Walnut Hills Real Estate Study Cincinnati, Ohio
Services Provided
Strategic Planning
Engagement
People Involved
Emily Silvius
Andrew Overbeck
Real estate study acknowledges past successes and sets future goals for a growing neighborhood
The neighborhood of Walnut Hills in Cincinnati Ohio has undergone significant change since the adoption of the Walnut Hills Reinvestment Plan in 2016. Guided by a robust community engagement process, this plan established many neighborhood-wide initiatives to return Walnut Hills to its former identity of “the second downtown” within the City of Cincinnati. One of the driving goals of the Reinvestment Plan is to “create a targeted and action-oriented investment plan”, which lead to the establishment of three neighborhood Focus Areas in which to concentrate any investment resources and dollars. Guided by this initiative and the involvement of the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation, all three focus areas have seen significant redevelopment.
As an addendum to the original Reinvestment Plan, the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation (WHRF) partnered with MKSK to conduct a real estate study with two goals; create a “summary of success” in regards to redevelopment following the 2016 Reinvestment Plan to serve as marketing material for future projects, and determine an updated set of real estate targets internal to the WHRF.
The WHRF invited neighborhood and city leadership to form a stakeholder committee that participated in engagement sessions and shared their insights on the neighborhood throughout the duration of the study. The committee helped select which opportunity sites were advanced into future real estate targets and provided feedback for each of the redevelopment scenarios.
To identify these future real estate targets, MKSK updated existing conditions maps, catalogued neighborhood assets, and inventoried past and ongoing development projects. Through this analysis, a refined map of opportunity sites was revealed. The sites that showed the strongest potential for redevelopment were brought to the WHRF and the Stakeholder Committee in order to identify the five most appropriate to advance into redevelopment scenarios. Redevelopment scenario alternatives were drafted for each site, and MKSK partnered with Development Strategies to run high-level feasibility analysis so that the plans were realistic in their land use goals. The plan preferred by the WHRF and Stakeholder Committee was further refined and included in the final plan document. Along with the redevelopment plans, a list of short-term and long-term strategies were included for implementation so the WHRF could see the site plans come to fruition.
