CINCINNATI — The Cincinnati Planning Commission will consider the city’s largest overhaul of its zoning changes in decades.
In January, Mayor Aftab Pureval announced the “Connective Communities” initiative, the product of two years of research and engagement.
“Connected communities is a people-focused approach to land use and zoning to build a more accessible, diverse, sustainable community for all of Cincinnati,” said Jesse Urbancsik, Cincinnati senior city planner at an April Equitable Growth and Housing committee meeting.
The goal is to increase the city’s housing supply near neighborhood business districts and along major transit corridors, like Reading Road and Hamilton Avenue. The two roads will be part of Metro’s Bus Rapid Transit system in the coming years.
The zoning cuts red tape for developers, making it easier to build “middle housing” in those areas. Middle housing is considered everything between a single-family home and a large mixed-use development, such as duplexes, triplexes, row homes and small mixed-use apartment buildings.
“It’s really hard to build in our city,” said Brandon Rudd, director of the Center for Research and Data for the Cincinnati Regional Chamber.
Rudd’s team recently reviewed housing data for city neighborhoods over the past decade. The report found only 18 of 52 city neighborhoods added net positive housing units.
“It's really hard to build in our city,” Rudd said. “Connected Communities would say, simply, you can build the types of things that you used to be able to build in Cincinnati again.”
The planning commission vote comes as a national conference on mixed-use neighborhood development is being hosted in Cincinnati.
The Congress for New Urbanism began Wednesday. At a session on the zoning changes, Mayor Aftab Pureval told attendees that the initiative is necessary in addition to financing and tax abatements.
“If it is illegal to build the kind of housing that we need to build in the city, that's not going to work,” he said. That money is just going to sit there.”
It is ultimately up to developers to decide whether or not they’ll choose to build more housing.
There is opposition to the changes. Several community councils have come out against Connected Communities, citing concerns with increased population, lack of parking and more traffic. It’s why there are expected to be hours of public comment ahead of the commission’s vote on Friday.
