Connected Communities plan a major step to fixing Cincinnati's housing crisis | Opinion

Cincinnati, unlike many of our peer cities in the Midwest, is growing in population and has a lot of momentum going in our favor. This provides us with a unique and timely opportunity to become the City so many of us want and believe we can be.

I want to stress that doing nothing is not an option unless we want to end up like cities on the East and West coasts scrambling far too late to mitigate the extreme cost of living. This is a chance to diverge from the mistakes of the past 100 years and plan our growth to have a real vision for where we want to add our new neighbors.

That vision is our Connected Communities land use reform policy, which will go to the Planning Commission on May 17 and to City Council in early June.

In our two years of engagement with the public and professional stakeholders over this policy, I’ve found it striking that almost all Cincinnatians I talk to want many of the same things. They want to be able to walk five minutes to get to a neighborhood grocery store or restaurant. They want to be able to age in place and have their grandkids afford to live in the same neighborhood they do. They want a more robust public transit system that connects job centers, entertainment and housing seamlessly. They want more human-scale and safer streets and corridors. Finally, and overwhelmingly, Cincinnatians want a chance to correct decisions that have led to historic segregation among our communities.

We’re where we are today by design, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Cities used to be built around their commercial centers and public transit infrastructure, but we lost our way with the rise of the automobile and the decline of cities. Connected Communities is a return to what works, focusing our future growth on density, walkability and connectivity.

Housing is our greatest tool to achieve these goals. In my previous work with The Community Builders, we used the renovation of dense, mixed-income housing in the heart of Avondale to create the conditions for a new grocery store and civic space, ending Avondale’s status as a food desert. It’s a common strategy to bring much-needed amenities to an area: create the housing density to support the businesses the community wants and desperately requires. Weekend visitors are great for Friday through Sunday, but businesses need Monday through Thursday customers to sustain. This happens when people live close to the places they eat, shop and play.

Reinventing METRO is also bringing about huge improvements to our bus system. In the coming years, the Reading Road and Hamilton Avenue corridors will have bus-rapid transit, which will have dedicated lanes, streetcar-like stops, and essentially act like light rail transporting thousands of people to Uptown and Downtown, two of the largest job centers in the region. They have also implemented 24-hour routes, increased service frequency, and are actively improving bus stops and shelters. We need to maximize the housing we are building along these corridors so people are connected to the economic centers of the city, especially when you consider the bus-rapid transit routes represent the lowest per capita car ownership geography in the entire city.

Connected Communities isn’t just about designing people-centered communities, but also communities that folks can afford to live in. The nationwide housing shortage has hit Cincinnati hard these past couple of years because we aren’t building enough housing, and it’s not fast enough. A recent report by the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber's Center for Research and Data showed that between 2010 and 2020 only one of our neighborhoods grew in population and built more housing units than it had new residents: Downtown. That is unacceptable and will send us on a dangerous trendline if we collectively don’t take action.

Cities around the country are beginning to catch on and repeal exclusionary zoning policies that restrict housing supply and correlate to steeper increases in housing costs and rent burden on residents. The philosophy is quite simple: make it easier to build housing and people will build more of it.

This also has a massive impact on our affordable housing developers. This mayor and council have propped up and funded in record amounts the Affordable Housing Leverage Fund, managed by our partners at the Cincinnati Development Fund. Even when projects are fully funded, however, they run into hurdles in attaining zoning variances and face protests from residents. One project in particular, called Gloria’s Place, is a fully funded, architecturally approved permanent supportive housing project from Over The Rhine Community Housing that has spent a year in litigation when it failed to obtain a simple density variance. Forty-four individuals experiencing homelessness still do not have a roof over their heads today because of outdated zoning regulations blocking the construction of much-needed affordable housing.

Change is hard, and some neighborhoods are seeing growth and new development for the first time in decades, which can be scary. But we need to plan for our population growth smartly and intentionally, or else it will sneak up on us and only further exasperate the disparities that exist in Cincinnati today.

I was elected to City Council to take real action on the housing crisis, and Connected Communities is a major step Cincinnati can take in the right direction.

To learn more about the Connected Communities initiative, including ways to get involved, you can visit https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/planning/connected-communities/.

Cincinnati Councilman Reggie Harris is chair of the Equitable Growth and Housing Committee.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Connected Communities plan focuses on housing density, connectivity