Wrecking Cincinnati: Who are the losers?

As Building Cincinnati enters its second year, I wanted to take a closer look at one of my daily features, Wrecking Cincinnati.

I first started writing news on demolished buildings on the Urban Ohio forums.

And in the first few months of this blog, finding content was often a problem. What better to fill some space?

So in July I started it as a weekly feature, and in late August I decided to post one per day.

I would like to stress that I do not consider all of the buildings I post to be important, contributing structures worthy of saving. Some are absolute dumps and have always been.

Still, they were part of our built environment and were once home to Cincinnatians with families, hopes and dreams.

I have taken a look back at some of the homes I have featured, and I thought I'd try to nail down which neighborhoods have been hit the hardest.

I began by finding the number of housing units by neighborhood by using Census 2000 data, the last census for which complete data is available.

I then estimated the number of housing units in each demolished building, fully knowing that this is imprecise. If anything, I made conservative guesses.

Finally, I divided the number of housing units lost by the amount of housing units in the neighborhood and then sorted each neighborhood by percentage.

Again, it's imperfect, but here are the true losers (with percentage of housing units demolished):

1. Lower Price Hill (1.55%)
2. Camp Washington (0.61%)
3. Avondale (0.55%)
4. Northside (0.44%)
5. Corryville (0.43%)
6. Walnut Hills (0.28%)
7. North Fairmount (0.25%)
8. University Heights (0.22%)
9. Linwood (0.22%)
10. Mount Lookout (0.21%)

Some of these numbers can be influenced by the size of the neighborhood, where the loss of one building could inflate the stats. For example, Lower Price Hill only lost two or three buildings, and Linwood one. On the other hand, it seems like I'm posting one or two from Avondale or Northside every single week.

So here is a listing of total number of housing units lost (remember, these totals are only of those that have appeared on Wrecking Cincinnati):

1. Avondale (40)
2. Northside (20)
3. Corryville (9)
3. Over-the-Rhine (9)
5. Lower Price Hill (8)
5. Walnut Hills (8)
5. University Heights (8)
8. South Fairmount (7)
9. Evanston (6)
9. West End (6)
9. East Price Hill (6)

One other caveat about the numbers - almost all of the Corryville demolitions took place on the redevelopment site at MLK and Vine.

I'll do this again in early 2009, since the sample size will be so much larger. Perhaps by then there will be enough information to start tracking some trends.