It must’ve frustrated the city fathers of Norwood back in the 1960s that the street grid refused to line up - that those who originally subdivided and platted the city back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century neglected to plan for the widespread use of the automobile.

Montgomery Road, which is part of Ohio Route 3 - aka Ohio 3-C (Cincinnati-Columbus-Cleveland) - cuts across Norwood from the southwest to the northeast. At a slightly more severe angle, the Conrail tracks set their own bearing, also from southwest to northeast, leaving a pie shaped wedge that, ironically, hosts Surrey Square.

Adding further complication, a section line runs down Section Avenue. If you look closely you’ll find that the intersections don’t quite line up on either side of that road either (running down the middle of the map below, continuing as a dotted red line).

I’ve included the a portion of the USGS map because it shows a bit of the past, where an aerial photo is a snapshot in time. For example, it still shows the Conrail tracks, which are no longer there. Other additions and subtractions are shown in purple.

Urban renewal plans of the early 1960s added the purple connector between Smith and Sherman. Additional realignment “fixed” the intersection of Allison/Section and Sherman, near the high school. Today’s Sherman continues all the way across the run at the west edge of Norwood to Victory Parkway. It is a significant local arterial.

The original Sherman Avenue’s ragtag zigzag would’ve made it far less attractive for east-west traffic. In making it more efficient, the city fathers took traffic away from the intersection of Mills and Carter. This intersection was once anchored by a bank on the northwest, a general store on the southeast, more commercial enterprises on the northeast, and St. Elizabeth Church and School on the southwest, with the lumberyard only another block down Mills.

Only the buildings remember.

In recent history, this intersection was better known for crime and violence - the school building condemned, the parish church empty, the neglected police substation housed in the former bank. Lottery tickets and porn sales out of the remaining storefront on the northeast corner became the sum total of local, legitimate commercial enterprise. The rest had escaped to Surrey Square and, later, Rookwood Commons.

It is easy to see where new slums are spontaneously forming today, and how dull, dark and undiverse are the streets in which they typically form, because the process is happening now. What is harder to realize, because it lies in the past, is the fact that lack of lively urbanity has usually been an original characteristic of slums. “Unslumming and Slumming” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p274-5)

Again and again, Jacobs hits on the diversity of uses - the cross-use, 24-7 eyes on the street. Activity, safety. A police force thousands strong cannot replace this type of self-policing.

Improving the traffic flow was a valid goal, but it had consequences. Retail space is hard enough to fill. Take away the traffic, and it’s almost impossible.

I love this quote and will use it time and again:

[S]lum shifting fails because it tries to overcome the causes of trouble by diddling with symptoms. “Unslumming and Slumming” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p271)

“Blight” is a symptom. We pretend that blight begets blight - a spreading disease, a fungus, an inflammation.

The buildings remember, and provide new opportunities to diversify again:

People are reinvesting in Norwood. My walks are data enough, though qualitative.

Some people would rather pay for improvements in their living conditions partly in labor and ingenuity, and by selecting which improvements are most important to them, instead of being indiscriminately improved, and all at a cost of money. “The Need for Aged Buildings” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p194)

Norwood is surrounded by Cincinnati. It cannot annex new territory for new development. It has built itself out. But why is the housing stock so much older than other built out areas? Has construction ceased? The answer is no. Norwood has seen industrial and commercial construction over the decades that show little to no new housing starts. As mentioned in the previous post, Ohio municipalities live and die by the local income tax. Norwood’s aim, stated or not, is to achieve a fiscally sustainable land use mix.

That houses still stand is not a failure. The construction of a new home simply cannot compete - on price alone - with a renovated, existing structure. The cost of materials and labor is too high. While an example from the world of physics might not be any more accessible, consider the difference between potential and kinetic energy. The embodied energy of an existing building retains value, despite the label of “blight” or the historical lending actions known as district “redlining.”

In successful districts, old buildings “filter up.” “The Need for Aged Buildings” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p193)

These days, it is hard to imagine any housing market improving. Norwood’s may continue to trend up. Perhaps, someday, its market position - price determined by demand - will be able to bear the cost of new home construction. Until then, the supply of bargains is simply too good to pass up.

No new houses have been built in Norwood over the last ten years. The bulk of Norwood’s homes were built over the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Q: Is this a failure?

The Census Bureau’s estimates show a tiny slice of new homes built since 1980, which are completely erased when one looks at the potential margin of error. The homes built before 1940 represent a Pac-Man-sized chunk of the total pie.

Jane Jacobs posits that cities require diversity (referring to uses) in order to maintain functions such as public safety and cross-use. To obtain/retain this kind of diversity, one of the conditions is the presence of both new and old buildings, comingled.

New buildings carry higher costs. For commercial uses, this requires higher rents from established, high-turnover, and/or subsidized uses. Old buildings don’t just carry an intrinsic historical value, time has amortized their construction costs. Riskier or low-yield ventures need old buildings, if but only as an initial proving ground.

While the numbers displayed above only indicate the age of housing units, it is still an interesting case by which to unpack Jacobs’ chapter on “The Need for Aged Buildings.”

Newness, and its superficial gloss of well-being, is a very perishable commodity. “The Need for Aged Buildings” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p193)

Economies of scale in real estate development have conditioned us to accept large swaths territory with buildings of the same age or period as the norm. In many ways zoning (and building) codes prevent the natural, granular change that Jacobs identifies in healthy city districts.

Barring disaster, things stay the same. The impulse Jacobs fights is to wipe the slate clean and start again when a district sputters and fails. It only restarts the cycle.

The only harm of aged buildings to a city district or street is the harm that eventually comes of nothing but old age—the harm that lies in everything becoming worn out. But a city area in such a situation is not a failure because of being all old. It is the other way around. The area is all old because it is a failure. “The Need for Aged Buildings” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p188-9)

It is difficult to diagnose the “failure” of Norwood. Part of it lies with incomplete data, even among the housing unit data I’ve included. Imagine the total renovation of a dwelling through reinvestment. The “year built” stays the same, but the housing unit carries new construction costs.

[P]eople who get marked with the planners’ hex signs are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were the subjects of a conquering power. “Introduction” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p5)

NORWOOD, OHIO - One house remains in the field that was once slated to become the Rookwood Exchange. It is boarded up, empty.

Back in 2007, when I was last here, three houses remained. The Ohio Supreme Court had recently reversed the city’s blight finding that enabled the use of eminent domain powers to take these properties. That reprieve, it now appears, was only temporary, the neighborhood already mostly destroyed.

The would-be-developers purchased this last house for well over $1 million. It remains like a gravestone, marking this fragment of an urban neighborhood, originally orphaned by the construction of Interstate 71 to the west and subsequent commercial development on the other sides.

Norwood v. Horney. Kelo v. New London. Planners, policy makers, land use attorneys, and property rights advocates in an uproar. Stir vigorously.

Out of a position of desperation, Norwood placed the “hex sign” on these blocks. Ohio municipalities all live and die by the income tax. Commercial redevelopment along one of the major traffic corridors in the Cincinnati metropolitan area made sense, if but only for that reason. The consulting planners labeled the area “deteriorating.” Disputable, yes, but even if true the court found that the area must be deteriorat-ED, as opaquely stated in the Ohio Revised Code.

Most of the residents sold their properties straight to the developer - many for prices well above market value. Eminent domain is a valuable tool for the planner and policy maker. It prevents extreme holdouts from defeating municipal projects. However, it can be too blunt an instrument. The outcry over the US Supreme Court’s findings in Kelo also brings up the question of whether this project could realistically be placed under the figurative umbrella of the “public good.”

The Ohio General Assembly erased the dangerous territory in the Ohio Revised Code that allowed these gray area blunders in Norwood (Substitute Senate Bill 277 of the 127th General Assembly) What is a landlocked municipality to do now?

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p6)

Fortunately or unfortunately, there is no blank slate. The urban renewal programs Jacobs decried made this fiction a reality at great expense. They placed a value on a district, purchased the land and buildings in it, and zeroed it out. All existing value - both that quantified in the official appraisal and the additional aspects observed by Jacobs - got thrown out.

At various points, you might find me on either side of the battle here in Norwood. Today, I am much happier to be found around a table in West Norwood. My friends have been here almost 15 years. They have seen the neighborhood change, and have been a part of that change - incremental, unglamorous - house by house, project by project.