This troubled neighborhood is being targeted by police — and developers

One of Cincinnati’s most troubled neighborhoods is being targeted by police — and developers.

While police work to stop a dangerous open-air drug market by barricading Republic Street in Over-the-Rhine, two of the city’s most well-known developers are planning an historic revitalization in this neighborhood north of Liberty Street.

“We’re going to try to replicate what we’ve done south of Liberty … and hopefully that takes care of some of the issues that we’ve been seeing,” said Joe Rudemiller, vice president of marketing and communications for Cincinnati Center City Development Corp., or 3CDC. “We are definitely seeing some challenges with safety up here, and that has been a pervasive problem.”

Lot Tan

When WCPO first toured the neighborhood in April , it was littered with homeless camps, trash bags of loot from car break-ins, graffiti and human feces on sidewalks and building ledges.

A resident provided surveillance video of shootings, public defecation, a man stabbing a planter with a large knife, people openly smoking crack pipes and sexual activity on a sidewalk.

Ray Pfeffer

North Over-the-Rhine has a reputation for crime and drug trafficking, which draws people from other parts of the city. Police are targeting the neighborhood as a PIVOT program, which combines a wide range of city resources from police and health inspectors to social services in order to address small areas of chronic violence.

Many believe that crime here is exacerbated by the number of empty, boarded-up buildings in the neighborhood.

Ray Pfeffer

“If you just look up and down the street, what you see is a lot of vacancy,” Rudemiller said, as he stood in the 1800 block of Vine Street. “Once you start to see that construction, things will change as soon as that happens.”

The private, non-profit 3CDC sparked the profound transformation in south Over-the-Rhine nearly two decades ago by acquiring abandoned, dilapidated properties and gradually restoring them to new offices, historic housing, award-winning restaurants and cool bars that drew in suburbanites. It also brought new life to Washington and Ziegler parks, with free concerts and swim lessons, kickball leagues and yoga, a dog park, flea markets, festivals and trivia nights.

“About five years ago we realized that essentially the vacant buildings that we had purchased south of Liberty Street in Over-the-Rhine, we had almost redeveloped those … we really recognized that there was a need to turn our focus north of Liberty,” Rudemiller said.

Ray Pfeffer

Next year 3CDC is set to start construction on a slew of projects including 55 new housing units in buildings on Vine, Elder and Republic streets, called Findlay Flats, of which one-third will be low-income.

Meanwhile the Model Group has already started to fix up 12 vacant buildings in the 1800 block of Vine Street and near Findlay Market, which will be available to rent next year. These Italianate buildings from the 1860’s and 1870’s have sat empty for decades, including a repair shop for horse-drawn carriages that has wide open space and a unique glass skylight.

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“It is really important for us to bring the life back into these old buildings,” said Bobby Maly, CEO of the Model Group. “The city or the county, no public entity is going to own the buildings and redevelop the buildings. They’re not in that business. So, it falls on the private sector to do all of it.”

The Model Group specializes in transforming blighted neighborhoods with projects in Walnut Hills, Peebles Corner, the Central Business District, Pendelton and south Over-the-Rhine. It moved into the Findlay Market area a decade ago and is now pushing their redevelopment into surrounding blocks.

Maly isn’t discouraged by the crime and blight here because he’s seen it before.

“It’s the same way that south of Liberty looked on Vine Street and Race Street about 20 years ago,” he said.

Lot Tan

The Model Group has already renovated 34 buildings near Findlay Market. The once-vacant structures now house mom-and-pop shops, a kitchenware store, dog groomer, bakeries that needed larger space and Findlay Market entrepreneurs who graduated from stall sales into their own spaces.

Maly wants to connect this new development down Vine Street to the already flourishing southern Over-the-Rhine. But there are several troubled blocks of vacant buildings in between. City officials placed temporary barricades on Republic, between Liberty and Green streets, in May for a six-month trial period to stop a dangerous drive-thru drug market.

“We saw a similar thing down in the 1500 block of Vine several years ago. And what we see now is that area has been developed; there are restaurants, there are residents, and we don’t see that anymore,” Rudemiller said.

Maddy Schmidt

City leaders and the Cincinnati Recreation Commission asked 3CDC in late 2020 to take the lead in redeveloping four underutilized properties in the neighborhood: Findlay Playground, Grant Park, Over-the-Rhine Recreation Center and the Elm Street pocket park.

“They recognized there was a problem with safety and crime in the area,” Rudemiller said. “I think it will be a very different look and feel in a couple of years.”

Lot Tan

Now, construction on Findlay Playground and the mixed-use projects are now slated to start in 2025 and finish in 18 months to two years.

“We want to move forward with a new 51,000-square foot state of the art community center that will have a gym, indoor aquatics, roller skating rink, hopefully childcare on site, community gathering spaces. We’ll also do a face lift on Grant Park and hope to program that. And then the OTR rec center is potentially going to become the new home of Crossroads Health Center,” Rudemiller said.

The new community center will likely have basketball leagues, free swim lessons, fitness classes and a heavy commitment to youth programming.

Courtesy: Cincinnati Center City Development Corp.

“Having a great civic space that is programmed and actively managed can make all the difference,” Rudemiller said. “We’ve seen that with Washington Park, we’ve seen that with Ziegler Park …and we recognize that there was actually a significant amount of crime happening at Findlay Playground for many years.”

As a nonprofit developer, Rudemiller said the goal of 3CDC is to activate spaces but not necessarily make a profit from them. They hope their early investments eventually attract for-profit developers to join in the revitalization.

“What we found is that when we took on those very difficult projects at the start, then the condo sales and third-party developers could actually come in and make a profit,” Rudemiller said. “Ideally you would have a similar scenario here - where we do a nice civic space, we program that, we do a lot of the development but hopefully conditions become such that other developers can come in and take on other buildings and it snowballs.”

JOSEPH FUQUA ll

The Model Group wouldn’t have taken on its recent Vine Street project without the promise of a new community center and redeveloped park across the street, Maly said.

“This block has been vacant for thirty or forty years. This park is a big deal,” Maly said. “It will be unrecognizable in terms of unused greenspace, weeds mostly, to best-in-class rec center.”

Maly wants city officials to recognize that development is crucial to Cincinnati’s future. His Vine Street projects are relying on tax increment financing to help with the cost of renovating the old buildings.

Lot Tan

“Being aggressive about pushing policies and a vision that drives population growth is, from my perspective, extremely important,” Maly said. “It’s more important now than it was five years ago since the work habits of the world changed forever. Now it’s a matter of life or death to a city’s health to have a population growing, not shrinking.”