A Pitiful Puff Piece on UC’s Development Consortium That Can’t Slide by Without Comment
I really shouldn’t have let this one go by for so long.
A month ago the Enquirer put out an ridiculous puff piece about the Uptown Consortium. This is the group dominated by the University of Cincinnati that had its hat handed to it by a state appeals court over an eminent domain dispute relating to certain properties that the Consortium had taken. The Consortium was able to do this thanks to the old version of Ohio eminent-domain law that the Ohio Supreme Court threw out last year (as I understand it, preemptive takings are no longer legal). The area in question is a roughly three-square-block area between Calhoun and McMillan south of the University of Cincinnati Campus that was to become known as McMillan Park. The condo development was already known to be in deep financial trouble six months before the state court made its ruling.
That ruling, which in essence said that the taking shouldn’t have happened and that the compensation paid wasn’t fair, will only add cost to the McMillan Park project as the two victorious holdouts demand a higher amount of money (the holdouts’ properties have since deterioriated to the point where I can’t imagine they would want to keep them).
The area involved is now three vacant blocks of real estate that is, like the school’s losing basketball team, going nowhere.
So I guess the Enquirer has been tabbed the designated PR recovery vehicle for the feckless and largely futile Consortium. That’s the only possible explanation for drivel and wishful thinking like the following actually making its way into what is supposed to be a major big-city newspaper:
….. (The Consortium) has transformed itself into a development powerhouse. Included in the $325 million commitment is up to $75 million in approved investments from UC’s Endowment, money that otherwise would have been invested in the fixed-income market.
Joined by nearby hospitals and the Cincinnati Zoo, UC has helped form the Uptown Consortium to spark development in seven neighborhoods that collectively are one of the region’s biggest employment centers. It has helped finance apartments and retail near the Medical Center campus off Martin Luther King Drive and restaurants underneath student housing on Calhoun Street.
It hasn’t all been a success. Some of that retail space along Calhoun remains vacant, and across the street, the McMillan Park development is on hold until they can complete the financing.
Safety on and around the campus remains a problem.
But the big picture is clear, one of a university determined to integrate the education of its students with a thriving urban atmosphere, even if UC has to go out and create that atmosphere itself.
Even if they have to bulldoze the community to save it. Zheesh. One wonders if Enquirer reporter Cliff Peale isn’t drawing two paychecks.
