Largely do to the efforts of 3CDC. Lot of money being spent to renovate those older buildings.

I am from and live in Cincinnati. As some others have stated, this article greatly overstates the changes that's occurred in OTR. Yes, parts of Vine and Race street have been cleaned up a great deal, but go just a street over, or even a little further on said streets and you are right back in an area that is anything but the "good" part of town.

It's not at all uncommon to go into these areas and see sights such as drug deals and prostitution occurring right out in the open. When I worked for Kroger (which, granted, has been several years now), they used to have to keep a police presence at the Vine street store because it was so common to have problems there. Sadly, much of OTR is still what I would consider urban plight.

A street over would be Walnut or Main streets, which now have a packed barcade, and a pretty solid empanada place, etc. The change even in the last two years is extremely positive, and I would have to disagree that the article greatly overstates it.

That said, past Liberty or Main certainly has some unsavory characters, but for the most part they're only dangerous to each other. I lived in that area recently and go back frequently. I never felt unsafe in the area that's experienced significant development, even late at night.

I think a lot of people who formed their opinion of OTR back in the race riots would do well to revisit and go in with an open mind. It's quite a wonderful place now

Grew up in the west end and went to elementary school there before the school moved to some countryside and still lived there until highschool before parents split… it was bad, but when I was younger it never seemed that bad as people make it out to be.

I rather gunshots, prostitution, having to stay in after hours sometimes or not being able to go home a couple of nights because some guy is barricaded in some abandon house across the street and the swat team is there than metadata drone strikes… some people don't get a choice where they live, or die… and in twenty years or so when this area becomes a slum, at least the buildings will be newer, up to code or w/e trendy bullshit people are selling these days :P

If you are in the area, there's a tour you can take that gets you into some of the unrestored buildings and the underground spaces beneath them. In particular, the breweries in the area used to lager their beer in manmade caverns that they cooled with water from the river when it was cold enough.

In the context of the article I make the recommendation with some reservations. You can spin it as poverty voyeurism or gentrification if that's your thing, but it also offers a glimpse into how things were when the area was a vibrant community. It also offers a peek into historical infrastructure (well, insofar as you can consider the aging and moving of beer infrastructure) when it was still more economic to chill beer with cold river water than electricity.

Not affiliated, but I did take the tour a couple years ago.

http://www.americanlegacytours.com/queen-city-underground/

Never knew Over the Rhine used to be the nation's most dangerous neighborhood. I'm on a consulting assignment here in Cinci and I go there all the time for trendy food and bars. Yes it does have pockets where I'm a bit scared to walk at night, but not enough so that I don't.

If you were here even as recently as 2010, you'd have been scared to drive in OTR in broad daylight. This isn't an exaggeration at all. Attempted car jackings were pretty common.

That's an exaggeration. These "most dangerous" designations are pretty meaningless, anyway. Neighborhoods can be dangerous for many reasons, in many different ways, and for different people, at different times of day, dependent on context.

All but the most careful comparisons are suspect.

You can say the same thing about almost any other kind of comparison that's not strictly numeric. Fact of the matter is, people make comparisons and they're valid for many reasons.

You can say the same thing about almost any other kind of comparison that's not strictly numeric.

That's an argument against making similar comparisons in other domains, too; you're supporting my claim, not contradicting it. People absolutely do make these comparisons, but I wouldn't point to what people happen to do as evidence that any random one of those things makes any sense.

I get it; we like these comparisons. They're fun. They're also -- at best -- misleading.

A acquaintance of mine lived there 10 years ago because he and his roommates could rent a whole floor of an old factory for $1000 a month. Thousands and thousands of square feet. He was robbed at gunpoint on his front porch 4 times in a year. (Best parties I've ever been to though.)

Reminds me of the Simpsons episode in which Bart and Millhouse bought an abandoned factory. I think they turned it into a skate park.

The OTR of today is much different than the one of even just a few years ago.

This part confuses me:

" From 2010 to 2014 it went from about 60 percent black to two-thirds white, while the still-undeveloped section north of Liberty Street has remained over 80 percent African-American."

Is the neighborhood becoming more white because white people are moving there? Or because black people are leaving? It sounds like the population dropped dramatically with the crime.

If it's because there were 4000 blacks and 1000 whites and now there are 4000 blacks and 4000 whites, that doesn't sound like a problem to me.

The census and 5 years estimates shows the picture very differently. 9,572 was the total population in 1990. The 2014 estimates are 4,568. The black population living in the neighborhood declined 65%, white population declined 33%.

3CDC and Cincinnati are creating a vibrant neighborhood for affluent whites. Just recently has the population started to increase for the white population. As the whole the neighborhood is declining in population and becoming much more affluent and much less dense.

Graph with population numbers. http://infogr.am/o65l3dVQjEXPYKWO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway

Short answer, by pricing out the poor people.

This is really disingenuous. The poor people left long before the transformation started because there was no where for them to live. The housing collapsed pushed most of the land lords out of business and the buildings were left vacant. The article itself says the population of the neighborhood fell to under 5,000, in a city of 300,000.

Most of the buildings in the neighborhood were empty and collapsing. Renovating the dilapidated building and infrastructure and bringing in new tenants is what seems to have had the biggest impact.

The 2001 riots destroyed the neighborhood and most people left. Then 3CDC bought the majority of the buildings.

I grew up in Cincinnati and was in OTR during the riots, albeit in a third floor secure apartment. It wasn't nearly as bad as the press coverage made it out to be... mostly a bunch of stupid kids trying to smash and grab. But the bad press definitely ruined OTR's economic prospects for a decade.

And execute the do-gooder liberal activists. EDIT: I am being literal. Read the article.

Ha. Never has executing liberal activists been part of the gentrification there.

Is this the basis of your statement?

> Wilbur Worthen, a mentally-ill 56-year-old whom Gray had befriended, burst into his office at the Drop Inn Center and shot him to death with a .357 magnum.

The Drop Inn Center is a homeless shelter. Buddy Gray was shot by a person he had previously helped at the shelter.

> Is this the basis of your statement?

No, the basis of my statement is the lengthy sections of the article describing Gray's political power and obstructionism which was causing the district to decay and how his death lead to a vacuum in which the gentrification could happen. Describing it as execution was just gallows humor. They could also be bought off with grants.

Has anyone ever proposed a large 1 time lump sum payment to long term renters driven out of gentrified neighborhoods to be payed for by part of the increase in property taxes?

Here's a TL;DR

> "the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp.—better known as 3CDC—has invested or leveraged more than half a billion dollars into Over-the-Rhine, buying and rescuing 131 historic buildings and building 48 new ones, while maintaining subsidized housing, rehabilitating parks and driving out criminals with cameras, better lighting, liquor store closings and the development of vacant lots"

Here's a TL;DR for your TL;DR.

Real estate development corp invests $500 million into gentrifying an area.

You know how far gone social justice is as an ideology when "gentrification" has become a bad word.

Gentrification means more safe high quality neighbourhoods for people to live in. The local effect might be to price some low income people out of their community but the systemic effect is to increase the supply and therefore reduce the cost of better quality housing.

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