66 minute read
TALENT
TALENT
LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION
Film Cincinnati creates jobs and connections for the region’s creative community. –LEYLA SHOKOOHE F
ilm Cincinnati is positioned to have its busiest year yet in 2021, despite the movie and television industry’s shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. While sets were dormant from Los Angeles to Atlanta to Toronto, project development was alive and well. “Content is king right now, and Hollywood is putting more into physical production than ever before,” says Kristen Schlotman, executive director of Film Cincinnati. “We already had the infrastructure in place here prior to the pandemic. We were just getting our groove as far as having production on a regular basis, but also more than one production at a time.”
Scholtman’s nonprofit organization, founded in 1987, has film production work scheduled through spring 2022, with four movies in concurrent production this summer—the most this region has ever hosted at one time. The Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit was established in 2009 to offer production companies a 30 percent tax break for filming in the state, leading to a movie boom here that’s included high-profile films such as The Ides of March, Carol, and Dark Waters.
Schlotman, however, says Film Cincinnati is interested in something beyond the accolades. “We get a lot of headlines based on the stars attached to movies coming to town,” she says. “But what we care about are the jobs these movies create. It’s the artists, the technicians, the accountants, the business leaders—those are the people we care about working in this realm of production.”
The average movie production hires between 100 and 200 people behind the scenes, in addition to those in front of the camera. Film Cincinnati offers a deep roster of local professionals to staff sets, from animal wranglers to aerial pilots. “This is an entire engine,” says Schlotman. “When a movie comes to town, they set up a production office. They lease space for four to six months. They lease parking and warehouse space where they’re building sets. Those are real dollars that impact our community.”
Film Cincinnati and the Greater Cleveland Film Commission recently appointed Olsberg SPI, a creative consultancy based in London, to evaluate the Motion Picture Tax Credit’s impact on the state. The study found the gross economic impact from 2009 to 2019 to be $1.1 billion, with a $573 million direct spend in Ohio, 6,192 full-time equivalent jobs created, and a $3.09 return on every dollar from the state’s tax credit.
The next goal? Uncapping the tax credit, which at 30 percent offers a maximum of $40 million statewide in tax credits per year. Schlotman points to states like Georgia, with uncapped tax incentives, where Netflix has planted deep roots.
“We’ve been in the top 10 cities worldwide for film production,” she says. “There’s no reason Cincinnati can’t be in the top three markets. But in order to do so, we have to increase the tax credit to anchor those films here and to have sustainability, and then once the secret’s out this could be a huge hub for production.”
DEEP DIVE
OWNER-OCCUPIED AND RENTAL HOUSING GROWTH WILL DRIVE REGIONAL GROWTH.
28
Visions of a Future City
36
Homing in on Solutions
42
Our Global Tech Profile
48
3CDC Is a Win/Win
Opportunity Is Knocking for Our Future City
What kind of Cincinnati do you want to live in? It’s a question about hope, about vision, about imagination, and about the future. Business leaders, entrepreneurs, young professionals, and others across the region began debating the question several years ago, and as we emerge from the pandemic crisis they’ve started the conversation again, asking What’s your vision for our Future City?
The Future City concept is meant to encourage regional business leaders— and everyone here—to think and act beyond the pressing needs of the moment, the month, or the quarter, and to devote time, energy, and brain power to something that’s abstract at the moment but will surely appear soon enough: the future. For a pop culture reference, it might best be summed by that Fleetwood Mac song: Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow/ Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here.
The concept went public in 2018 at the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber’s annual dinner with a video featuring people from business, academia, sports, and other professional walks answering the question, “What is your vision for our Future City?” It was a personal approach to a big idea.
For artist Gee Horton, his Future City is a place where one can find real community, a nexus of people who support each other as they work to realize their potential. “It’s a city you can get your arms around and get plugged into quickly,” he says. “For me, personally, the best way to do that is to find your tribe.”
For Melis Aydogan, the daughter of Turkish immigrants who grew up in
AS THE SAYING GOES, THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO CREATE IT YOURSELF.
BY DAVID HOLTHAUS ILLUSTRATION BY SAM FALCONER
the Cincinnati suburbs and works in brand management at Procter & Gamble, her Future City engages businesses and universities to actively encourage international employees and students to come here and stay. She contributes to the cause by hosting Rüya Coffee at pop-up spaces and events in Cincinnati, creating a place where people of different ethnicities can get to know each other better. “We do it cup by cup, conversation by conversation,” she says.
For CincyTech CEO Mike Venerable, his Future City is “the place my grandkids want to come to when they graduate from college to get really great jobs.” His two grandchildren, ages 8 and 4, currently live out of town; wouldn’t it be wonderful, he thinks, if they decide later to live in Cincinnati because they have opportunities to pursue, be it college, grad school, internships, or satisfying jobs. “What brings people to a community first is opportunity,” he says.
Chamber leaders hope Future City will become a movement, a guiding principle for all of us, a challenge, and a call to action. It could serve as a lens through which to view decision making, policy making, investment, and everyday actions.
What it isn’t is a Chamber program, which CEO Jill Meyer makes clear. She won’t be convening a Future City summit, with subcommittees formed to divide up work, assign deliverables, and issue a weighty report. At least not now. “What it isn’t is a Chamber initiative where we’re asking people to come together and build something physical and concrete,” she says. The Future City movement will not be a project driven from the top down. It needs groundup buy-in and commitment from stakeholders in business, government, and other sectors to make it happen. “It works only if the
Chamber doesn’t own it,” says
Meyer. “Nobody can own it. The beauty of it is that everyone has to own it.”
INSPIRED TO THINK BIGGER
THE FUTURE CITY concept germinated with a Chamber-sponsored three-day trip to Toronto in 2018. For several years, the Chamber has gathered an annual delegation of business and government leaders to travel to other cities to collect and share ideas and best practices through its Leadership Exchange program. Boston, Nashville, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Charlotte have been on the destination list over time.
The Toronto excursion was the Chamber’s first outside the U.S., and it came about 15 years after that city’s economy took a hit from the SARS outbreak of 2003. SARS seems mild in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the disease did kill nearly 800 people around the world, including 44 in and around Toronto. Perhaps unfairly, the city became linked with that contagion, and its tourism and hospitality industries suffered after a number of large conventions pulled out.
Toronto leaders, however, mobilized and developed a plan for the future. “They laid the groundwork and started working toward the Toronto we know today,” Meyer says.
One of the outcomes was the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works with leaders from business, government, academia, neighborhoods, and elsewhere to build a better city and region. It’s engaged thousands of people to work on civic projects, including post-SARS tourism recovery, jobs for underprivileged youth, talent attraction, and strong neighborhoods. “They are now a Mecca, a fast-growing city attracting companies and talent,” Meyer says, adding that the growth has largely been attributed to international migration. “It’s a place where all cultures and all people can succeed. They created a modern, global city because they decided they were going to do it. They got intentional about it.”
Closer to home, another Future City inspiration was the BLINK art, light, and culture happening that first took place in October 2017 and then again in 2019. BLINK was philosophically guided by a mission statement of sorts, a manifesto that envisioned a future city of light, opportunity, and hope. “The people of the Future City are united and enlightened,” it reads in part. “In the BLINK of an eye their hearts and minds glow with
the radiance of transcendent knowing. Knowing the light of a thousand tomorrows of opportunity and hope. Knowing the light that shines from their hearts is all that was ever needed to stay the darkness of ignorance and poverty.”
The first BLINK event drew about a million people into downtown and Over-the-Rhine over a long weekend and put Cincinnati on the map with just a handful of cities that had pulled off similar events, including Berlin, London, and Sydney. In its afterglow, leaders at the Chamber, which had helped produce the event, talked about what it could mean for Cincinnati. The feeling was that “everything we do should be filtered through the Future City lens,” Meyer says. “If it’s not building that Future City that we’re feeling right now, we shouldn’t be doing it. And if there’s something that the Future City requires, then we should figure out how to do it.”
The Chamber produced a video for its 2018 annual dinner featuring a dozen or so people from business, academia, government, and sports briefly sharing what their Future City would be like. The very next day, says Meyer, she began receiving emails and calls about the Future City theme and about how people could get involved. A pilot program was launched to seek out community leaders to join with friends, family, and co-workers to envision their Future City and share their thoughts via an online portal that could be used to craft a vision and create action steps. But “something about it never felt right,” Meyer says.
The idea laid fallow for a while, and then the pandemic emerged. The present crisis became all-consuming. There was no time to think about the future.
During the past year’s forced isolation, it became clear that the Future City concept needed to bubble up again to help organizations and individuals view themselves and their work. “As more and more organizations start to look at their work as
COOPERATION
Business, government, academia, and neighborhood leaders work together to build a better Toronto.
core components of building out a city that’s booming, where everyone has opportunity, I would hope that we come together and create a common vision,” Meyer says. “To get it going, people need to feel in their heart that the work they’re doing is building something impactful for the future.”
“WHEN I THINK ABOUT OUR FUTURE CITY, I WANT TO MAKE SURE ALL VOICES ARE REPRESENTED, HEARD, AND HAVE OPPORTUNITY,” SAYS WHITNEY GASKINS, ASSISTANT DEAN OF UC’S ENGINEERING SCHOOL.
BUILDING ON NEW CREATIVE ENERGY
SEVERAL KEY ELEments will require attention, maintenance, and expansion as the Cincinnati region moves inexorably into the future. We’ll need good, affordable housing (see more about this topic on page 36). We’ll need a robust transportation system on the ground and in the air. We’ll need an environment that’s green, healthy, and sustainable. And we’ll need to attract and keep smart talent in order to create a viable future for the region’s employers.
Job opportunities will start with educational opportunities, from preschools up through universities. Venerable also points out that non-college education opportunities must be abundant in order to match skills with jobs. His main role at CincyTech is to find smart people with product or service ideas that can be nurtured, accelerated, and grown with the help of the organization’s expertise. Derrick Braziel has helped cultivate opportunities at MOR-
TAR, the OTR-based academy and hub for entrepreneurs of color he co-founded in 2014. He took his own advice and started a street food concept last year specializing in tacos al pastor. Cincinnati has creative energy now, Braziel says, resulting from a lively startup ecosystem and a rich and varied mix of arts and culture. We need to keep that momentum going, he says.
“We have an opportunity now to continue uplifting those voices, those entrepreneurs, highlighting their stories, and using that as a tool for people to come to Cincinnati and create something special for themselves and others.”
“Opportunity” can become the region’s identity that transcends city, county, and state lines. It’s a recruiting pitch that Molly North, CEO and president of Al. Neyer, has seen happen in Pittsburgh and Nashville, where her company also has offices; both created identities that are easily recognizable by people who live elsewhere.
“Nashville is Music City,” she says. “They are Music City. They’ve written that and written it all the way.” Pittsburgh touts itself as Steel City and promotes its vaunted NFL Steelers, winners of six Super Bowls, and rabid fan base. “Whether we like their sports or not, they’re a sports city.”
Our neighbors upriver have more than sports and a steel legacy to hang their hat on, says North. “Many years ago, Pittsburgh got around technology,” she says. Capitalizing on the brain power of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, the city was able to transform itself from a Rust Belt relic to a tech hub. “They’ve become a real hotspot for advanced manufacturing and technology.”
Cincinnati has many strengths, one of which is that we have many strengths. But that can also be a weakness when it comes to crafting an identity people can connect with. “We really haven’t found something that we can all latch onto,” says North, immediate past chair of the Chamber’s board. “That’s really what the essence of the Future City initiative is—defining what makes Cincinnati a great city in a concise way that all Cincinnatians can embrace and be proud of.”
“All Cincinnatians” is the key element for Whitney Gaskins, assistant dean at UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. She’s working to bring more women and people of color into the science and engineering workforce. “When I think about our Future City, I want to make sure all voices are represented, heard, and have opportunity,” she says. “We can’t talk about the future if we aren’t providing opportunities for everyone to thrive.”
For business leaders, that may mean examining workplace policies—even down to dress codes and expectations—to make sure they make sense for everyone, says Gaskins. It could also include reassessing pay scales and finding new ways to give back to the community. “It seems like
this is a lot of work and a heavy lift, and it probably is,” she says. “But it’s also doable. You just have to get comfortable doing the uncomfortable.”
WHY THE CONVERSATION MATTERS
THERE’S ALSO AN INtangible aspect to what makes Cincinnati a great city, says Gee Horton, who experienced it first-hand. He was welcomed and supported through career moves, he says, and he hopes Cincinnati is a place where other people new to the region feel like they belong, can make a difference, and can be engaged, successful, and connected with their neighbors.
After graduating from Thomas More College in 2006 and departing, he returned to Cincinnati in 2013 to coach basketball at Xavier University. He entered the corporate world a few years later at a talent recruitment firm, and today he’s evolved again as a working artist. Through these career transitions, he was supported by a network of friends, family, peers, and mentors.
“That’s the secret sauce when you think about attracting talent,” Horton says. “How can we assure that folks get plugged in quickly with the right people? We have to have that ability to create space for new folks.”
That’s a future he’s working in the present to create as a muralist and the current artist-in-residence at the Mercantile Library. Horton helped recruit artists for the Black Lives Matter street painting in front of City Hall last year, and his first original large-scale public mural was recently unveiled as part of 3CDC’s Court Street rebuild downtown.
Braziel hopes that business leaders across the region will continue to look for ways to engage nascent, nontraditional entrepreneurs and artists like Horton. “Find space and opportunities for them to grow and be part of
COFFEE TALKS
Melis Aydogan, who works at Procter & Gamble, promotes inclusion through her Rüya Coffee popup project.
TAKEAWAYS
THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW Future City is an effort to get everyone across the region to devote time, energy, and brain power to something that’s abstract at the moment but will surely appear soon enough: Cincinnati’s future.
BE INTENTIONAL Regional leaders are studying how growing cities like Nashville and Toronto have galvanized local support through unified goal-setting and messaging.
PLUGGING INTO OPPORTUNITIES Cincinnati artist and entrpreneur Gee Horton says our “secret sauce” when attracting talent can be the region’s openness to new people and ideas. “How can we assure that folks get plugged in quickly with the right people?” what’s happening here,” he says. “I’d encourage folks to recognize a sense of urgency. If we want Cincinnati to be the place we want it to be, we have to take risks, we have to be bold, and we have to pass opportunities to folks who might not be from here.”
Aydogan is doing her small part to promote inclusion through Rüya Coffee, which features Turkish coffee recipes from her parents’ homeland. “Finding those key points of culture that people recognize from their home countries and allowing them to feel welcomed would bring so much more flavor to the city,” she says. “How do we work with large organizations that are bringing in people from all over and intentionally create programs so people are more willing to stay in Cincinnati versus just thinking of this as a transitional part of their lives?”
Why does this Future City conversation matter? Because Cincinnati is racing into the future against every other city in the country, says Leigh Fox, CEO of Cincinnati Bell. “We’re competing for the next great asset, which is talent,” says Fox, whose company employs about 4,500 people. “As a city, we need to be concerned about that competition.”
Smart, young people increasingly have choices in where they can live and work, he says. Some may make a choice based on the prevailing weather climate—not a great indicator for Cincinnati, unfortunately—but many will choose based on a region’s vibe, its people, its businesses, its amenities, and its spirit. “We have beautiful assets we need to accentuate and really sell to the outside,” says Fox, who is the current Chamber board chair. It means adjusting our vision for the long-term, too. “We’re not talking about two years from now or five years from now, but what it looks like 30 years from now.” Failing to anticipate and prepare for the future can spell disaster for a business, or for anyone. But it happens so often that it has a name: the boiled frog syndrome. “You can be a successful business and, unless you’re constantly striving forward and looking how to improve, all of a sudden the future will sneak up on you one day and you’re going to wonder what hap-
pened,” Fox says. “It has nothing to do with what you did that day or that year or that week. It’s the fact that years ago you weren’t focused on improving and doing the right thing.”
The same concept applies to cities. “We should be incredibly proud of who we are and what we have,” Fox says. “But I’m passionate about it because I want to keep it that way. This Future City conversation is the work that ensures we do.”
Homing In on Solutions
REGIONAL LEADERS BEGIN TO COALESCE AROUND A HOUSING AGENDA THAT FOCUSES ON ALL INCOME LEVELS.
BY GAIL PAUL
In April 2020, as the pandemic spread across the U.S. and millions of Americans filed for unemployment, many assumed the housing market would plummet. It did drop, temporarily, but quickly roared back. The Cincinnati region would have a record-setting year for home sales, and the trend has sustained in 2021.
As in most areas across the nation, there is a housing market disconnect here, with demand outpacing supply and housing affordability a more-pronounced challenge. This is true for both owner-occupied and rental housing. COVID-19 has helped unmask the inescapable reality that the Cincinnati region’s housing inventory is too low (52 percent below a year ago) and impediments to delivering new housing supply at scale are formidable.
Community development and planning leaders across the region are sharing data about these complex housing challenges and starting a long, collective journey to devise solutions. They agree that local zoning policies and neighborhood opposition to density often work against new housing. Especially in Hamilton County, topography and an older built environment make land assembly and redevelopment costly.
Additionally, skilled construction labor is in short supply and the cost of housing materials has risen dramatically. Lumber, for example, jumped from its typical $200-$400 for 1,000 board feet to over $1,350 in May, before falling again. Several of the region’s largest homebuilders have even temporarily pressed “pause” on sales as they fulfill existing contracts and ramp up new production.
Households that are cost burdened—or pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing—loom as a bigger issue than ever before. Rent and mortgage payment costs continue to escalate faster than wages, forcing families to spend less on non-housing essentials. Housing insecurity was a growing challenge before COVID-19 but worsened for low-income renters, who often work in service occupations where pandemic-related job losses have been concentrated.
Cincinnati hasn’t done as well as some peer cities that are experiencing stronger housing and population growth. Annualized housing unit growth from 2010-2019 was 0.3 percent in Cincinnati, compared to 0.7 percent in Indianapolis and Columbus.
The deeper challenge—and the one that’s probably most difficult to tackle—is that housing represents a matrix of social and economic issues, intersecting with economic growth and regional prosperity, racial equity, workforce and talent attraction, neighborhood vibrancy, family stability, and access to employment and health care.
The pandemic and a controversial affordable housing ballot initiative this spring in Cincinnati helped elevate public dialogue about housing production and affordability challenges, but they’ve also broadly exposed a healthy ecosystem of advocates, developers, community finance specialists, government, nonprofit, and philanthropic partners committed to cracking the nut. Here’s the current situation on the ground as they home in on solutions.
THROUGH ITS CENTER for Research & Data, the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber has spent the better part of the pandemic gaining insight that will help define regional priorities to increase housing development. According to Mark Kylander, Regional Data and Policy Manager, the Chamber’s research teams became involved because of a desire to anchor the escalating conversation in sound regional housing and growth facts. “People are looking for details on what’s actually going on with housing,” he says. “We started digging in, part doing research of what’s happening in the space and part talking with partner organizations to figure out the landscape.”
Luke Blocher, senior counsel at Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, calls housing incredibly complicated but says what’s preventing the region from producing more can be “summarized fairly simply. It’s the gap between the costs of constructing or renovating new housing and the rents that can be charged in the market.”
The primary reason for a lack of new housing supply is that land development is risky, says Greg Fischer, Chairman of Fischer Homes. “Buying land is capital intensive, the zoning and entitlement process is costly, and there is no clear path to success,” he says. “You can have so much invested in the property and never get to build on it, because at any step you may encounter a risk or opposition that won’t allow you to move forward.”
Fischer Homes, a second-generation business headquartered in Erlanger, is the Cincinnati region’s larg-
MORE OF EVERYTHING
Laura Brunner, President and CEO of The Port, says the region needs more market- rate housing in addition to affordable units. est homebuilder and the 30th largest in the U.S. Fischer says the privately held company’s 2020 closings for all markets were 2,336, up 16 percent from 2019, while its 2020 Cincinnati region closings were 1,026, which represents single-family for-sale housing and a small number of multifamily/condo units. Total new construction closings across the Cincinnati region were 3,687.
“Homebuilders got killed during the last recession,” he says. “We were fortunate. We took our licks, but we were able to keep investing in locations, teams, and systems, unlike many of our competitors.” Building permits, however, are still half of what they were pre-recession. “And risks associated with land development continue to keep people out of the industry.”
As Executive Vice President for The Port, the region’s quasi-governmental community and economic development agency, Philip Denning leads a team in revitalization work that includes housing redevelopment and land banking. “More and more data indicates that supply is a huge driver of our affordability challenges in Cincinnati and Hamilton County,” Denning told The Port’s board in March, citing 2021 research indicating that market-rate housing makes nearby units more affordable across all ofrental housing. “It’s the opposite of what a lot of the narrative says, which is if we build new housing it’s going to adversely affect neighborhoods.”
The Port President and CEO Laura Brunner says that, for all of the talk of affordability, “there isn’t enough about the fact that we need more of everything.” The region needs to boost homeownership rates among all income levels and demographic groups. “We rank really low in home ownership, and even lower in African-American homeownership,” she says.
The Port typically builds 10 to 12
single-family homes per year and avails its public finance tools to developers responsible for producing hundreds more. As a new housing hybrid model, The Port is building six market-rate townhomes on vacant land it owns in Mt. Auburn. They’re expected to be priced in the $400,000s, and sales proceeds will help The Port develop future affordable townhomes, which will “look exactly the same as the market-rate,” Brunner says.
Fischer says the solution to expanding housing production will be through “a regional alignment that understands we’re better off with a variety of new housing meeting the entire community.”
THE CHAMBER’S Kylander says his housing research analyzed the region’s “inside-out growth,” looking for a correlation between growth of an urban center and the broader region. He found that the fastest growing regions nationally are the ones with healthy urban centers—not just downtowns but the older inner-ring suburbs as well. Columbus, Minneapolis, and Raleigh all exhibit strong growth in the county containing the principal city, he says.
Urban growth could be an area of strategic focus for Hamilton County, where annualized growth is tied for the smallest compared to the other 15 counties comprising the region. Hamilton County’s 10-year contribution to regional housing growth was only 11.6 percent, even though it contains more than a third of the region’s total population and 40 percent of its total housing units. 3CDC’s investment in Over-the-Rhine and downtown, for instance, has proven that targeted urban core redevelopment blending a range of affordable and market-rate housing can work. 3CDC Executive Vice President Adam Gelter recalls a bright September morning in 2019 when guests gathered at
Court and Walnut streets to witness the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new Kroger store, the first in the central business district since 1969. Kroger
Chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen was joined by Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley and a litany of project partners. As high-profile real estate events go, this one had everything, including hometown hero Marty Brennaman as emcee.
The spotlight was on the grocery retailer, but the project’s 139 apartments built above a parking structure were arguably more significant— they represented 3CDC’s shift from building condos to developing larger mixed-income residential projects. “We made a dramatic shift toward building housing in much larger numbers that’s much more diverse,” Gelter says. “We can do larger towers downtown by forming teams to accomplish a project like the Kroger store, parking, and housing above it.”
Gelter says the under-construction Willkommen project embodies 3CDC’s current thinking about urban housing diversity and density. The 20-building mix of new construction and top-to-bottom rehabs is geographically spread throughout Over-the-Rhine and will include both market-rate and affordable housing. Model Group is a development partner.
“Willkommen is emblematic of the boldness we can have,” Gelter says. “I’m not sure I want to do too many more scattered-site, $55-million projects. But the point is, with the determination to do it, it can be done. We used to talk about mixed-income housing, and people said you couldn’t do it. But it makes the most sense. Let’s just figure out how to do it.”
Model Group CEO Bobby Maly says Over-the-Rhine represents a good roadmap for a holistic planning approach to development where “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Whether it’s garages, parks, restaurants, retail, or affordable and high-end housing, those elements done in coordination is exponentially greater than any one on its own.”
Maly says his company, like most, started small with developing OTR properties until he could gauge what the consumer response would be. Now that demand for housing is through the roof, he says he doesn’t dabble any longer. “If we are going to do one phase, we are going to do five or six. We learned that from the Gateway Quarter, starting at 12th and Vine, when there was so much blight. Our story was, This is going to be not just 100 condo units here, there’s going to be 100 after that and another 100 after
that. Essentially, you have to go big to solve big problems.”
ON MAY 4, CINCINNATI voters defeated charter amendment Issue 3, but the premise of the legislation—that the city prioritize housing affordability and consistently fund its Affordable Housing Trust Fund—reverberates. Neither of the mayoral primary’s winning candidates, Aftab Pureval and David Mann, supported Issue 3, but both agree that housing affordability is a priority issue. In fact, the Chamber’s Center for Research & Data housing data shows 18.3 percent of the region’s homeowners are considered housing cost burdened, as well as 43.5 percent of the region’s renters. The question remains how much local governments are willing to invest in boosting housing opportunities. Blocher, a former Cincinnati Deputy City Solicitor now at Taft Law, says even market rate housing development projects in Cincinnati require public incentives, such as tax abatements. Affordable housing development requires incentives plus access to low-cost project capital plus significant grant dollar subsidy. “That’s what makes it so hard to do affordable housing,” he says. “You need this big subsidy, and there’s only so much to go around.” With the overall lack of housing production, there’s little available at the lower end of market rate. “That’s the fundamental dynamic that has to be changed.”
Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Greater Cincinnati partnered with the Greater Cincinnati Foundation and numerous community development partners in 2020 to launch Housing Our Future, a 10-year housing strategy playbook for Hamilton County. Among its recommendations is producing 2,000 affordable housing units a year for the next decade.
MORE UNITS
The apartment tower above downtown’s new Kroger store represents a push for more housing over incremental gains.
URBAN GROWTH
The scattered-site Willkommen housing project combines rehabs with new construction across Overthe-Rhine.
Executive Director Kristen Baker says LISC was brought to the Cincinnati region 20 years ago by the philanthropic community to act as “connective tissue” to bring together resources that neighborhoods need to address their challenges in a way that’s responsive to residents. After the recession, she says, an imperative was to bring people back into the city, increasing the tax base and helping revitalize economic activity and mitigate blight and vacancy.
“We have been successful in seeding that and starting to see that grow,” Baker says. “We now recognize that by not tending to our neighbors who are struggling to stay in their community or who are spending too much of their monthly income on their housing costs, we have to think differently about the community’s needs.”
That includes, she said, investing in housing development inclusively. “Everyone needs to be able to fully participate in the economy,” she says. “If we do that, all of us benefit.”
The Greater Cincinnati Foundation works to advance housing affordability and systemic change, says Robert Killins Jr., Director of Special Initiatives. Its Affordable Housing Impact Investment Pool helps bridge funding gaps at the start of a development project, when capital is difficult to come by. GCF has targeted $5 million for the loan pool, which he says “will easily leverage more than $100 million in investment.”
Killins serves on the steering committee for Housing Our Future, and GCF has partnered with LISC to support rental and eviction protection policies. Eviction filings “have their roots in low wages, single incomes, paying too much, and having no margin of error in terms of additional assets,” he says.
The City of Cincinnati announced in April that it intended to create an Affordable Housing Loan Pool to access $35 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and have the Cincinnati Development Fund manage the program. The longstanding community development financial institution helps banks pool funds and share risks as they invest in affordable housing, and it’s helped create thousands of units of market-rate and affordable housing and revitalize neighborhood business districts. “We’re eligible to apply for grant money from the federal government,” says President and CEO Jeanne Golliher. “That’s one way we can leverage important public investments the city makes into housing and neighborhood development.”
Golliher says two of her organization’s newest funds, established in 2020, are specifically focused on affordable housing: the Capital Magnet Fund, using a grant from the U.S. Treasury, and GCF’s Affordable Housing Impact Investment Pool.
Housing Our Future strategy recommends preserving housing affordability in units that already exist, in both subsidized housing but also in “naturally occurring” affordable properties. Denning and Baker express frustration over property speculation that further reduces housing availability. “When our work started in Evanston in 2013, there had not been private homeowner sales, but speculators were buying single-family homes and turning them into four-families with little upkeep,” says Denning,
who served as the City of Cincinnati’s Director of Community and Economic Development before joining The Port. “These became cash cows, and you have families paying enough in rent to actually own a home, but there’s no alternative in the market.”
LISC’s Baker concurs. “That is what we see a lot of in neighborhoods,” she says. “Houses might sit vacant, but the owner/investor is waiting for the perfect moment as the market starts to turn. They hedge their bets.”
In late 2020, The Port sold 25 vacant, non-contiguous, land-banked lots in Evanston to a private, Black-owned real estate development company, Civitas Development Group, to activate the properties back into local productivity. CEO Darin Hall says Civitas Development will build single-family homes that are priced accessibly, which aligns with the community’s objectives to support growth that does not displace current residents. “New residents coming in to the neighborhood also support the viability of locally owned and Blackowned businesses that are trying to recover from the pandemic,” Hall says.
Maly says preserving housing that’s already affordable is important. “After the market has completely taken off, it’s harder than if it was a part of preserving some affordable housing in the beginning.” Model Group acquired and is redeveloping the Alexandra Apartments in Walnut Hills, preserving it as affordable senior housing. After the property went into foreclosure, Maly says, “there was a huge risk of it either being converted to market-rate or a poor operator coming into and running it, neither of which would have been good.”
BAKER SAYS THAT AMERican Rescue Plan Act funds represent an unprecedented opportunity for political leaders to invest in
CAN’T AFFORD NOT TO
Model Group CEO Bobby Maly says one piece of the housing puzzle is preserving existing affordable housing. the local economy and quality of life by stabilizing housing. Solving housing production and affordability a long game, she says, but the region should not lose sight of its social impact.
“We commodify housing so much we forget there are people who live here,” says Baker. “They might not have the same access to the grocery store or to employment centers that happen in places that have been more stable, but that doesn’t mean we get to throw these neighborhoods away or that we get to go in and decide that they need to be different. We have to do that together with the people who live there.”
Kylander says the intent of the Chamber’s housing data initiative is to give the issue a fresh perspective. “The conversation has been so fragmented regionally and there are a lot of people talking about it, but about it in their own way,” he says. “We are looking at this from a regional perspective. We’re also looking at other regions doing this kind of thing to figure out what we can be doing here and then parse it down to what local communities can be doing to build into the regional model.” 3CDC’s Gelter says the Cincinnati region has the capacity to ramp up housing production. “We have all the resources we need to put the effort behind a comprehensive strategy to address housing at all levels,” he says. “It’s just making it a priority.”
“Remnants of the foreclosure crisis remind us that we must rebuild equitably,” says Civitas Development’s Hall. “That’s possible when partnerships between governments and public intermediaries, neighborhoods, and private sector developers unite to build a wide range of housing options that fit the needs of many.”
According to Greg Fischer, “The region needs to awaken to the problem, and we need to solve it regionally.”
TAKEAWAYS
LACK OF HOUSING HURTS GROWTH Regional leaders agree: Our lack of new market-rate and affordable housing is impeding overall economic growth. They’re working to devise a comprehensive solution.
THE CORE COUNTS Fast-growing regions like Columbus, Minneapolis, and Raleigh have healthy downtowns and first-ring urban neighborhoods, research indicates, so developers are pursuing higher-density projects in Over-the-Rhine, Mt. Auburn, Evanston, and downtown.
KEEP INVESTING Although Cincinnati voters rejected an affordable housing ballot initiative in May, the city is working with Greater Cincinnati Foundation, Cincinnati Development Fund, and others to invest millions of dollars in new affordable housing.
Enhancing Our Global Tech Profile
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TAKES MANY SHAPES IN THE CINCINNATI REGION, FROM ONLINE SHOPPING TO GARDENING APPLICATIONS TO APPRENTICESHIPS.
BY AMY BROWNLEE
Nothing changes faster than the tech industry. Companies are constantly on the move, developing or adopting new and more efficient practices; those that don’t evolve often don’t survive. But because there are so many ways that tech can inform business practices, products, and services, it can be hard for consumers to track a company’s placement in the tech landscape.
Here are three local organizations that excel in the tech industry, whether through communications, commerce, or information technology. Each has used tech in different and creative ways to enhance its offerings, either to their customers, their employees, or all of the above. Tech makes their businesses, and it also makes their businesses better.
EVERYTHING BUT THE HOUSE PLAYS THE NUMBERS GAME
THERE IS A NATURAL lifecycle to the estate sale scene. Items from different properties come to market en masse according to a totally random schedule. Sellers—whether individual homeowners, dealers, or brokers— have little say about what product categories they can promote. Buyers have virtually no say at all.
That’s the way estate sales have always been, even with the relatively recent benefit of online listings. Everything But The House, however, is leveraging marketplace data to upend that model and expand the footprint of individual sales. The approach, combined with the company’s capacity to store physical inventory, means it can override the randomness of estate sales to maximize profitability.
Buyers often approach estate sales with a browsing mentality rather than seeking out a specific item as they might in a conventional shopping setting. Sellers and buyers are often like ships in the night, missing each other for lack of an organized sale structure. Through its EBTH.com site, Everything But The House can closely track search terms, bid amounts, sale dates, time on site, and other user behaviors, which allows the company to create a multi-dimensional, real-time customer profile. EBTH has reconfigured its entire sales approach, starting with the sales events themselves and how they’re presented on the site.
“Over the last two or three years, we’ve been transitioning,” says President and Co-Founder Brian Graves. “A lot of people know us as ‘the estate sale company,’ but we’re really an all-purpose consignment marketplace, and we’re coming off of a great year of positive momentum. We’re going through an entire site redevelopment right now to help us provide the optimal experience and support a broader range of seller and shopper profiles.”
The new EBTH.com has a restructured navigation, which will allow for a more interactive shopper experience. “And then in-house,” says Graves, “we’re using rich data our model provides to develop machine learning and AI tools to help us strategically merchandise the items onto the site, enhancing the discovery process. Our goal is to reach shoppers at the right time, in a manner that’s attractive and convenient, and drive consistent results for our sellers.” Website users can visit and search for individual items from different estate sales across the region, which EBTH can curate into single sales events according to category, from collectibles to furniture to art. The process also helps cut down on personnel hours, since manually merchandising the site takes a lot of time and attention.
Creating a data set around user behavior isn’t just about higher sales volume—it’s also about reach. The obvious customer for Everything But The House is the buyer, who will use the company to find a unique item from a local estate sale; but EBTH’s other customer is its seller. “It became a much broader marketplace,” says Vice President of Brand Marketing Michael Palmer. “So estate sales and estate services are just one part of what we do.”
Everything But The House considers itself a trusted middleman, brokering the relationship between estate sale sellers and an audience of prospective buyers. “What sets us apart from the competition is that we are full-service,” Palmer says. “We take possession and responsibility of
EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME
Everything But The House President Brian Graves (left) and VP of Brand Marketing Michael Palmer are using AI to improve the buyer/seller experience.
GROWING TECH
Tata developed a mobile app called Grow+ to help employees manage a community garden on its Milford office campus. all of these unique items. We use our expertise and our knowledge inside the house as well as this marketplace data to take that item and then list it properly.”
Even with this growth toward data collection, EBTH never forgot its roots at estate sales and the thrill of finding unique, special items in homes around the region. That’s why, in yet another layer of transition, EBTH has launched its own television show, Everything But The House, starring Lara Spencer and the company’s own co-founder, Jacquie Denny. The HGTV show has completed its first nine-episode season to wide acclaim.
The show taps into the same magic that started Everything But The House in the first place and sustains it: People are fascinated by artifacts in their homes and don’t want them to go to waste, and other people want to discover them. But it takes a lot of work to unearth those items and present them for sale. “The show illuminates that,” Palmer says. “You’re often surprised by the amount of energy and effort it takes to bring these things to the world, as well as all the e-commerce technology that’s behind it. That’s the recipe that got everything rolling in 2008, and it’s still very well-received today.”
TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES ENGINEERS A VICTORY GARDEN
KEEPING A COMMU- nity garden going is notoriously difficult, requiring massive levels of volunteer organization, planning, time management, and sweat equity. So when multinational IT services company Tata Consultancy Services tried to operate a community garden on its Milford office campus, run and harvested by TCS employees, the company ran into the same challenges that plague many such organizers. But rather than let the idea simply die on the vine, Tata leaders decided to leverage their technology expertise to come up with a solution. That solution is Grow+, a mobile application that helps gardeners track the 3,500 square feet of watermelon, cantaloupe, tomatoes, cucumber, eggplant, sweet potatoes, and other produce growing on the TCS campus.
Grow+ is designed to take the guesswork out of gardening by tracking weather patterns to help predict rainfall and to plan watering schedules. It also allows people to send automated messages to volunteers to mobilize an army of gardeners when the weather is right for a day of watering and weeding. And the main thing that keeps Grow+ working is an array of sensors in the ground at the garden site that monitor water levels so organizers and volunteers get a real-time picture of soil conditions.
Though headquartered in Mumbai, India, TCS feels intimately connected to its Cincinnati roots. The impetus for the garden was the firm’s commitment to the surrounding community. The original plan was to give employees a chance to get fresh air and learn the basics of gardening while also providing a service through food donations, which go to food banks like HeathSource of Ohio, the James Sauls Homeless Shelter, Clermont County Community Services, and MercyWorks; the organizations then distribute the food to locals in need.
According to TCS, one-third of Cincinnati families experience food insecurity. Company employees sought to be part of a solution to the problem; they now contribute thou-
sands of pounds of food donations.
Tata is looking to expand in Cincinnati and will invest more than $518 million in Ohio over next two years. The company plans to hire more than 800 employees at its Seven Hills Park campus and other offices around the state by 2022.
The community garden at Tata’s Milford campus is about raising food for the local community, but it’s also about being part of that community and making a meaningful contribution to improving everyone’s health and well-being. “Community is not just a stakeholder, it’s the very purpose of our existence,” says Domodar Padhi, Vice President & Global Delivery Center Head. “The company and the group just can’t live without the community it operates from.”
The Grow+ app and companion garden project is a handy metaphor for Tata’s operational philosophy: It’s a place where technology, community, and education meet and where they work together to grow ideas and innovation. Says Konstantinos (Kosta) Elefter, Grow+ Program Manager, “We’re working with the teachers, with politicians, with different people within a community to try and provide our services through volunteerism. Volunteerism is a huge component of all of our offices in North America and the company as a whole. So it’s not, Here’s money. Check the box. It’s a continuation of providing something to the community that can grow over time.”
APPRENTI CINCINNATI RESURRECTS THE APPRENTICESHIP MODEL
THE WORKPLACE HAS evolved dramatically since apprenticeships were common practice. And so the apprenticeship itself—an old-school training model traditionally associated with the trades, where a novice worker can earn a wage while training on the job—has evolved with it.
Now encompassing new fields and industries like technology and communications, apprenticeships are preparing a workforce to take on current issues and needs. That work is happening in some of the world’s most established companies, including partners of Apprenti Cincinnati, a program headquartered in Seattle that launched locally in 2019 via the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber.
The conventional apprenticeship model draws in new talent for training. Apprenti Cincinnati also takes this approach but adds another element—upskilling a company’s incumbent workforce to fill new and different roles to respond to industry needs. Christina Misali, Apprenti Cincinnati Program Director at the Chamber, says the pro-
TRAINING UP
Members of TQL’s inaugural Apprenti Cincinnati bootcamp pose with faculty from MAX Technical Training after class.
TAKEAWAYS
CHANGING THE EXPERIENCE Everything But The House has used information technology to reconfigure its entire sales approach, starting with the estate sales events themselves and analyzing search terms, bid amounts, sale dates, time on site, and other user behaviors.
GROWING COMMUNITY India-based Tata Consulting Services, which will invest more than $500 million in Ohio to expand, is using technology to improve an employee-run community garden in Milford.
MODERN APPRENTICESHIP Apprenti Cincinnati is expanding traditional apprentice training to new fields and industries like technology and communications, preparing a workforce to take on current issues and needs. gram’s overall goal is to diversify the technology space by bringing people into roles from which they’re normally screened out.
“For most employees, they’ve had a life-long passion for getting into IT and haven’t been able to do so,” says Misali. “We’re removing biases throughout the screening process and bringing in people based on their aptitude rather than their background. We focus on women, minorities, and veterans. All are welcome to apply, but those are the three primary audiences that we’re making sure we’re providing opportunities for.”
Apprenti is for anyone who wants to break into technology, from software development to cybersecurity. A candidate’s first step in the process is to take an aptitude test, and then Apprenti takes them through a series of interviews. Then they interview with an employer who extends an offer of apprenticeship contingent on the employee passing a program of technical training. Different partner companies take different approaches; most involve a multi-week training program and a certain number of hours of on-the-job training.
“Candidates start work at that company,” Misali says. “They are mentored to help expand the depth and breadth of what they learned in training.” The roster of partner companies is a who’s-who of tech leaders around the region and world. Apprenti Cincinnati currently has 12 hiring partners, including Procter & Gamble, Great American Insurance Group, Kroger Technology, Kingsgate Logistics, Total Quality Logistics, Paycor, and UC Heath. Employers cover the cost of the training.
Apprenti places each worker directly in a job rather than training them up from a distance in post-secondary classrooms, which are not an affordable option for everyone (or every high school graduate’s first choice). The benefits are numerous: Young and novice workers gain access to reliable employment pathways, and employers get a highly skilled talent pool they can train from the ground up in both
industry practices and their specific corporate culture. “You go through a training and then immediately apply it,” Misali says. “Technology is evolving so fast, and we’re able to give them the latest and greatest. And then the employer is training them on their systems and their approach.”
For company leadership, moving people around within the existing organization presents a real opportunity for maximizing employee talent. For candidates, an apprenticeship is an investment in their own abilities and an opportunity to grow their own careers. Apprenti brings these perspectives together and creates a stable pathway to employment for people hoping to break into the technology industry.
“You’re not going down this path,” Misali says, “unless there’s an employer saying, I got you.”
How 3CDC Became a Win/Win for the City
FORMED IN THE WAKE OF TRAGEDY, THE NONPROFIT DEVELOPER HAS HELPED TRANSFORM OVER-THE-RHINE AND DOWNTOWN. HERE’S HOW IT CAME TOGETHER AND WHAT’S NEXT. AS TOLD TO JOHN FOX
Cincinnati was a much different city 20 summers ago. A few months earlier, a police officer had shot and killed Timothy Thomas, an unarmed young man with outstanding misdemeanor warrants, after chasing him through dark, dirty alleys behind Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine. Rioting broke out in OTR and elsewhere, and Mayor Charlie Luken locked down the city under curfew.
News footage of Cincinnati Police officers in riot gear and shotguns lined along Central Parkway facing OTR was broadcast nationally and internationally. Its message reverberated both literally and figuratively: Do your worst in Over-the-Rhine, but you’re not damaging the central business district.
Along with the necessary work it would take to reach a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice on police-community relations, called the Collaborative Agreement, Cincinnati’s political and business leaders knew they finally had to address the Over-theRhine problem. For decades the neighborhood had languished, stalemated between advocates for social services
supporting the homeless and advocates for redeveloping historic properties.
Luken decided to carve out the city’s economic development efforts for Over-the-Rhine and downtown into a stand-alone nonprofit organization and lobbied Cincinnati’s highest-profile corporate leaders to put their money and reputations behind it. After studying success stories and failures in other cities and consulting with urban planning experts, the group launched Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation in 2003. The following year they hired Steve Leeper as 3CDC’s president and CEO. Since then, 3CDC and its partners have invested $1.6 billion in Cincinnati’s central business district and Over-the-Rhine, resulting in 193 buildings restored, 49 new buildings constructed, 17 acres of civic space renovated, 1.3 million square feet of commercial space built, and 320 new homeless shelter beds created.
This is the story of 3CDC’s early goal-setting and organizing, from many of the principal players, as well their thoughts on the organization’s next steps. John Fox is Editor-in-Chief of Cincinnati Magazine. He worked at 3CDC from 2012 to 2014.
Charlie Luken, Cincinnati Mayor 1983-1991 and 1999-2005: In 2001, the Collaborative Agreement with the Justice Department meant we first needed to have a framework in place for the police and the community before we could do anything else. I asked George Schaefer, CEO of Fifth Third Bank, to head up an economic development task force to look at new ways of addressing the crisis in Over-theRhine. We decided to create a nonprofit economic development group headed by local corporate leaders and backed by political leaders.
Jim Zimmerman, then Macy’s CEO: Mayor Luken should get a lot of credit for acknowledging that the city wasn’t doing a good job on economic development, and he had enough objectivity to admit that we needed to find a better way.
AG Lafley, then Procter & Gamble CEO: The day after the Timothy Thomas shooting was very quiet downtown. I was eating dinner somewhere that night and could just tell we were about to go through a tough time. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so we needed a new way to tackle Over-the-Rhine’s decline. The Cincinnati Business Committee, which Jim Zimmerman chaired, brought in John Alschuler to talk about urban planning and get us to think differently. Luken: I spent time with AG Lafley to try talking him into being overall leader of this new effort. He was key. It’s important to get the top person at P&G on board—then other leaders in town can’t say no. Lafley: P&G was struggling in 2000 and 2001. Our market capitalization was down about 50 percent, and I didn’t have any extra time. I met Charlie at City Hall on the weekends, and we sized each other up. We understood that a new model for economic development wouldn’t be a quick fix. Zimmerman: Kroger CEO Joe Pichler and I became vice chairs, and AG was board chair. A P&G person is still the board chair of 3CDC. Every major city has a P&G, the company others look to for leadership. When I served with Federated in Atlanta, it was Coca-Cola. Joe and I joined others on a search committee to hire a full-time CEO.
EARLY RESPONDERS
(From top) AG Lafley and Charlie Luken knew downtown Cincinnati needed an economic development jolt after its 2001 tragedy. 3CDC’s work would eventually encompass Washington Park and Music Hall (opposite page).
Calvin Buford, Dinsmore partner and 3CDC board member from the beginning: There was a particular reason for the board to come together at first, coming off of the Timothy Thomas shooting and the riots and unrest. So there was a very public purpose for rising above corporate rivalry and competition. AG Lafley at Procter & Gamble, Joe Pichler at Kroger, and Jim Zimmerman at Macy’s had already made their reputations and had nothing to prove to the rest of us, so they got involved solely to help the city. They set a tone of selflessness, and we all followed their lead. Luken: The City Manager form of government is good at some things, but isn’t good at economic development or out-of-the-box thinking. There wasn’t a real road map for forming 3CDC. My role was to provide the political will. AG wanted to know if the political leaders would bail if trouble arose along the way. Lafley: Downtown and Over-theRhine took decades to fail, so they’d take a long time to fix. While we were talking about the 3CDC concept, I met with the Police Chief to walk through OTR and saw drug deals going down. It was grim. I lived in Hyde Park and wasn’t familiar with that world.
I decided that even though I was busy as hell we needed big changes in Cincinnati. We had some ideas already for what we wanted to do, and Charlie would be a partner with me and stand up for this concept when he had to. Previous P&G leaders like John Pepper and John Smale made it a core value at the company that we give back to our home community and all of the communities in which we operate. They said we’d be successful as a company only if our communities were successful. There had been some talk of moving P&G’s headquarters out of downtown, but I decided to keep us there. It’s our city.
THE SEARCH COMMITtee identified Steve Leeper as one of two finalists for the 3CDC leadership position. He was executive director of the Sports & Exhibition Authority of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, responsible for developing and financing that city’s new football and baseball stadiums, convention center, riverfront park, and public parking facilities. He’d also served as Pittsburgh’s director of development and housing director for its Urban Redevelopment Authority.
“THERE’S A ROMANTIC VIEW OF WHAT OVER-THE-RHINE WAS LIKE 20 YEARS AGO, BUT IT WAS AS CHALLENGING A NEIGHBORHOOD AS I’D EVER SEEN,” SAYS STEVE LEEPER.
Zimmerman: We were trying to figure out early on whether we needed a politically connected leader or a proven development person, so fundamentally a politically-correct vs. results-oriented decision. Boards and commissions normally don’t take risks, but the search committee deserves credit for choosing Steve. He’s a proven results person, and, yes, he’s broken some china while achieving his goals, but underneath he’s an amazingly compassionate person. Lafley: Most candidates were local executives with the usual ideas. I checked out Steve in Pittsburgh, and he’d been herding cats in the neighborhoods and had strong opinions. I felt like an outsider would be good for 3CDC. Luken: Steve had the right expertise and tenacity, and he came from outside of Cincinnati. We knew this new organization was going to be controversial and difficult. I was unapologetic about giving up development authority to 3CDC, and I still am. Independence is their strength. Steve Leeper: My jobs in Pittsburgh had evolved over time, and they thought my experience and background fit nicely. I recall the thing that intrigued me the most was Over-theRhine. People have a little bit of a romantic view of what this neighborhood was like 20 years ago, but it was about as challenging of a neighborhood as I’d ever seen. I’d worked in some tough neighborhoods in my career, in both Pittsburgh and Baltimore. The blatant disinvestment that had gone on here, plus the negative behavior adjacent to the central business district, was mind-boggling. I knew it was a challenge. Buford: Steve had deep experience in Pittsburgh with doing large-scale projects and with financing them. The city was behind 3CDC politically, and we got the top three companies in town to not only support the idea but put their top people on the board. I think Steve really evolved as a leader in his early years here working with AG, Joe, and Jim. Zimmerman: Housing in Cincinnati’s urban core was in a bad place then. 3CDC had an anti-crime focus early on as a way to start improving that neighborhood, and there was much collaboration with Cincinnati Police. We needed to make visible improvements right away, so we went for the low-hanging fruit by buying and closing a number of carryout markets that were crime hotspots. Steve focused on the pursuit of good vs. waiting for perfect. Leeper: I didn’t know everything I was getting into, to be honest, but I did know I had the support of the corporate community then, and I still feel that way now. The corporate community’s stamina is the real story here. They get little to no credit for that. They put in their capital funds every year, but they also give up their time by serving on the board and have reputational risk being so closely aligned with 3CDC.
IN LEEPER’S FIRST FEW years, 3CDC concentrated on acquiring and holding property in Over-the-Rhine, especially along Vine Street. Its first high-visibility project was renovating Fountain Square. Lafley: Steve said it would take a lot of money to accomplish our goals and would take a wide mix of funding sources: private dollars, loan funds, tax increment financing, and city, state, and federal money. He ran the housing authority in Pittsburgh and knew how the financing worked, and he’d learned how to harness public and private partnerships to build the stadiums there. He was a guy who could close a deal. Leeper: Fountain Square was an early agenda item while we were purchasing land in OTR. By time I got here, the board had already decided what they wanted to tackle first and what the key projects would be, so I hit the ground in execution mode. How we renovated Fountain Square and how we funded it still had to be figured out. There was discussion
around moving the fountain and taking down the skywalk, which we did. We were “two guys and a truck” back then, and the fact that Charlie allowed us to tackle that project and trusted us with the city’s famous fountain was kind of risky, but it turned out to be the right thing to do. Luken: The Square was dated, dark, and lifeless, but people were up in arms when we decided to move the fountain 80 feet. City Council to its credit stood with us and moved the fountain in order to open up the space’s look and feel. It was a leap of faith and risky, but we needed to stand with Steve and his staff. It was our first big test with 3CDC. Lafley: Steve’s idea for the Square was that the parking garage would fund the plaza renovations. City governments don’t really understand garages and other infrastructure, so the city said yes. Initially we thought 3CDC would build things and not operate them, but Charlie wanted us to manage and program the Square after we renovated it. Steve said they’d learn how to do it, and they did. He’s an experimenter, someone who says, Let’s try it and see. Leeper: A big chunk of scattered Section 8 housing in Over-the-Rhine was vacant because the owner was in default and HUD allowed people with Section 8 vouchers to go anywhere they wanted. So a lot of people voted with their feet and moved out of OTR. The main commerce in the neighborhood was about a dozen carryout markets engaging in less-than-beneficial activities. Our top priority was acquiring a lot of property, and we targeted those carryouts with our first efforts. We were quiet about what we were doing, which was controversial.
Our bandwidth was small then and we were focused on Fountain Square, so we got other developers to do a lot of the work: Model Group, Urban Sites, NorthPointe Group. We put the funding together and were the master developer and took the risk; they sold the residential units, and we kept the commercial spaces so we could control who the tenants were.
LET’S TRY IT
(From top) Calvin Buford says there were a lot of questions on the 3CDC board about how to turn around OTR’s demise. Steve Leeper was hired to answer them.
We didn’t want Vine Street to look like Anywhere, USA with national chains, so we purposefully recruited local retail and restaurant people. The reality is not a lot of people wanted to take a risk on us at the time, but Jean-Robert de Cavel was already on Vine Street with Lavomatic, so Daniel Wright (Senate and Abigail Street), 4EG (The Lackman), Jose Salazar, the Lanni brothers (Thunderdome), and others opened up. They were the real heroes.
“REAL CHANGE IN A CITY COMES FROM DAYTO-DAY, WEEK-TO-WEEK EFFORT TO IMPROVE THE CULTURE OF A PLACE,” SAYS FORMER P&G CEO AG LAFLEY.
Buford: There were lots of questions at the beginning. Would there be a market for housing downtown and in Over-the-Rhine? Would private developers come on board after 3CDC seeded things? Would visitors come back to OTR? There was so much uncertainty in those early years.
But success begets success, and most of those questions have been answered. Now the 3CDC board has to be careful to keep our focus and maintain that spirit of transcending self-interest and rivalries. We still have to focus on the public good. S TARTING AT 12TH AND Vine streets, 3CDC redeveloped buildings north along Vine Street and then along Republic, Race, and Elm streets, bringing new residents to Over-the-Rhine along with restaurant and retail activity. Washington Park’s reopening in 2012 marked a tipping point in the public’s embrace of the changes. Leeper: We decided to go for home ownership instead of rental units at the beginning, feeling like the neighborhood needed condos and people who were invested in the place. It was a slow process and didn’t get as many people there as quickly as we would have wanted. We needed a critical mass of three types of people: residents, office workers, and visitors.
The civic spaces were important because they could attract visitors. I didn’t know Washington Park would be as great as it’s turned out to be, nor did I really think we’d have the kind of commercial activity on the streets we have today. I feel like Washington Park is the most significant project we’ve done. It’s probably the most democratic space in the city, it’s beautiful, it’s active, and it’s both a neighborhood park and a regional/national destination with Music Hall. Music Hall probably doesn’t get renovated without Washington Park’s rebuild. Lafley: The idea was, and still is to some extent, to work up Vine Street from Fountain Square to OTR. We stayed focused. There are 50 or so neighborhoods in Cincinnati, and they all wanted the corporate community’s help. They wanted us to take the money we allocated for 3CDC and split it 50 ways. They put pressure on the politicians, but Charlie really helped us stay focused on the urban core. Steve brought in lots of local entrepreneurs to start businesses in 3CDC buildings, and he offered them very simple deals. If they succeeded, we all succeeded, so we tried to set them up for success.
Stadiums, hotels, and a convention center are event-based, and their economic activity is temporary and fluctuates. Real change comes from day-to-day, week-to-week effort to improve the culture of a place. Luken: The technical side to how Steve and 3CDC put together financing for their projects is pretty spectacular. That’s a real credit to him and the board. I was amazed with their pace and drive in the early years.
Anastasia Mileham, 3CDC Vice President of Marketing 2011-2016 and current Executive Director of The Cincinnati Experience: The urban core lacked a sense of place, a density of destinations other than office buildings, and market-rate home ownership opportunities. Cincinnati needed a developer with a conscience, and our corporate community saw an opportunity to invest in a community development corporation that could infuse downtown with for-sale units, small businesses, and programmed spaces to create a sense of place.
A decade in, 3CDC started to garner national media attention from the likes of Politico, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and others. OTR’s renaissance is still a focus of attention in the national news today—especially with 3CDC’s ability to keep its small business tenants alive through the pandemic. Buford: Steve has been working to build diverse 3CDC suppliers and subcontractors from day 1. He’s brought minority-owned companies along through the years, not just giving out one-off projects so he can check the diversity box, but keeping
companies on from project to project to really help them grow. We’ve recently been having success bringing minority-owned businesses into the retail spaces, which has a positive effect on the surrounding community by saying that everyone is welcome. Washington Park and Ziegler Park are always packed, and they’re very diverse. Leeper: One of my favorite things to do after a day at the office is I’ll go work out at the Central Parkway YMCA, which we helped renovate, and then sit on the porch at Washington Park and take in what’s going on.
3CDC EVOLVED IN RE- cent years to tackle large-scale projects like Music Hall and Memorial Hall on Elm Street, Ziegler Park on Sycamore Street, and the Kroger store and apartments on Central Parkway. It also helped fund and build new facilities for social service organizations like the Drop Inn Center and City Gospel Mission. Zimmerman: 3CDC has focused its efforts on two geographical areas: Over-the-Rhine and the central business district. They’ve also provided talent for one-off projects like Music Hall. That was a very complex project, and 3CDC was asked to take it on. These days half of 3CDC’s time is spent managing and operating existing entities, and that role will continue to grow. Leeper: It was hard to convince the homeless organizations to trust us at first. It took them time to see the reality of their situations. They were physically and fiscally challenged in Over-theRhine. We went to homeless facilities in other cities like Columbus, Louisville, and Indianapolis, and they were all better than what we had here. Now they can’t touch the quality of facilities our social service organizations have.
Neither the Drop Inn Center nor the City Gospel Mission had day services. Each morning they’d turn everyone out to fend for themselves. Now they can engage people 24/7, especially when there’s inclement weather, and can provide more services. Arlene Nolan [Drop Inn Center] and Roger Howell [City Gospel] are two of the best leaders in their field. Talk about doing the Lord’s work.
THE HEART OF THE CITY
(From top) Jim Zimmerman and Anastasia Mileham say 3CDC’s work has evolved since 2003 and will continue to adapt to the times. Mileham: When I was at 3CDC, a big focus of our work was on developing new homeless facilities. There was a heavy concentration of services around Washington Park, and the land-locked facilities lacked the space for daytime programming, which meant its residents spent the day in the park. The park’s renovation had to be paired with a solution for service providers and people experiencing homelessness. Leeper: Greg Hartmann on the Hamilton County Commission carved out $2 million a year from the indigent care levy that typically goes to local hospitals to help us fund these services, which would keep a lot of homeless people from ending up in those hospitals’ ERs. He got no publicity and no credit for that. We raised $15 million in philanthropic money for these projects, and a number of corporate leaders donated personal funds. Again, our corporate leaders took risks, allocated resources, and stayed the course. That really differentiates Cincinnati from other cities.
3CDC’S DEVELOPMENT and operations work continues, but what are its next focus areas and projects? Did the pandemic change its goals? What will its legacy be? Leeper: The area west of Fountain Square near the Duke Energy Convention Center needs attention. The bad news is if you exit the convention center today you’re facing surface parking and vacant buildings. The good news is that big chunks of that is owned by the public, including the Millennium Hotel, so we have a blank slate and a lot of opportunity to improve there.
Another area of focus is the area between the Square and Central Parkway leading into OTR. It’s kind of a “downtown north” district that we refer to as a no-man’s land right now. The idea that Vine Street north of Central Parkway is
TAKEAWAYS
MATTERS OF TRUST Then-Mayor Charlie Luken and then-P&G CEO AG Lafley met multiple times after the 2001 riots to see if the city’s political and business leaders could forge a new path forward on economic development.
AN OUTSIDE POINT OF VIEW 3CDC was formed as a nonprofit corporation to jumpstart public/private development, and Steve Leeper was hired from Pittsburgh to lead it as a deal-maker.
A NATIONAL MODEL 3CDC’s successes with Washington Park, Music Hall, and Vine Street have garnered national media coverage of Over-theRhine’s renaissance and the Cincinnati region’s momentum as a whole. more vibrant than Vine Street south of Central Parkway, who would have imagined that 10 or 20 years ago? That’s part of the reason we’re doing the Court Street plaza and condos project, and then we’ll move south from there.
We’re finishing off the last of our projects south of Liberty Street with our Willkommen housing. We’re also working on the area around Findlay Market. We’re helping the Cincinnati Recreation Commission reimagine a new rec center and athletic complex with after-school programs and a health component. City Council and Mayor John Cranley asked us to get involved there. We’re also going to do mixeduse and mixed-income housing developments in that area. Zimmerman: A five- or sixyear plan these days is a waste. Three years is about as far out as you can plan any more. 3CDC is taking a very balanced approach, with affordable housing regularly discussed. The pandemic changed short-term priorities, but not long-term. Its overarching goals are still the same. Buford: We were fortunate that Cincinnati hadn’t flatlined as a city before we came together in 2003. We didn’t have to start from scratch like some cities have done. Mileham: I was with Downtown Cincinnati Inc. for eight years [before 3CDC], marketing downtown as a place to live, work, and play, but it wasn’t easy. 3CDC and its corporate partners made the dream a reality. Much of what we promote about Cincinnati now through The Cincinnati Experience is located within the urban core. It’s the heart of our region. Luken: What 3CDC seeded has taken on a life of its own. They’ll put a lot of attention on downtown over the next five years, I’m sure. I hope the business community remains committed. What 3CDC is doing doesn’t seem as shiny and new these days, so you never know. But the spirit of support and cooperation needs to continue, as does the mix of business and political will. CEOs need to focus on the next quarter, though, and these
kinds of projects take 5, 10, 20 years to come to fruition. Leeper: 3CDC has cycled through multiple P&G leaders, three mayors and another to come this fall, dozens of City Council and County Commission members and other corporate leaders, and it’s still cohesive and functioning. That means it’s built for long-term success, which is all I could have hoped for when I first came here. Lafley: Very few things in life are a win/win, but 3CDC is.
