Soapbox Cincinnati / March 22, 2022
Lower Price Hill is a largely Appalachian community, with nearly half of its residents living below the poverty level. It is bordered to the east by Mill Creek, which, as its name implies, was used by factories along its watercourse to dispose of industrial wastes. The neighborhood’s southern border is U.S. 50, a highway that sees thousands of vehicles a day. It is home to the region’s largest wastewater treatment plant, where about 100 million gallons a day are processed. The Bengals once practiced in Lower Price Hill, on Spinney Field, but departed in 2000, complaining of foul odors and bad air.
So what better place to begin to restore some greenness to the urban jungle?
“Lower Price Hill has an incredible environmental injustice legacy,” says Tanner Yess. “It’s a tough place to live, but progress is being made.”
Yess leads Groundwork Ohio River Valley, a nonprofit that has set up shop in the neighborhood and taken a deep dive into its history of housing and environmental abuses. It engaged residents in drafting a climate resiliency plan, assembled and paid a small workforce of neighborhood youths, and began to create what it says is Ohio’s first climate-safe neighborhood.
The effort started small, but its plans are big.
It calls for increasing the tree canopy in the neighborhood, where public spaces are largely made of asphalt and concrete. It calls for green roofs, or rooftop gardens, on top of some of the large flat roofs of businesses to cool building temperatures and reduce the urban heat island effect. And it sites locations for community gardens and green spaces.
Its team has helped build a stormwater retention basin. (The low-lying community, at the confluence of Mill Creek and the Ohio River, is prone to flooding.) They’ve helped develop and maintain a walking trail, and have planted fruit trees in vacant lots.
Next up is a project to intensively monitor the quality of the air that residents breathe. Using grants from the U.S. EPA and University of Cincinnati, they’ll set up air monitors near ground level at a dozen or more businesses. They plan to pay residents to carry wearable air-quality monitors to get data on the air they actually breathe, instead of the air several stories higher, where air monitors are usually situated.
“We’ll get a true picture of particulate and other indicators of air quality,” Yess says.
For Groundwork, engaging the community around the issue of climate change is a way to create long-term change. “We use climate-safe neighborhoods to be the driver and the rationale to do what we do: community development and workforce development, especially for young, diverse people,” Yess says.
People like Mohagany Wooten, who heard a presentation from Yess when she was a freshman at Oyler School, Lower Price Hill’s public school.
She got involved, seeing it as a chance to do something outdoors and an opportunity to learn about the environment. Now 17 and a junior at Oyler, she has helped clear invasive species from a vacant lot, planted trees there, and worked on a rooftop garden at her school.
“It’s fun to be a part of it,” she says.