Cincinnati's biggest neighborhood has a problem: rundown properties.
But activists got some big help from the city - $1 million to buy vacant buildings and demolish them. They now are being allowed to help decide which properties should go.
"I feel like we really can't move forward with anything until we get rid of some of these," said Jim McNulty, president of the Westwood Civic Association, the neighborhood's community council. "It's the key to everything else."
• Click through a graphic showing the doomed dozen buildings.
The goal is to knock down eyesores in high-visibility spots in favor of grass for now and, hopefully, replace them eventually with single-family homes.
The eyesores are obvious when driving along Harrison Avenue, said Councilman John Cranley, the native West Sider who led efforts to give Westwood some of the money.
"As I've said many times, you get off Harrison onto Werk Road, or Cyclorama, and there are some gorgeous homes," he said. "But driving up and down Harrison, you'd never know that. It's just awful."
He blamed lax zoning regulations decades ago for allowing many multi-family properties to crop up in Westwood.
That gave a path for developers during the 1960s and 1970s, he said, to put up apartment buildings they hoped would bring them more money than single-family homes. Westwood residents complained, cajoled and begged for years. They got four torn down by the city in 2005, and pressed for more.
Council agreed in March to give them $250,000 from a housing demolition fund and $750,000 more from one of Westwood's tax-increment-financing districts. The latter means the city gives the money up front, banking on getting it back in future tax revenue, revenue that's expected to increase over time and when the dilapidated buildings are replaced with something better.
Of the dozen suggested for demolition on the community council's original list, four already have demolition orders against them through the city's process of taking owners to court for failing to keep up their properties.
The rest are owned by private owners, companies and banks that bought the properties to protect their investments after forfeited loans.
The reasons for the upkeep failure vary, too, from aging owners to absentee landlords.
Westwood will be home starting next week to the city's latest Neighborhood Enhancement Program - City Manager Milton Dohoney's program that dedicates representatives from every applicable city department from police to buildings to a neighborhood for a 90-day focus period.
Demolitions also could come about as part of that process, too. They have in previous NEP programs.
In Westwood, where more than 36,000 people live, the housing is 60 percent multi-family. The community council would like to see a shift, to 60 percent single-family homes. McNulty thinks some upscale houses - in the $350,000 range - would be a good start to bring about what he calls a better balance to the neighborhood.
"Apartments aren't bad," he said. "I love all these four-families here - they're part of Cincinnati. But we've got to stabilize our neighborhood.
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