Development News

A $3 million boost from a national foundation may soon help make local church pews and nonprofit offices a lot more comfortable, and a lot more energy-efficient.

It's an innovative new approach to making energy-efficient upgrades profitable for both loan recipients and lenders that local leaders hope illustrate that the market for conservation-minded upgrades is both robust and profitable. The effort is a partnership between three nonprofits: Greater Cincinnati Energy Alliance, the Cincinnati Development Fund, and the Calvert Foundation, which typically invests in real-estate secured loans and has never before invested in Cincinnati.

The new initiative, called the Better Buildings Performance Loan Fund, leverages federal and foundation money to offer loans at competitive interest rates; the loans must support building investments that increase energy efficiency, says Al Gaspari, GCEA finance director.

While GCEA's focus to date has been on helping homeowners with energy-efficient upgrades, this new initiative expands its role in the region.

"We're initially targeting nonprofit organizations and multi-family dwellings," Gaspari says. Churches, arts organizations and schools rank high on the list of prospective loan applicants. He offers a practical example of how the program can work: An inner-city church with a 60-year-old furnace could apply for a loan, invest in a new energy-efficient furnace and save 20 percent on energy costs. In addition to the monetary savings, the new system could make existing spaces accessible year-round--even during hot summer and cold winter months--thus allowing for expanded programs and services.

"From our perspective, our grant is not dollar-in, dollar-out," Gaspari says. "The goal of our grant is to get people involved and lower their initial risks."

For lenders flirting with the idea of investing in energy-efficiency, the new fund provides a potential sustainable model. "Our overall goal is to show that there is a market for these loans and show that they do perform," Gaspari says.

While the new fund is not yet up and running, he says the GCEA expects to underwrite loans, which will be offered through the Cincinnati Development Fund, before the end of 2012.

As part of the fund, the GCEA will track the energy savings that improvements allow. For investors at the Calvert Foundation, the forward-focused program offers a chance to invest in a program that ultimately conserves energy, reduces pollutants and saves money.

Gaspari and his colleagues see this win-win-win approach as an opportunity to show financiers the wide-ranging benefits of planet-friendly investments.

By Elissa Yancey
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During its spring conference hosted here in Cincinnati last week, CEOs for Cities, a national network of urban, civic leaders, released its second ever “City Vitals” report, a kind of scorecard that measures and ranks key development and quality-of-life indicators for cities around the country.

Using the acronym of CITY (Connections, Innovation, Talent and Your Distinctiveness), report authors analyzed mostly Census data to explore what makes cities vibrant, appealing and successful.

Here’s a roundup of where Cincinnati rates among CEOs’ 51 identified cities and regions.

First, some good news. Cincinnati ranked in the top 20 in the following catgories:

•  Voting. Nearly 65 percent of Cincinnati’s population voted in the 2008 Presidential election, putting us in 13th place. (Minneapolis-St. Paul ranked first with more than 76 percent of the population casting ballots.)

• Community involvement. We squeaked in the top 20 at number 19, with close to 29 percent of the metro population reporting a volunteer effort in the past year. (In Salt Lake City, more than 42 percent of the population reported volunteering.)

• Economic integration. Cincinnati ranked 11th in the percentage of the population living in middle-income neighborhoods, with 76.1 percent. (Minneapolis-St. Paul topped the economic integration list with more than 84 percent of the population in middle-income homes.)

• Patents. Cincinnati ranked 19th in number of patents issued per 10,000 employees with 5.9. (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara dominated this category with 83.5 patents per 10,000 employees. The next closest city, Austin-Round Rock, issued 31.9 per 10,000 employees)

• Creative professionals, or folks employed as mathematicians, scientists, artists, engineers, architects and designers. Four percent of Cincinnati’s workers come from this creative group, making the city 18th on the list. (The number one slot went to San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, where 7.6 percent of the population fits into this category.)

Now, some challenges, or, as we like to call them, room-to-grow areas:

• Greenhouse gas emissions. Cincinnati earned its highest ranking, second, in this not-so-positive category of per capita carbon emissions. While we emitted 3.28 tons per person, per year, Los Angeles emitted just 1.41 tons per person per year. Yes. Los Angeles.

• Entrepreneurship and small businesses. In these increasingly essential categories for cities, Cincinnati ranked 46th and 43rd, respectively. (See Cincinnati growing Cincinnati for some examples of how to increase those numbers significantly.)

• Weirdness index. Cincinnati nearly bottomed out this category with a ranking of 48th out of 51. What this means, basically, is that we tend to buy what everyone else in America buys. Weirdest cities on record: San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara and San Francisco, not surprisingly, rank first and second. But number three? Salt Lake City, Utah. That’s just weird.

The CEOs for Cities report can be accessed in its entirety online. Overall, it provides a fresh lens for city dwellers, city lovers and city officials through which to view the present and plan for the future.

By Elissa Yancey
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When Chris Breeden at Arnold’s wanted his historic business to be the first in the city to offer an interior tour via Google maps, he turned to his neighbors at Alias Imaging for help. He’d seen how Google maps offered 360-degree tours of businesses on the East and West coasts as a way to offer viewers the chance to get a sense of a place’s architecture and ambiance long before, and after, they’d paid a visit.

With help from Alias Imaging, led by co-owners and founders John Carrico and Adam Henry, Arnold’s became the first Cincinnati business featured by Google in a virtual tour.

In the process, Carrico and Henry launched a new business, Alias 360 Photos, and became “Google Trusted Photographers” in order to add panoramic tours to Google Maps’ pages. Henry explains the certification wasn’t an easy process. “It’s not like we just shoot and upload,” Henry says. “It seems simple and natural, but it’s quite painstaking.”

While the duo of polished commercial photographers have worked for a wide range of commercial clients, from Procter & Gamble to local ad agencies to independent businesses like Arnold’s, the certification process required new training on an exacting process that requires them to take dozens of pictures from nearly every vantage point, then use specialized software to conform to Google specifications. On top of all of that, each tour must be aligned with Google satellite images.

“The weirdest thing to me is that it requires so many pictures,” says Henry, who, along with Carrico, also provides the photography and video for The Queen City Project, a partnership with Bluestone Creative that has often been featured on Soapbox.

Because of the tight guidelines, businesses can be assured of high-quality tours that literally add three dimensions to their web presence. Henry sees that as a cost-effective opportunity, especially for smaller businesses. “For hundreds of dollars, you can get thousands of dollars of material which is priceless exposure on the internet,” he says.

Once businesses contract with Alias 360 Photos to create their virtual tours, the photographers get to work, estimating they need no more than a couple of hours of time on-site to get the photos they need. After that point, the Google content is managed for the businesses. “They basically get a whole new website built for them that is hosted on Google places,” Henry says.

By Elissa Yancey
Follow Elissa on Twitter

Managing Editor’s Note:

If you’ve noticed dust settling around The Brandery building in Over the Rhine, that’s because new General Manager Mike Bott is overseeing a massive remodeling project. The building's first-floor space is being renovated for a new class of startups (applications being accepted now) while graduates Choremonster, Road Trippers and Venue Agent will maintain workspaces on the third floor.

Soapbox Media, also a web-focused startup, can be found in the space as well.

In addition to dedicated space at The Brandery on Vine Street, we will also maintain office space in Northside as part of a collaborative office suite we will share with startup local nonprofits.

While the Brandery caters to and nurtures high-tech startups, the collaborative space in Northside serves as a new home for disparate, community-focused nonprofits.

In Northside, at the corner of Hamilton Avenue and Blue Rock, the space currently occupied by Shop Therapy will soon serve as the home for The Urban Legend Institute, the retail store element of the literacy and creative-writing focused nonprofit WordPlay. With creative and marketing support from Possible Worldwide, WordPlay plans to offer preview tours by July.

The second floor of the building houses the offices of the educational nonprofit as well as two other nonprofits: parProjects, which is focused on building a community arts center and providing arts programming in Northside, and 350.org, the local arm of the national environmental nonprofit. (Full disclosure: Soapbox's managing editor sits on the Board of the nonprofit WordPlay.)

One thing that has not changed is the best way to reach Soapbox with your story ideas, questions and comments. Connect with us via email. But if you want to send us a letter, old-school postal-style, you can find us:

Soapbox Media via The Brandery
1411 Vine Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202

Soapbox Media via WordPlay
4041 Hamilton Avenue
Cincinnati, OH 45223

As they prepared for Bike Month, Casey Coston, an OTR resident and avid bike rider, paired up with Mike Uhlenhake, to plan a group ride in the urban basin of Cincinnati. 

After gauging interest via Facebook and holding one planning meeting at Neon's, the Urban Basin Bicycle Club was formed and launched their first ride from Fountain Square April 17. The ride was planned on Tuesday to not interfere with the Thursday evening Slow and Steady Ride, which starts at Hoffner Park in Northside. The UBBC's main goal was to give downtown residents a group ride with a more accessible starting point. 

The first ride brought more than 20 riders sporting bikes from 1960's Schwinn cruisers to road bikes to mountain bikes. They rode along the river, through Sawyer Point and ended with post-ride libations at The Lackman on Vine Street. Since the first ride, two more rides have happened with the most recent leading more than 30 riders, of all skill and experience levels, on a tour past some of Cincinnati's historic breweries. The second ride crossed the Roebling Suspension Bridge and went through Covington and Newport before making the trek back to OTR and ending at Neon's, but not before stopping for a beer on the patio of Party Source. The upcoming ride on May 15 will take riders past all of the Art Deco landmarks in the urban basin, including Union Terminal and the main post office and as always, will end with a post-ride meet up at a local business. 

"We'll be meeting up at a different local business after each ride," says Coston, a Soapbox columnist. "We want to spread our business around and support as many as we can." 

Members of the UBBC will be led on a themed ride each week as a way to explore the downtown area. All riders are welcome and the group makes a conscious effort to keep all riders in one group. Monthly Saturday destinations rides are being discussed, including a potential early afternoon to Terry's Turf Club for lunch and back. Whatever the ride, riders can expect a leisurely, friendly exploration of Cincinnati.

By Evan Wallis (Follow him on Twitter)