When John Barrett, President and CEO of Western and Southern Financial Group, returned to his native Cincinnati after a stint in New York City 30 years ago he says he was struck by a couple of things: “Cincinnati was not a city on the move and it was not a place our children would want to come back to.”
Sound familiar?
In the decades since, Barrett and the Cincinnati Business Committee have led efforts to bring the city back. They worked to redevelop its riverfront—which includes two new stadiums for the city’s professional football and baseball teams—and revitalize a 19th-century neighborhood now home to young professionals and empty nesters as well as the bars, restaurants and entrepreneurs that follow them.
“Young people are coming back here now,” Barrett says. “Things are happening that are kind of exciting.”
To hear Barrett and his fellow business leaders share the secrets of this success—as they did this morning with Baton Rouge civic and business leaders on the Baton Rouge Area Chamber’s Regional Canvas Benchmarking workshop—it sounds easy.
It was not. It look a lot of work, and there is still plenty more to do in a city that, like Baton Rouge, struggles with poverty, a homeless population, a weak mass transit system and poor health care outcomes.
But the main takeaway was this: The business community in Cincinnati is driving the change and has done so for the past 30 years. Multiple businesses and economic development groups work closely together and in coordination with one another.
One striking example is how the largely downtown-based business leadership group called the Cincinnati Business Committee, comprised of corporate CEOs, created a large group of suburban and mid-cap company executives to help create broader and necessary support for investing in redevelopment projects in the city’s urban core.
The CBC also created a development corporation with its own capital that it now leverages to attract federal New Markets and historic building tax credits to tackle redevelopment projects.
And, it created a public-private partnership called Cintrifuse that is working to develop a tech economy in Cincinnati by providing small startups with access to office spaces, networking opportunities and capital.
“We would not exist without these large companies,” says Cintrifuse CEO Wendy Lea. “The CEOs in this town put their money where their mouth is.”
The access to capital piece is huge. Four years ago, a group of corporate executives here established a fund for startups with $57 million of their own corporate investments. Today the fund is worth $3 billion, at least on paper.
“The CEOs in this town saw we were behind in risk capital and they didn’t say, ‘Oh let’s go out and get startups,” Lea says. “They said we need provide capital to attract startups.”
