Sunday, August 13, 2000

Pumping life and lives into cities' neighborhoods

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Carthage at front of movement to revive areas abandoned by industries

By Cliff Peale
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        Like many center-city neighborhoods, Carthage missed the 1990s economic boom.

        Older houses are fading. Younger home buyers are choosing to live in the suburbs. Factories dot the landscape, bringing trucks and smoke and noise. And Vine Street, once Cincinnati's prime thoroughfare, has lost many businesses that once called it home.

Fran Burns, on the porch of her home in Carthage, welcomes the housing development planned across the street. (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

        But now, thanks to an investment of more than $10 million from the city, there is a new start. Construction will begin next year on about 60 new houses at the former Carthage Mills industrial site.

        The transformation in Carthage, from an industrial zone to a neighborhood of single and double-family houses, is requiring many times the effort and cost of starting fresh in the suburbs. But it's a necessary endeavor, say neighbors, activists and a Task Force Report on Ohio Urban Revitalization delivered to Ohio Gov. Bob Taft in June.

        The report found that Ohio cities are losing residents, a crucial element to urban renewal.

        “If they want to keep people in the city, this is what they're going to have to do,” says Fran Burns, who lives on Fairpark Avenue, across from the 14-acre site. Carthage is at the front of a movement across the state to remake city neighborhoods that industry has abandoned. But revitalization comes with a price: Housing developments are cheaper to build, and potential buyers are more numerous, in greener suburban areas that don't have to be cleaned up first.

        The Carthage site required removal of asbestos and fly ash, furnace soot that was used to make sidewalks and driveways less slippery.

        Rescuing poorer, underdeveloped neighborhoods will take millions in public and private dollars to resuscitate properties that have fallen in disrepair in cities and bring back housing and better schools, state officials warn.

        “The problems are just unbelievable,” says Lawrence Johnson, dean of the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati and a member of the Urban Revitalization Task Force that earlier this summer recommended setting aside $200 million to help cities clean up industrial sites for housing.

        “It isn't going to be bringing a new department store downtown that's going to revitalize the inner city,” he says. “To me, it's jobs and education. Those are the real keys.”

        In its report to Gov. Bob Taft, the task force recommended a package of legislation designed to encourage investment in neighborhoods such as Carthage. The proposals included tax credits for developers and homeowners in inner-city and industrial zones, new housing, and sets aside a portion of the taxes to be used to pay for improvements within a district through tax-increment financing districts.

        The result could be new homes in places such as Carthage and Bond Hill, new businesses to Queensgate and Winton Place, and encouraging new high-tech workers to relocate to Pill Hill, the cluster of hospitals straddling Corryville, University Heights and Mount Auburn.

        It isn't easy, often requiring the moving of existing businesses and cleaning up environmental problems. (Businesses at the Carthage site relocated to the other side of Mill Creek, to the Ridgewood Industrial Park.) But housing advocatessay the effort will be well worth it.

        “When all is said and done, this will be one of the wisest investments the city has made in a long time,” says Sister Ann Rene McConn, president of Cincinnati Housing Partners, a nonprofit group that works to revitalize housing across the city. “This is not for 65 or 70 houses. This is for an entire neighborhood.”

        To make the Carthage Mills project work, Cincinnati officials have helped move several companies to an industrial park several miles away. Two more companies have yet to relocate.

        Meanwhile, Cincinnati Housing Partners is buying and renovating several houses on the perimeter of Carthage Mills, hoping to lure first-time home buyers into the city with moderately-priced homes.

        With an aging housing stock and few public dollars for programs like Carthage Mills, the home ownership rate in Cincinnati was only 38.3 percent in 1990, by far the lowest of the 16 Ohio cities covered by the state task force.

        Nationally, home ownership rates were estimated at 68.5 percent, the highest rate reported since 1965, when the Census Bureau started tracking the occupancy and ownership. Regionally, the Midwest has the highest rate of home ownership at 71.7 percent.

        But the Task Force Report shows that between 1990 and 1997, only one-fifth of all new housing units added in the Hamilton County were built in the city of Cincinnati.

        Some put the numbers lower. Jay Buchert, a home builder and developer with the American Heritage Properties, Inc., and a member of the Task Force estimates that the city accounts for less than 5 percent of all new housing units.

        Columbus was the only city in the study to add more housing units than its surrounding county.

        Cheryl Meadows, Cincinnati's former director of Neighborhood Services, says there are few alternatives other than refurbishing industrial space to make urban, single-family housing available.

        “Most cities are landlocked,” she says. “What you have left is hillsides and brownfields.” (A brownfield is an abandoned, idled or underused industrial and commercial facility where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination.)

        Carthage resident Mrs. Burns says new homes would make all the difference.

        “It's going to make this neighborhood stable,” she says.

        To help finance similar developments, the task force proposes a linked deposit program from the Ohio state treasurer. The state could put funds on deposit at banks for below-market interest rates, allowing the banks to lend money to housing developers for lower interest.

        Jeanne Golliher, executive director of the Cincinnati Development Fund, says the programs could shave hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest costs off large projects.

        Another change in state law would loosen some restrictions on the Ohio Housing Finance Agency, the agency that provides housing initiatives to fund affordable housing projects.

        But Ms. Golliher says state programs need major overhauls to solve the basic financing problems that confront many housing developers doing business in center cities.

        High land costs and bureaucratic red tape can cause gaps of up to $4 million between what loans will support and what a project actually costs, gaps that then must be filled by either public subsidies or private investors.

        “Most of these state programs, they're only for low-income housing,” Ms. Golliher says. “If the only opportunities are to create low-income housing, I'm not sure you're doing these cities a big favor.”

       

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