Dorothy Bush stands next to a babbling stream surrounded by native plants in South Fairmount. She's showing me the Lick Run Greenway, a $100 million project completed by the Metropolitan Sewer District in 2021.
The stream had run through an underground tunnel prior to that. MSD brought it back to the surface and built an enormous park and natural runoff control system around it.
Bush loves the results.
"They've done a beautiful job of creating what the neighborhood asked for," she says.
But Bush says that kind of investment has been rare during her 30 years in South Fairmount. And it's even rarer that anyone asks the neighborhood what it wants.
She feels like most people in the city don't really see her community, or the other low-income neighborhoods that nestle just west of the Mill Creek along the north-south thoroughfare of Beekman Street — North Fairmount, Millvale and South Cumminsville.
Together, those communities are called the Beekman Corridor.
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"They're pass-through neighborhoods," she says. "How fast can we get from here to there and get out of this neighborhood?"
A path forward?
That could change in the coming years. Lick Run was just the start of big projects underway along the entire Beekman Corridor.
Those include a new $335 million Western Hills Viaduct replacement running right up to South Fairmount.
And there are a number of remediation efforts by development nonprofit The Port on some of the remnants of the heavy industry that once dotted the neighborhoods, including millions to clean up pollution in the hulking former Lunkenheimer Valve building that looms over the Lick Run.
In many ways, Lunkenheimer symbolizes the corridor's industrial past, one that stretches back into the 19th century and once provided stable jobs to the area's residents. But all that industry also left pollution and vacant buildings as it ebbed starting in the 1970s.
People left with the industry. South Fairmount went from about 4,100 residents in 1980 to just 2,100 in 2020, Census data shows. That decline triggered a decades-long period in which little investment took place in the corridor neighborhoods.
Now that investment is starting back up. The Port says it hopes to clean up places like Lunkenheimer to make it possible for developers to build industrial or residential projects there, bringing jobs and people back to the neighborhoods.
Another big project in the works: plans for a bike and walking path running from South Cumminsville, through the Fairmount neighborhoods all the way to Lower Price Hill. The path through the Beekman Corridor could better connect it to Downtown.
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That's something Tri-State Trails Director Wade Johnston spends a lot of time thinking about.
"It's really important that we don't just invest in the affluent communities that are asking for trails and active transportation, but we also prioritize the communities that lack access and some of the political capital that affluent neighborhoods have," he says.
The proposed path would be one of the last links in a city-wide bike network called The CROWN. Some of the other links in that network have gone to neighborhoods with higher median incomes and more political pull, Johnston says.
On the flip side, Johnston acknowledges that the rush of investment into the Beekman Corridor could cause unintended consequences, like rising rents and property taxes. That includes the bike trail.
"We know that the trail can have development outcomes that can sometimes be detrimental to lower-income communities," he says.
Cautious optimism
That's a worry Bush has. She's excited by the prospect of a bike path and other investments that could entice people to move to her neighborhood. And she wants traffic safety improvements that will make her neighborhood more walkable.
But she's also seen houses near hers up for sale for much higher prices than in the recent past.
Property taxes in South Fairmount went up 66 percent on average after the last valuation by the Hamilton County Auditor, and Bush wonders how affordable the neighborhood will be as it changes.
Valerie Glenn has similar concerns. She lives where the bike trail would start in South Cumminsville, the northernmost neighborhood along the Beekman Corridor.
Like South Fairmount, there's a lot of recent activity here.
The Port recently got $5 million to demolish an abandoned garbage incinerator at South Cumminsville's southern edge. Last year, it removed the enormous Early and Daniel Silos, an industrial site that had become extremely blighted.
The portion of Beekman Street that passes through South Cumminsville is getting traffic calming measures and a bike lane to make it safer for residents there to get around.
Glenn is mostly optimistic about the changes. But she says sometimes people from outside the community have a simplistic view of residents here — what they want and need. She has a simple question:
"What is the benefit of this bike trail coming through South Cumminsville?" she asks.
Her hesitancy has historical roots. Glenn points out South Cumminsville hasn't seen much city or private investment since I-74 tore through the neighborhood in the 1970s.
The highway split Cumminsville into two neighborhoods — South Cumminsville and Northside. That split, combined with deindustrialization, caused the neighborhood's population to plummet, from a peak of almost 7,000 in 1960 to little more than 700 in 2020.
Glenn wants some of the neighborhood's vibrancy back. She'd like to see more businesses here, more trees, and more opportunities for youth to connect with nature via the neighboring Mill Creek.
"Just to beautify the area," she says. "To me, most of the areas that look really nice have trees. When you're going down Beekman Street, there isn't a tree anywhere."
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But Glenn also wants long-time residents like her to be able to stay. Lately, she says she's gotten lots of calls asking to buy her house. And the average property tax bill went up more than 33 percent in South Cumminsville after last year's valuations. That's a lot, she says, especially for people on fixed incomes.
Residents like Glenn and Bush haven't been waiting around for outside investment to make their neighborhoods better.
Glenn has been involved in South Cumminsville's community council and helps run the neighborhood's community gardens.
Bush is active with the Beekman Street Corridor Coalition, a group aided by nonprofit Working In Neighborhoods and comprised of residents of all four neighborhoods focused on issues like pedestrian safety and equitable development.
And there are other grassroots efforts, including a thriving monthly farmer's market in North Fairmount.
The Port and Tri-State Trails say they want coming changes to benefit residents first and foremost. The trails advocacy organization recently got a $550,000 grant from a nonprofit called Reimagining the Civic Commons to find ways to make development in the Beekman Corridor more equitable.
The group says it will continue in-depth conversations with residents like Bush and Glenn, making sure they're part of the planning processes.
Glenn hopes that bears out. She's still open-minded about the bike path, if not completely sold just yet. And she can see a future in which neighborhoods like South Cumminsville and South Fairmount get the attention they deserve.
"I see more people realizing that, even though it's a smaller area, it's a really important area to the city," she says, "instead of us being some of the forgotten neighborhoods."