The city of Cincinnati is recruiting the help of University of Cincinnati students to revitalize approximately 600 empty lots in Cincinnati neighborhoods.
The Cincinnati Property Maintenance Division will tear down abandoned buildings on the lots within the next year, and needs help to ensure the empty lots do not become problems for the neighborhoods surrounding them, said Ed Cunningham, manager of Cincinnati’s property maintenance code enforcement division.
“The question is, what do we do with these vacant lots so they don’t become blighted — you know, overgrown with weeds and littered with broken bottles and trash,” Cunningham said.
The lots could lower property values in approximately 10 neighborhoods if they are left alone after demolition, he said.
Keep Cincinnati Beautiful, a nonprofit agency dedicated to citywide beautification, is working with the city to transition the abandoned buildings to easy-to-maintain lots. Linda Holterhoff, executive director of Keep Cincinnati Beautiful, sought the help of approximately 30 students from the College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning to create a how-to guide designed to help city employees better utilize the lots.
Holterhoff said a mix of students studying horticulture, architecture and city planning worked for a weekend generating ideas and will work through an interdisciplinary class to earn college credit and help the city. The students will not receive payment.
Jenny Russell and Frank Russell of the Niehoff Foundation are in charge of the class, but the students have not been chosen yet.
“We’ll have three to five different scenarios of how a lot will look after the house is demolished on it, and they’ll basically make a selection matrix that will tell us the application to use on it,” Holterhoff said.
The selection matrix is a guide the city and Keep Cincinnati Beautiful will use to easily identify the best and most efficient way to “clean and green” the lots, Holterhoff said. Based on certain criteria — like the size, location and amount of light in the lot — the guide will suggest what types of plants would work best for easy maintenance.
Building Value, a nonprofit agency that salvages reusable materials, will collect materials such as brick and wood from unusable parts of the blighted buildings, and the DAAP students will plan for potential landscaping uses of the materials.
The class will present a book of potential uses for the empty lots to Keep Cincinnati Beautiful and city officials in March.
“They even went a little deeper into how to look at the community as a whole and what’s going on in that certain area, and maybe take these lots and connect them to make a public space or a garden,” Holterhoff said.
Most of these lots are privately owned, and even if the funding to transition the lots to a usable public space becomes available, the private owners would need to donate the land, Holterhoff said.
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