Urban Planning and the Streetcar
I’ve been thinking a lot about urban planning lately. Specifically, how Cincinnati initially was pretty good at it. And then how the city eventually fumbled the bag and got it all wrong. The city used to be dense, walkable and had some pretty neat inclines as well as a 221-mile length streetcar system that ended in 1951. Obviously, the inclines eventually faded away and that seems perfectly logical due to their safety concerns and just operating on outdated technology. But to completely kill a highly developed streetcar system was a monumental failure. Abandoning the partially constructed subway system was another embarrassing failure, but the subway was never fully developed and was abandoned half-way through so that is an easier pill to swallow. But to completely blow up a perfectly functioning and highly developed streetcar system is just villain level mismanagement.
A 1940s streetcar with Downtown Cincinnati in the background.
Source: Wikipedia
Since then, personal vehicles took over our country and the leaders of Cincinnati began redesigning our city strictly for cars. Once highways became a thing, the Cincinnati city planners looked at everything through the lens of “how can we get people from point A to point B as quickly as possible in their personal automobile.” Another curious development occurred in the 1960s when the City of Cincinnati stopped allowing zoning for multi-family housing (duplexes and triplexes) and focused primarily on single-family, low-density dwellings. I wrote a really good blog post about it in March of 2021 when I spoke with Nick Keeling and Mark Samaan, two of our city’s smartest urban planners. Density and strong public transportation go hand-in-hand when developing flourishing cities and for some reason, previous city leaders made it a priority to inhibit both public transportation as well as housing density. And we haven’t even touched on the fact that they razed the entire neighborhood of Kenyon-Barr, which had a population of 27,000 predominantly black residents; They did this to install a highway beginning in 1958. The combination of all these things paints a very brutal picture for the previous leaders of Cincinnati around the 1950s and onward. Yet, none of us can be blamed for the blatant incompetence of previous generations. None of our city leaders were around and all we can try to do at this point is right the wrongs of the past. The numbers speak for themselves: Cincinnati’s population peaked in 1960 with 502,550 residents and then by 1970 a sharp decline began and white flight took hold. Our current population sits at 309,000.
Cincinnati leaders officially apologized for razing Kenyon Barr in June of 2023 which is a nice first step in trying to right the wrongs of our city’s past. I appreciate that modern-day city leaders were able to recognize the flaws of former city officials. And now it’s time to act on the recognition of how miserably bad our city was managed post 1950. How can we improve Cincinnati and make it a more attractive place to live for current and prospective residents? Investing heavily in public transit and allowing more dense housing to be built is the first step. We must also recognize our city is a bit hamstrung by being in Ohio, a state that is led by mostly white men from suburban and rural areas who gerrymandered their way into power. One Ukrainian refugee ended up moving to Columbus, Ohio and was so appalled by their dilapidated and unusable public transit system, she had to move back to Kyiv because she couldn’t reliably use COTA to get to work.
The first test-run of the Cincinnati Streetcar in 2015.
Source: Wikipedia
All of this long-winded trash talk leads us to the modern-day iteration of the Cincinnati streetcar. An idea that was initially pursued by a group of Over-the-Rhine residents in hopes of revitalizing their struggling neighborhood. It was a very divisive idea but former Mayor Mark Mallory liked it enough to implement it. He faced push-back from all sorts of people including Ohio Governor John Kasich who tried his best to kill the idea. John Cranley capitalized on the anti-streetcar sentiment and rallied Cincinnati’s conservative-ish west side in opposition of the new streetcar which led to his mayoral victory in 2013. Similar to Kasich, he also tried to kill the streetcar but failed. People like Cranley and Kasich are the exact opposite of what I would call “visionaries.” What our city and state needs is visionary leaders that will reinvent our city and state to keep current residents as well as attract new ones. The best idea Governor DeWine could come up with to lure new residents to our state was a pitiful advertising campaign putting billboards in other states bragging about Ohio’s low taxes. Again, there is nothing innovative about DeWine and his half-baked plan that also failed. In DeWine’s mind, the stagnant population growth of Ohio isn’t due to the extremist state government but because people perceive Ohio as being a high tax state. Some of the most brain dead thinking you’ll ever come across.
Our tax dollars were actually used for this. Literally lighting money on fire.
Source: WABCtv-NY
Getting back to public transit, current Councilmember Reggie Harris is leading the effort to expand the current streetcar which I applaud. The streetcar route is only a 3.6-mile loop around downtown and OTR. This leads us to the question of what neighborhoods would be an ideal fit for streetcar expansion? John Schneider, one of the most prominent advocates for the streetcar, recently made a Facebook post about what he sees as the most logical places the streetcar could expand to. He provided plenty of valuable theories about where the streetcar could possibly go next, but one particular neighborhood stuck out in my mind: South Fairmount.
Streetcar advocate, John Schneider, shares his thoughts on possible future routes.
South Fairmount used to be a vibrant neighborhood filled with working-class Italian immigrants. Buddy LaRosa said his famous pizza was even born in the neighborhood within the basement of the San Antonio Church. And due to massive amounts of white-flight, the modern-day neighborhood is a former shell of what it used to be. If you want to talk about piss-poor urban planning, South Fairmount is Cincinnati’s crown jewel of urban planning failure. Queen City and Westwood Avenues are essentially two mini-highways that run parallel through the neighborhood. The county did their best recently to add some development to the neighborhood by installing the Lick-Run Greenway in between these two mini-highways. But more investment needs to happen in South Fairmount and that could possibly be the expansion of the streetcar. The neighborhood is the definition of urban blight and the city has completely ignored this neighborhood for decades. During a drive through South Fairmount, you will witness large quantities of illegal dumping, ample amounts of graffiti, a large collection of potholes and of course abandoned and deteriorating buildings. South Fairmount calls itself the “Gateway to the West Side” and it’s a perfect representation on our city’s feelings of contempt towards west side neighborhoods. Imagine the streetcar connecting OTR, Downtown and the West End to a beautiful green space known as the Lick-Run Greenway. West side residents could even use the Lick Run Greenway as a park-and-ride to easily commute downtown without having to hassle with parking. The streetcar generated millions of dollars in development in OTR and I would hope it could do the same for South Fairmount.
So, will it happen? Being the cynic that I am, I’d easily bet my entire bank account on the streetcar expanding to literally any neighborhood other than South Fairmount. I can still dream that one day South Fairmount will shed its graffiti riddled abandoned buildings for dense housing and an actual functioning business district. I just don’t think the neighborhood or the west side in general has enough political capital to make this happen. We are at the bottom of the city’s neighborhood pecking order and I don’t foresee that changing any time soon. Sorry for the length and thanks for reading.