CINCINNATI — The Banks development was meant to be a new front door for Cincinnati: A 24-hour entertainment destination with a wharf, public landing, boardwalk, and attractions that would extend along the riverfront like a string of pearls.
Twenty-five years after local leaders approved that design plan, The Banks has nine empty acres, and no developer whose job is to fill them.
That could be a problem for taxpayers, who’ve already invested $1.7 billion in the streets, utilities, garages, and stadiums that enabled the project - with no end in sight for the bills yet to come.
“I don’t think taxpayers have gotten their value at all, not even close. And it’s really a shame,” said Chris Bortz, a former Cincinnati Councilman who worked extensively on The Banks during a 6-year period that began in 2005. “This is about creating an architectural gem, a community gem, something we can all be proud of. And I don’t think we have that now. I give us a C-minus at best.”
Watch: We break down what was supposed to be at The Banks vs. what is there now
Hamilton County leaders declined to be interviewed for this story, but spokeswoman Bridget Doherty provided a statement on behalf of a city-county partnership in charge of The Banks.
“This partnership has allowed us to move forward jointly on a flurry of initiatives,” Doherty wrote. “Together, we have turned a mud pit into a welcoming gateway community to the city and county and we look forward to building on this momentum.”
The city and county are now reviewing bids from urban planners, who will re-assess The Banks and make recommendations for its future. They’re also seeking a developer for Lot 24, a 2.6-acre site one block east of Paycor Stadium. And they’re continuing conversations with an office developer who owns air rights at 180 Walnut Street.
But they’re taking these steps without the advice of the Joint Banks Steering Committee, an advisory panel of business leaders that weighed in on every important decision during The Banks project’s first 20 years.
“The JBSC was formed at a time when it was helpful to have a third-party bridge communication between the city and county. Currently, the city and county enjoy a fantastic working relationship,” Doherty wrote. “The city and county will continue to involve stakeholders as they consider development options to ensure transparency and participation.”
The steering committee hasn’t met since 2019, even though a city-county cooperation agreement on The Banks requires it to meet at least quarterly. Once known as the Banks Working Group, the panel led by Cincinnati Reds owner Bob Castellini has been waning in influence for years.
“It is a colossal failure of leadership that the working group has become essentially defunct,” Bortz said. “Let's get some new blood in there and let's reinvigorate the working group and maybe put the brakes on another bad idea or series of bad ideas.”
Unmet potential
The WCPO 9 I-Team reviewed the state of The Banks on its 25th anniversary and as it approaches a critical juncture.
The future of Paycor Stadium is in limbo because the Bengals' lease with the county expires next year. The Banks may also lose the Heritage Bank Center. Many leaders want to build a new arena on the western edge of the city’s urban core, which would drastically reduce visitors and customers to the riverfront.
Two recent disclosures reveal how far off-track The Banks project has veered from the city and county’s vision in the Central Riverfront Urban Design Master Plan of April 2000.
The first disclosure came in December – in bidding documents for an urban planner. It showed the project has generated far fewer housing units, hotel rooms, and office space than its master developer, the Atlanta-based Carter Co., envisioned in 2007.
That plan doubled the scale of The Banks to 2.8 million square feet, but Carter built less than half of what it proposed before walking away from the project in 2017.
Commercial real estate expert Carl Goertemoeller said there isn’t enough density to guarantee long-term survival for the 21 restaurants and retail establishments that operate at The Banks today.
“You need that critical mass of retail for it to really be successful,” said Goertemoeller, a former Macy’s executive who now runs the Real Estate Center at the University of Cincinnati. “Give a lot of credit to the tenants that are down there. They have made it work for the most part. But my sense is they are overly reliant on baseball games and football games, and that’s a tough formula.”
The second important disclosure is that the Joint Banks Steering Committee no longer advises on the project’s future.
That is a stunning development, compared to the project’s origins.
Bortz said the city and county fought in the early 2000s over how to build the garages that would lift The Banks out of the floodplain. So, early attempts to get the project started kept stalling – until Bob Castellini convened the Banks Working Group to move things along.
“I think it’s fair to say that it wouldn’t have happened without Bob,” Bortz said. “We’d still be looking at a big hole down on the river had Bob not stepped up and really forced people to the table.”
The working group chose Carter as The Banks master developer and helped to negotiate its contract. As it morphed into the steering committee, its oversight of public infrastructure at The Banks was required by a 2007 cooperation agreement between the city and the county. It calls for “not less than quarterly” meetings to discuss “project status, budget, construction, scheduling,” economic inclusion, responsible-bidder requirements “and any other matters pertaining to the public project.”
“I don’t think it’s been useful for years,” said former Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken, who was surprised to learn that he is still listed as a member of the Joint Banks Steering Committee. “It doesn’t meet. It doesn’t get any information. It doesn’t make any decisions.”
The committee last met in September 2019.
Doherty claimed its members still receive quarterly reports on the project from Project Executive Phil Beck. But Luken said he didn’t get those reports and thought the group had disbanded.
Bortz said the steering committee could have been a valuable resource for The Banks. He would have liked to see it transition from the business leaders who started it, to planners, developers, and financial experts with no direct involvement or conflicts of interest.
Instead, he argued, it became an advisory group dominated by Tom Gabelman, whose law firm, Frost Brown Todd, billed thecounty more than $25 million for its work on The Banks since 2000.
“It was a power vacuum,” Bortz said. “And so, the county deferred to their attorney who had been involved since the beginning.”
Gabelman defended the work his law firm has done to transform the riverfront and protect the interest of taxpayers. In a statement, he wrote in part:
“The benefit, value and return on investment to Hamilton County taxpayers from retaining Special Project Counsel to sustain and advance Cincinnati’s Riverfront Development far exceeds the cost of such services by a factor of more than 20 times … the redevelopment of the riverfront has become a major economic driver in the region with over $2.3 billion in economic (impact) annually.”
Block by block
To get a better sense of how well the project is being managed, the I-Team zeroed in on four major blocks where recent decisions have been made since the steering committee last met in 2019. Each summary shows how the blocks were envisioned in 2000, and how those plans evolved since then.
Block 4
Bordered by Second Street, Freedom Way, Main and Walnut, this block was projected in 2000 to have office, retail, hotel and residential uses. Instead, it has a 300-unit apartment building with 77,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space. It also has an unfinished development parcel at the corner of Second and Walnut, known as Lot 26.
At the steering committee’s last meeting in September 2019, Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co. proposed a $90 million office building for the site. That led city and county leaders to sign a development contract with Lincoln in 2020 and extend the deal in 2023.
“We remain committed to future development at The Banks and our partnership with the city of Cincinnati and Hamilton County,” said Peter Kelly, executive vice president for Lincoln Property. “We look forward to providing an update in the near future.”
Goertemoeller expects Lincoln will propose a different use for the site because the pandemic – and remote working options – decimated the office market nationwide.
“You're not going to see office developed there for a number of years,” said Goertemoeller. “However, if somehow they can land corporate tenant, who's looking at Class-A, state-of-the-art office space, and would want to plant their flag in that area, that could be a game changer.”
Bortz questions why the office deal wasn’t scrapped before it was extended in 2023.
“The priority ought to be, ‘Let’s fill out the rest of the blocks. And let’s take a look at this office deal that clearly isn’t going to get off the ground,’” Bortz said. “That’s what the working group needs to be re-constituted to address. And, I think it has to be re-constituted.”
Block 6
Bordered by Freedom Way, Vine and Race Streets, and the ICON Festival Stage, this block was described in the 2000 master plan as “four stories of prime residential units above ground floor restaurants and shops.” Now, it’s known as Lot 24, a development-ready site with two floors of garage space and support pillars to accommodate new buildings above.
The lot is considered the most valuable of the remaining empty lots because of its open views of Smale Park and the Ohio River, which could support luxury condominiums or apartments. In 2018, Jeffrey R. Anderson Real Estate proposed an $85 million residential development on the site, but the proposal never got built.
“The City and County Banks Project Teams will recommend one or more of the finalists as the Developer,” said the document. “Over the longer term, it is expected that the City and County will provide input toward strategic planning decisions and development for The Banks.”
Lot 24
The 2018 proposal came in a year when critics complained the Joint Banks Steering Committee was meeting in secret. So, it isn’t clear why Anderson, the only bidder, wasn’t selected. The proposal asked for the city and county to construct a development podium atop the unfinished garage and turn the site over for $1. It also requested a 15-year, 75% tax abatement for all residential units and free parking for its office, gym and entertainment uses.
Bortz said a better-equipped steering committee might have been able to negotiate a more attractive deal for taxpayers.
“Everything is negotiable and I think a real estate developer understands that,” Bortz said. “It doesn’t matter what those documents say, we’ll figure that out later. Let’s figure out what we want first, what’s best for the community first. And then we can go back and renegotiate, change the deals so that we can do what we all envision we want.”
Block 1
Bordered by Second Street, Freedom Way, Elm and Race streets, this block was depicted in 2000 with a seven-story office building on its eastern edge and a five-story residential property on the west.
This block is now a surface lot. It’s one of three blocks at The Banks that can’t be developed until garages are built.
A 2018 deal reserved this block for Bengals tailgaters until the county could finalizethe purchase of Hilltop Basic Resources, a concrete-mixing plant that will be demolished this spring.
That memorandum of understanding helped toresolve a controversy.When Columbus-based PromoWest Productions proposed a concert facility in 2016, the Bengals had a lease provision that prohibited any “auditorium with a seating capacity of more than 3,000 persons” west of the Roebling Bridge. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra offered a rival concert venue.
The Joint Banks Steering Committee settled the dispute with a bidding competition, which CSO’s Music and Event Management Inc. won.
The Bengals waived its lease restrictions in exchange for the county’s promise to buy Hilltop and in the meantime ensure 3,200 tailgating spaces were available near Paycor Stadium.
In September 2019, Gabelman prepared a 20-page public memo that explained how the Bengals lease interferes with the development of The Banks.
“In each of the three instances that The Banks development has advanced west of the Suspension Bridge … it has been necessary for the county to seek the Bengals’ review and modification to existing development guidelines” in its lease, Gabelman wrote. “Absent such modifications, development of such lots would not have advanced.”
But Gabelman added that the county and the Bengals had agreed “to address potential modifications … in a proactive manner” by retaining an urban planning consultant through the Joint Banks Steering Committee.
More than five years later, as the delayed Hilltop sale was being finalized in December 2024, the city and county finally began to look for that urban planner. But the request for qualifications made no mention of the steering committee.
Instead, the city and county formed a new team to review bids: two city employees, and three county employees, plus Phil Castellini whose family owns the Cincinnati Reds, Caroline Blackburn, whose family owns the Bengals and attorney Tom Gabelman.
To Bortz, this is another missed opportunity for a re-constituted steering committee.
“The working group wasn’t structured how it should have been to create a real counterweight to the interests of the two sports teams,” Bortz said. “How do we negotiate with them and get a development that’s good in the long term for the whole city and not just for the Reds and for the Bengals. And we really missed the boat there again because the working group maybe didn’t have the authority.”
Block 10
Perhaps the biggest variation from the 2000 master plan happened in Block 10, originally designed as a two-story “pavilion in the park” restaurant that would extend from Theodore Berry Way to the river.
The plan changed in 2007, when Carter & Co. proposed a high-rise residential tower that fronted Elm Street between Mehring Way and Theodore Berry.
Neither came close to being built. And today, the site contains the Andrew J. Brady Music Center and Black Music Walk of Fame.
Hamilton County decided to build the Walk of Fame in 2021, without seeking guidance from the steering committee. This year, the county posted an RFP to put a guard booth on the site at an estimated cost of $200,000. Last year commissioners unanimously voted to approve a three-year contract for unarmed security guards to protect it for $831,670.
“Who’s pushing a guard shack and why is that necessary? Is that really a priority? I don’t think so,” said Bortz. “Well, that’s the kind of pushback you’re going to get with an active, functioning executive team. And that’s what the working group should be.”
