From the NYTimes...

CINCINNATI — A few years ago, Jim Moll, a real estate agent, turned to his friend Bill Baum, a developer, and asked whether anyone would ever sell condominiums on Vine Street, the epicenter of race riots here in 2001.





Much of the area, including this part of Main Street, has begun to thrive again, five years after race riots brought redevelopment to a halt.





“Not in our lifetimes,” Mr. Moll recalls Mr. Baum replying.


One recent afternoon, Mr. Baum, 57, stood on the battered pine floorboards of a 130-year-old building on Vine Street as a workman mixed cement in a wheelbarrow. Mr. Baum’s company, Urban Sites, is transforming this vacant brick shell into six condominiums, which he plans to sell by next summer.


“To hear the jackhammers and the booms and the nail guns,” Mr. Baum said, “it’s music to me.”


Vine Street runs through the heart of Over-the-Rhine, a neighborhood of narrow streets and ornate brick buildings built by German immigrants from 1865 to the 1880s. After decades of decay in the area, gentrification is spreading north from downtown and south down the steep hillside of Mount Auburn. New condominiums, art galleries, theaters and cafes are bringing people and investment.


But poverty remains, as do drugs, violent crime and the stigma of the three days of riots in 2001. The riots effectively killed an earlier Over-the-Rhine renaissance, in the late 1990s.


The magic of Over-the-Rhine is in its compact brick buildings. Mostly two- to four-story walkups, few are significant individually. But together they create a historic district with a scale and grace reminiscent of Greenwich Village in New York. In May the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the entire 362-acre neighborhood as one of the country’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.


As Over-the-Rhine’s white families left for the suburbs after World War II, its buildings attracted black families displaced when Interstate 75 tore through the nearby West End neighborhood, said Vice Mayor Jim Tarbell, who moved to Over-the-Rhine in 1971. It gradually became a slum in what the Census Bureau has found is the sixth most segregated city in the nation.


By 1990 the neighborhood’s median family income was $4,999, census figures show. It was the most dangerous part of the city, according to Police Department records, with almost 22,000 calls for emergency service, 8 murders and 306 robberies in 2001.


During the first renaissance, a generation of young hipsters discovered Over-the-Rhine, drawn by sturdy, funky and affordable buildings just a five-minute walk from downtown. The first nightclubs moved to the area in the 1980s, followed by art galleries and specialty shops. St. Theresa Textile Trove opened in 1994 and attracted art quilters from across the country, said Becky Hancock, its owner. A few doors down stood the Suzanna Terrill Gallery.


At the height of the boom, Mr. Baum said, young downtown office and restaurant workers placed down payments on future apartments that still had garbage piled on the floor and pigeons nesting in the walls.


“There was this palpable feeling that things were really taking off,” said Ran Mullins, who moved to the neighborhood in 1999 and now owns Metaphor Studios, an advertising agency in Over-the-Rhine.


But early in the morning of April 7, 2001, Stephen Roach, a white police officer, shot and killed Timothy Thomas, an unarmed African-American, after a foot chase. A protest march two days later devolved into riots. Many Over-the-Rhine businesses were looted.


After the riots, redevelopment projects fizzled. Most of the nightclubs closed. Demand for apartments dwindled, Mr. Baum said. Art galleries, including Suzanna Terrill’s, closed, and St. Teresa Textile Trove moved to another neighborhood because customers refused to drive into Over-the-Rhine.


“The riots set this neighborhood back a decade,” Mr. Mullins said.
Paradoxically, the riots’ reverberations may actually speed Over-the-Rhine’s recovery. Afterward, thousands of renters receiving federal rent subsidies left the neighborhood.


“A huge number of people just vamoosed,” said Marge Hammelrath, director of the Over-the-Rhine Foundation.


Their exodus left 500 of the neighborhood’s 1,200 buildings vacant, according to the Trust for Historic Preservation. Property values dropped, making it easier for developers to buy into the neighborhood.


But unlike the last boom, where small developers rehabilitated buildings one at a time, Over-the-Rhine’s current wave of gentrification is driven by Cincinnati’s corporate and philanthropic elite, whose strategy is to buy entire blocks. The largest player is the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation, known locally as 3CDC, which was created in 2003 with $80 million raised by the city’s corporate leaders.


In the last 18 months, 3CDC invested $27 million in Over-the-Rhine, buying 100 buildings and 100 vacant lots, said the organization’s president, Stephen Leeper. It completed 28 new condominiums on Vine last year and is building 68 more.
Next came the Art Academy of Cincinnati, which spent $13 million to move from its hilltop campus into two adjacent warehouses in Over-the-Rhine last summer. Now the academy’s sign, which is four stories tall and reads “ART” in red neon letters, casts its light into new condominiums. The academy also became an anchor for smaller arts groups, like Know Theater of Cincinnati.


The neighborhood’s rapid growth makes some people worry that low-income families will be pushed out.


“Obviously the architecture is beautiful,” said Bonnie Neumeier, a community activist. “But we feel that the faces of our people are more important than the facades of the buildings.”


This time, the biggest threat to revitalization may come less from crime or racial tension than from Over-the-Rhine’s buildings themselves. Many sat vacant for so long that they are on the verge of collapse, Mr. Tarbell said, and some that were used as crack dens were bulldozed.


“This is a race,” said Bill Donabedian, a director at 3CDC. “If we don’t move quickly, we will lose these buildings forever.”

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Buh-bye.

After reading this... it makes me kind-a perplexed about what it would take to find a key to unlock the door towards ignorance and blight that plagues large chunks of the city north of Fairmount Street.

For Cincy they had to hit absolute rock bottom for one tiny neighborhood (only 1,200 homes).

Our blight covers an area well in excess of 100,000 properties.

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Buh-bye.

I wonder if something like this is even possible in Philadelphia with the prevalent anti-corporate culture. One thing that keeps coming up in the news lately is how little involvement there is from business in the city, and little surprise IMO, since local jumps on them and robs them any time they poke their heads out from under their rocks.

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Your representatives on Philadelphia's City Council are at odds with our new mayor over whether many reforms he has proposed should become law. Please write to them and tell them what your priorities are.

Indict State Senator Vince Fumo into The Crooked Pol Hall of Fame.

Oh how foolish you two are. Have you guys even been to Cincinnati? If you think its a "tiny bit" blighted or problematic then wow. I thought we were supposed to be criticial on this blog?!? Saying Over-The-Rhine is totally gentrified is like saying Kensington has totally turned over. Also the former mentioned neighborhood is very, very small and still faces Blackwellian tear downs. Truth.

Articles like these are meant to inspire. The writer "worked" you guys. Well anyways, continue your little cute sugar coated articles of make believe.

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Sarah Palin = Thomas Eagleton

The party that values "absintence only" education and rallies against fornication.

I just wish someone would start a Center City District in this city and...

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Sarah Palin = Thomas Eagleton

The party that values "absintence only" education and rallies against fornication.

you've got a point, although we still don't seem to have much in the way of very large benefactors for specific projects (like the $68M for keeping "The Gross Clinic" in town). I'm still speculating, of course. Feel free to prove me wrong.

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Your representatives on Philadelphia's City Council are at odds with our new mayor over whether many reforms he has proposed should become law. Please write to them and tell them what your priorities are.

Indict State Senator Vince Fumo into The Crooked Pol Hall of Fame.

A was a little drinky in those posts if you know what I mean. What I said though I still very believe to be true.

Dave you mention "very large benefactors for specific projects", you have more per capita here then Cincinnati with that 80 million I'm sure. Philadelphia has many neighborhoods that fall in the hot, becoming hot, or getting there as far as being discovered by outsiders. The situation in Cincinnati is this, the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood is one of strongest vestiges of the 19th century in Southern Ohio. The neighborhood is similar to Old City in a vernacular way and size (maybe Rhine is a little larger, it also has more quaint rowhomes then the OC). Old city was dirt cheap and in really bad shape not too long ago. Look at photos even from the early and mid 90's.

In relation to the article, someone house hunting in South Philly said to me that a big investor bought nearly a whole block down there...I forget the exact number. Things like this happen all the time in Philly, its no big deal.

Oh and EC, you should read that new inqy write up on Dwight Evans and his revitalization of West Oak Lane and how it effects the rest of the city.

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Sarah Palin = Thomas Eagleton

The party that values "absintence only" education and rallies against fornication.

A return to large scale manufacturing.

It's what no only brough a large number of uneducated jobseekers earlier in the century...but also caused/created the very unappealing housing set up in large sections of blighted neighborhoods (3 blocks housing...one block factory..three blocks housing...freight line..etc..no parks...no breaks...)




My plan would be to convert all abanodoned land into temporary park. When the land becomes useful again the park would go back to it's original R zoning.

This couple with a land use tax should do a lot.

NTI was a good first step even if seemingly unsucessful. It did remove a number of properties...

non salvagable I may add...(since that's the beef..they destroyed "salvagable buildings"....they didn't...they tore down roofless waterlogged collapsing brick messes)

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They already use those areas for dumping old tires, bodies and other rubbish.

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"Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though." ~Obama: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

They were not RACE RIOTS. A race riot requires two races fighting over somthing.
They were just riots.