Cincinnati, some say, remains a city divided.

        Us and them. Haves and have nots. Black and white.

        Let me add one more measure by which we mark our differences: How we house our children.

        My urban neighborhood, Pleasant Ridge, is dominated by well-maintained single-family homes, populated with a mix of black and white families who, by and large, have been able to create warm and welcoming homes for their children.

        The yards of my neighborhood are covered with plush lawns and flowering garden beds. The sidewalks are littered with skateboards and scooters and bikes at rest. The streets, occasionally, are cluttered with kids throwing or kicking balls to each other.

        Inside the homes of my neighborhood are children who, as a rule, have comfortable rooms, plentiful toys and warm beds.

        It is a place my neighbors and I are happy to call home.

        Two miles and a world away is another urban neighborhood, Bond Hill, and Cincinnati's largest apartment complex, Huntington Meadows.

        The nearly vacant development — now in the last gasps of life following the financial failure of its owner — has been a different kind of home for its children.

        The 58 buildings of Huntington Meadows are stark, dull red brick reminders of the “projects” of major U.S. cities or the government housing of former Communist states. Inside, the entryways are ratty, the floors cracked and worn, the paneling tattered and torn. In the apartments themselves, the windows are as often made of plywood as they are of glass.

        Outside, the courtyards are dry and dusty patches of weeds, crossed by crumbling sidewalks. The playground sits empty, the basketball court unoccupied on a late summer, late morning day. The skateboards and scooters that must have once stood at doorways have disappeared, save a single bike on a front lawn, its back wheel missing. The streets here are cluttered, too, but with broken-down couches, discarded dinette sets and used-up mattresses instead of kids with balls.

        Now an almost deserted shell — like the burned-out Mazda abandoned just beyond the unused playground — Huntington Meadows can hardly be described as a safe and welcoming home for children. Maybe it was at one time. The blocks surrounding the sprawling, 1,100-apartment complex show evidence of a neighborhood friendly to children: At one edge is a school; at another, a park with a fancy new play structure; at another, streets of tidy homes with geraniums on porches and swing sets behind fences.

        Over time, though, the apartment community once marketed to single mothers was ruined by tenants who wouldn't pay rent, owners who wouldn't maintain buildings, drug dealers who drove out residents and, finally, plumbing and asbestos problems left unanswered. Its future — rehabilitation by another owner or demolition by the city — remains undecided.

        In recent years, several books have chronicled how communities like Huntington Meadows affect their youngest residents. To a one, they conclude that kids from such desolate environments face a struggle to resist drugs, to stay out of crime, to envision a hopeful future and to find safe passage to that future. “There are no children here,” a mother in a Chicago housing project once told author Alex Kotlowitz, inspiring the title of his book about urban life. What she meant was clear: Children don't stay children long in such sorry surroundings.

        At Huntington Meadows, as the final families flee or prepare to, that mother's words have taken on a literal meaning. But in this urban pocket of Cincinnati, they've resonated figuratively for some time now.

        A city divided? Until the parents of a Pleasant Ridge would consider a community like a Huntington Meadows a suitable place to raise their children, yes — and divisively so.

They've got their motors runnin'
Bany fund offers seminar aid to working musicians
Allison Moorer proves better than her songs
Adult clothes go back to school
All children need to be raised equally
Get to it