A Livable Neighborhood Agenda

By David Pepper

Cincinnati has always been a city of strong neighborhoods, but City Council has recently allowed too many of its neighborhoods to fall in disrepair. The Liveable Neighborhood Agenda lays out a concrete, proactive plan to change that.

While Cincinnati won the award "Most Livable City" in 1993, it lost nearly one in ten citizens-about two families per day-in the 1990s. This was one of the steepest declines in the nation; indeed, the average city (of the 195 cities greater than 100,000) gained 9% in population, while Cincinnati lost population at that same rate. The 2000 Census also shows that our losses were nearly across the board-45 out of 52 neighborhoods diminished in size. This exodus from Cincinnati is a devastating statement about the livability of our neighborhoods, and it should alarm us.

If we are to grow again as a city, we must give people reasons to come to Cincinnati, reasons to stay in Cincinnati once they are here, and reasons to return to Cincinnati if they have left. Clean, safe and livable neighborhoods are the centerpiece of each of these goals. Learning from success stories in Cincinnati and other cities, the Pepper Plan for Livable Neighborhoods proposes 10 steps to make this long-term goal a reality. The ten steps are as follows:

Vision and Leadership
1. Comprehensive neighborhood development plan Community-Oriented Government
2. Reviving the Cincinnati Neighborhood Action Strategy
3. Leveraging Community Self-Empowerment Cleaning Up the Mess
4. Fighting Litter, Nuisances and Blight
5. Eliminating Blighted Buildings and Properties
6. Introducing a Proactive Abandoned Car Policy The Building Blocks of Livable Neighborhoods
7. Supporting Community-Based Schools
8. Fostering True Community-Oriented Policing
9. Housing and Homeownership
10. Downtown as a Neighborhood

Some of these steps will require considerable investment, others call for creative thinking on the part of community and city leaders, and others call for dramatic change in old, stale patterns of government. Most have been successfully pursued in other cities with many problems similar to our own-from Detroit, to Indianapolis, to Cleveland. Their success makes clear that there is no reason we can not set out a comprehensive agenda, prioritize among the various steps, and achieve them over time. Indeed, we must undergo this process if we are to once again grow and thrive as a city that prides itself on strong, vibrant neighborhoods.

For the full plan, please log onto http://www.davidpepper.com.

Paid for by Pepper for Council Committee, Scott Stern, Treasurer, 951 Hill St., #1, Cinti., OH 45202 A Livable Neighborhood Agenda

Situation: While Cincinnati won the award "Most Livable City" in 1993, it lost nearly one in ten citizens-about two families per day-in the 1990s. This was one of the steepest declines in the nation; indeed, the average city (of the 195 cities greater than 100,000) gained 9% in population, while Cincinnati lost population at that same rate. The 2000 Census also shows that our losses were nearly across the board-45 out of 52 neighborhoods diminished in size.

This exodus from Cincinnati is a devastating statement about the livability of our neighborhoods, and it should alarm us. On close inspection, too many of our neighborhoods are overflowing with grime and blight-abandoned cars, abandoned buildings and litter, among other things, are strewn across the city, and remain in place for years, as examples from Appendix A demonstrate.

Such disorder and disarray drive down property values, drive away small, neighborhood-based business, and breed criminal activity.

Given this disrepair in our neighborhoods, it is no surprise that we lost population. Other indicators also signify trouble. We have one of the lowest homeownership rates in the country (37% versus 65%%), and we issue fewer housing permits in our city relative to the broader metro region (2.8% in 1998), and fewer per square mile, than almost any other major city in the country. Our peers at this low level of housing development are the struggling urban centers of Baltimore, Providence and St. Louis.

Long-term Goal: Both people and businesses are more mobile than ever. If we are to grow again as a city, we must give people reasons to come to Cincinnati, reasons to stay in Cincinnati once they are here, and reasons to return to Cincinnati if they have left. Clean and livable neighborhoods are the centerpiece of each of these goals. Moreover, the livability of our city has long been one of our great strengths, setting us apart from the typical big city. Our long-term goal must therefore be to clean up our neighborhoods-all of our neighborhoods-so that they are livable and family friendly once again.

The Plan: The Pepper Plan for Livable Neighborhoods proposes 10 steps to make this long-term goal a reality. I will push for these measures to be the foundation of a common sense neighborhood agenda that council undertakes beginning next term. Given the consensus that must be built on a nine-person council, this report marks the beginning of the agenda-setting process, and I look forward to working with council, neighborhoods leaders, and the administration as we turn this proposed agenda into a finished product.

The Sources: In the past six months, I have attended approximately 50 community council meetings in more than 30 of Cincinnati's 52 neighborhoods. I have also met individually with dozens of community leaders-neighborhood representatives, community development and housing non-profits, clergy, current and former leaders at City Hall, private sector leaders-to discuss neighborhood revitalization. Finally, I have also looked extensively into neighborhood revitalization models from other cities. All of these sources provided invaluable insights into the steps we must pursue.

Vision and Leadership
1. Comprehensive neighborhood development plan

In order to move in a clear and sustained direction as a city of neighborhoods, we must lay out where we are going. Our last truly comprehensive master plan was in 1948. Because city hall is currently rewriting its zoning code, we have a unique opportunity to engage in a community-based planning process for downtown and each neighborhood. Within a year of the election, the city plans to lead such a comprehensive effort, working within each community to determine priorities, assets and needs, and laying out a broad master plan reflecting this work-including infrastructure improvement and housing and business district development that retains the traditional character of each neighborhood. I support and will place a priority on these efforts. I also will ensure that as we undertake this community-based envisioning and designing, we keep in mind the basics of what makes a neighborhood livable-healthy business districts, pedestrian-friendly streets and sidewalks, front porches, greenery and lighting, to name a few .

Community-Oriented Government

2. Revive the Cincinnati Neighborhood Action Strategy (CNAS)

Like community-oriented policing, we must strive for community-oriented government. The Cincinnati Neighborhood Action Strategy has been an attempt to establish such government, but purely reactive city policies regarding our neighborhoods-marked by bus tours of neighborhoods and once-a-year clean ups and sweeps-demonstrate that the CNAS system is not working well enough. The idea of CNAS is that teams of city employees work closely with individual neighborhoods on a continual basis, solving problems before they become brushfires, not after. That is clearly not what we have today in too many of our neighborhoods. We need to reinvigorate CNAS through a wave of reforms, including: a. We must assess where CNAS is working and where it is not, and determine why CNAS is failing to be a proactive source of improvement and responsiveness in too many neighborhoods; b. We must push CNAS teams to delve deeper into neighborhoods than simply working with community councils; rather, they must interact with schools, senior centers, business districts, and other community groups; c. We must ensure that we provide sufficient training to CNAS members so they can answer citizens' questions and field their complaints and queries adequately; d. We must introduce clear goal-setting, measurables and accountability for CNAS teams, and encourage cross-learning among CNAS teams; e. We must configure our city administrative structure in a way that ensures that CNAS has sufficient credibility and authority within the city administration. If CNAS is to be the one-stop shop for serving neighborhoods that it needs to be, CNAS leaders must be able to cut through city bureaucracies and across departments to accomplish neighborhood priorities rapidly; f. CNAS teams must do more than just listen and respond to neighborhood concerns. They must also serve as a mechanism which informs neighborhoods of the key decisions that will affect them (such as decisions involving zoning, permits, variances and easements, as well as relevant state decisions). Early warning of projects that impact upon a neighborhood helps everyone involved, while the recent tumult in Sayler Park shows what happens when plans and developments are kept hidden from a neighborhood for too long. g. The city should add a city solicitor to each CNAS team, who can provide sound legal advice to neighborhoods when challenges arise, and when appropriate, provide legal assistance on behalf of a given neighborhood. Today, neighborhoods are desperate to get sound legal guidance, often having to raise considerable money to do so.

3. Leverage community self-empowerment

The most important source of change in neighborhoods are the neighborhoods and citizens themselves. Indeed, strong neighborhood activism is making a difference in communities across this city-from Westwood to Madisonville to Evanston. While most of this work clearly belongs on citizens themselves, the city can play an important role in fostering neighborhood self-empowerment and self-improvement. Specifically, we must: a. ensure that the city adequately inform neighborhoods of crucial decisions affecting them (see above); b. provide support (often matching) and training for low-cost, high-impact self-improvement endeavors, such as Citizens on Patrol and community beautification projects. Other cities have introduced efforts such as community-based paint, tool lending, and other programs that remove obstacles keeping neighborhoods from helping themselves. When programs become permanent and structured, allocations should be decided through a peer review process with integrity, such as the process utilized in the Cincinnati Neighborhood Business District United program. c. introduce steps that help communities enforce the laws, such as placing solicitors on each CNAS team, and the encouragement of neighborhood-based "code compliance committees" or nuisance-fighting teams that can begin the process of identifying nuisance buildings and properties, and work with the city as it seeks to remedy these problems; d. the city should provide training to community councils and other neighborhood groups on their rights and abilities to enforce local and state laws, as well as what resources are available to battle blight in neighborhoods. A component of this training should be to introduce a Neighborhood Service Manual, which is also available on-line. Ultimately, the city should work to build a seamless and user-friendly, web-based Neighborhood Resource Center with which all community councils and neighborhood leaders are familiar and fluent.

Cleaning Up Our Neighborhoods

4. Fighting Litter, Nuisances and Blight. The most consistent complaint arising from the community council meetings I have attended is that our neighborhoods are drowning in litter and blight. We know where litter comes from: household trash placement and collection, business and apartment dumpsters, loading docks, construction sites, trucks with uncovered loads, pedestrians, and motorists. We must devise a comprehensive and proactive plan to tackle each of these litter sources, with a clear vision of what a litter-free neighborhood looks like, goals of how to achieve it, and measurables for success. We also must reconsider crucial aspects of the "Zero Tolerance" initiative of the mid-1990s that have been whittled away in recent years through cuts and lack of attention. a. We must restructure our approach so that we enforce litter, trash and illegal dumping laws proactively and 24 hours per day. The current arrangement of a separate and weak litter patrol is ineffective, with only a trickle of citations every week. As part of community-policing initiatives, other cities have shifted litter patrol efforts into their police departments, with assistance from other departments, and we must do the same. Citizens on Patrol should also play an active role in battling litter. b. Utilize smart anti-litter technology: we must take advantage of new technologies that we know lead to cleaner streets and neighborhoods. In Walnut Hills, for example, a pilot program utilizing larger trash carts had a dramatic input on street litter. Rather than building on this success, City Hall cut the program. We should instead broaden it, and consider other steps that new technologies will make a difference. c. We must more aggressively police garbage set-out rules (with occasional weeks of concentrated citations for set-out violation). Seemingly minor set-out violations, combined with wind, animals and the like, lead to much of the litter that now infests our streets. d. Enforce the laws on the books against code violators i. While we have improved our system of enforcing laws with the administrative citation process introduced by Mayor Qualls, we must improve the community's understanding of this process and its impact on actually cleaning up the neighborhoods. This will take greater public explanation of the process to communities that may wish to take advantage of it, as well as creating a fine structure that best accomplishes the ultimate goal of cleaner neighborhoods-not just the collection of fines while violations persist. ii. We must ensure rapid turnaround on complaints to city departments; generally, the city must set a clear response time goal for all complaints of code violations-from initial complaint, to letters of warning, to the running administrative citation process, to the remedy. It must communicate that response time goal to neighborhood leaders, adhere to that response time, and utilize a systemized referral tracking system that ensures that it does so. iii. We must improve the collection of fines after the administrative citation process has run its course. The process has no legitimacy without the hammer of actual collection. iv. Our administrative hearing process assumes that the violator wants to be in compliance, and will attempt to be once notified or cited. That is true in most cases. But the system is unable to cope with the most egregious violators-cases that instead become tied up in criminal court and subject to all the delays and obstacles therein. We must therefore work creatively and cooperatively with the county to ensure more rapid and effective prosecution of criminal cases for housing and building code violations. At most, we should consider creating a housing and building court dedicated to this task; at the least, we should work to have a several-day per week dedicated docket within one court, focusing on criminal violations of housing and other code violations. e. We must invest the funds necessary to allow routine building code inspections of trouble spots. f. We must work with non-profits, community groups and corporations to reinvigorate "adopt a spot" programs, and other community-based and -supported efforts that help to battle blight from the ground up.

5. Ridding Blighted Buildings and Properties Through Urban Land Reutilization. Abandoned buildings and properties pervade our city, yet we sit paralyzed in ridding ourselves of them, let alone converting those properties back into valuable assets. Other cities, such as Cleveland, have instituted Urban Land Reutilization programs that undertake comprehensive land banking aimed at solving this very problem. Such programs, often working through third party intermediaries, convert community eyesores into assets by aggressive acquisition of tax-delinquent properties, pursuing receivership of nuisance abandoned buildings under state law, and assembling tracts of unused lands. The programs then raze the worthless structures that blight our streets, assemble acquired land into marketable parcels, and sell these properties back into the market (at a write-down) to be put to good use-housing and commercial. Such development will be further assisted by streamlining and expediting the building approval process, as well as by the creative use of "sweat equity" programs that assist those who are willing to do the work to renovate such structures. We must study the successes from other cities, and build the required partnerships (with the county, as well as community development groups) to replicate those successes in Cincinnati.

6. Introducing a proactive abandoned car policy. A one-time, costly sweep is an adequate band-aid, but certainly not a solution to the abandoned cars that are strewn across our city.

We need to usher in a policy that makes it cheaper to abandon cars in a clean and easy way than to leave them on our city streets scot-free. This involves increasing fines and enforcement for those who leave junk cars on our streets, more rapid response when junk vehicles are left on a street, and making it easier for citizens to dispose of their cars in a clean and environmental fashion through a well-publicized car recycling program or center. We also must make the auto salvage yard ordinance a real tool in cleaning up private lots overflowing with abandoned cars.

The School as the Centerpiece of our Neighborhoods.

7. Community-based Schools. Schools must once again be the centerpiece and hub of our neighborhoods, drawing students, families and other citizens together both during the school day, as well as after. I am thus supportive of the community-based schools concept, which has been successfully pursued in other cities, and which is being introduced here in Cincinnati by a number of community leaders. While I will describe the idea more fully in my Plan for Youth Opportunity, I believe the city must establish a standing committee that works with the schools to coordinate and provide the various city services (from health, to police, to recreation) that community-based schools and their students need.

Safety and public order
8. True community-oriented policing. No city is livable unless it is relatively safe and crime-free. Fostering better police-community relations is an integral step in creating more livable and safer neighborhoods. I describe a number of specific proposals on this subject at my website, but the primary point to underscore is that we must move to a deeper, more pervasive form of community-oriented policing than we have in our city today. True community-oriented policing means that police and community engage in a working partnership to battle crime and make communities safer. True community-oriented policing means "order policing"-where police have responsibility for identifying and solving neighborhood problems and disorder. True community-oriented policing means that police officers spend more hours on the streets than in headquarters, and more hours working with people rather than with paper. True community-oriented policing means the police and community work together to assess and learn from problematic incidents that have occurred at the hands of police officers. And true community-oriented policing means that the community better understands the difficulties and challenges of policing our city and keeping our neighborhoods safe, and works with the police to identify and weed out criminal behavior

We have indeed established a system of neighborhood police officers, which is a step in the right direction, but we need to go much further to create true community-oriented policing in Cincinnati. The community-oriented philosophy must pervade our police division, from training, to evaluations, to execution.

Housing and Homeownership
9. While housing is clearly a priority in Cincinnati, we have no broad housing plan or strategy. We simply know we need to do better, but do little to get there on any broad basis. We must follow the lead of other cities and develop a broad housing strategy that tackles the problem at both the supply and demand-sides of the problem. Only such a comprehensive approach will allow us to reach the scale we need to truly make an impact on housing. a. Housing should comprise a central part of the master plan of development; b. We must reinvent and streamline our city's process of housing development, so that we become an effective partner with responsible developers. This will require reforming our bureaucracies and assessing regulations that hamper housing development; c. We must consider steps to promote housing supply on a broad scale, such as a housing trust fund from which to select projects based on particular criteria and goals. d. We must create effective working partnerships with LISC and other organizations that support community development and housing, allowing them to show us the way toward effective housing development. e. We must take part in a public-private partnership that provides permanent operating support to high quality neighborhood development groups; f. We must consider demand-side strategies. In addition to traditional approaches such as abatements, tax credits and incentives/assistance for housing renovation, we should stress the promising trend of employer-assisted housing programs, where the city and other large employers within the city provide a package of incentives to employees to buy homes within the city's borders. Cincinnati Public Schools and the University of Cincinnati have initiated such programs, working with other partners to establish attractive packages. The city itself should follow this path for city employees. Most importantly, a group should convene to learn from all of these models, as well as others from other cities, so that other private sector employers will take part in such programs.

Downtown as a Neighborhood
10. We must work to make our downtown a 24-hour, living neighborhood. There is a booming demand in this country for downtown living, and we must be a city that capitalizes on that demand-something we are failing to do at the moment.

This begins with ensuring that we have adequate housing stock downtown. While public sector support may be necessary to kick this off, market forces should mean this is a process that will pay for itself.

Other initiatives to consider:

In addition to shoring up our neighborhoods one at a time, Cincinnati is in dire need of initiatives that bring our historically divided neighborhoods together-and not just through downtown events. Initiatives that the city and community might consider to do this include: · Initiating sister neighborhood relations, bridging West and East, black and white, rich and poor, · Establishing "neighborhood days" that focus on a particular neighborhood-both its cultural, social and business assets · Creating a user-friendly map of Cincinnati neighborhoods, providing highlights of each neighborhood's assets, as determined by that neighborhood