Cincinnati’s first-ring suburbs face unique challenges. Changing demographics, economic stability, and issues regarding resources and security are common threads among these jurisdictions.
The ways the 49 Hamilton County cities, villages, townships, and municipal corporations not only adjust but thrive is the focus of this series, First Suburbs—Beyond Borders. The series explores the diversity and ingenuity of these longstanding suburban communities, highlighting issues that demand collective thought and action to galvanize their revitalization.
Don Kessel has lived in the village of Fairfax since he was 9, and his roots in the tiny community go deep. Some years ago, he and his wife bought the house he grew up in on High Street, when it became available after his mother bought her brother’s house in the neighborhood and moved there because it was easier to get around, being all on one floor.
Some years ago, before everything was on the internet, Don got interested in what was happening in town and started attending council meetings. “I'd see things going on in the village, and wonder what was happening,” he says. “You’d see dirt moving or construction and wonder what was going on. I just started going to the meetings.”
He became a regular, and when a seat on village council opened up, the mayor approached him about it. “Nobody else is running for this spot, and you’re here anyway,” the mayor said. That was 14 years ago and Kessel has been involved since then. Now he’s heading up a committee that’s examining one of the most exacting, thankless, yet essential parts of municipal governing: zoning.
For about two years, Kessel and his committee have been overhauling Fairfax’s zoning regulations, using a model zoning code adopted by the Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission in 2022. The commission had found that, particularly in some of the county’s older and smaller first-ring suburbs, the zoning codes were outdated, perhaps even unenforceable, says Chris Schneider, a county planning administrator who is working with communities on the model code.
The county hired a consultant, created a committee that included architects andothers who make use of zoning codes, and developed a model that can be adapted by individual jurisdictions. Fairfax, and an equally small village on the west side of the county,
North Bend, are the first to make use of it.
Fairfax’s zoning code was first adopted in 1955 and although it has been amended many times since then, the most recent changes occurred in 2016. It doesn’t deal with some developments that have become popular since then, like food trucks – where and when they can operate – or regulations around short-term rentals such as AirBnBs.
"What we're really doing is cleaning up the regulations that we had, because over the years, the needs have changed," Kessel says.
And in Fairfax, a town one square mile in size, with just 791 households, recent years have seen a trend of older homes being torn down and newer, bigger ones being built on those lots. Teardowns, as they’re called, have been part of the landscape for several years in upscale communities such as Montgomery, Madeira, Hyde Park, and Indian Hill. But it’s a relatively recent phenomenon in working-class Fairfax, where many of the existing homes were built 80 to 100 years ago.
“We never realized this would be happening,” says Village Administrator Jennifer Kaminer. Although the trend of new investment in housing is welcome, it can come with its own problems, especially as teardowns and rebuilds can quickly change the character of a neighborhood, and impinge the property rights of neighbors.
On Germania Avenue, a quiet street where most of the homes are small and tidy and whose construction dates to almost a hundred years ago, several new, larger homes have been built on teardown lots. Scott and Elizabeth Hacker bought their two-bedroom home on Germania in 2005 for $105,000. Across the street, a four-bedroom, three-bath, two-story was built in 2017 that now has a value approaching $400,000. And two doors down from the Hackers, a new foundation has been poured for a house being built on the site of another teardown.
“It doesn’t bother me one bit,” Scott says. He moved to Fairfax after a divorce with two young children. The house was affordable, and “I needed to move somewhere where there was a good school district.”
That’s a big draw for the community, as it is part of the Mariemont School District, which is consistently ranked among the best in Southwest Ohio. With the
median price for a home in neighboring Mariemont at $650,000, families with school-age children can buy in the same school district next door in Fairfax, where the
median sale price is $286,000.
"The school system's been a huge draw in bringing those people in," Kessel says. But families with children may want something bigger than the typical 950-square foot house built in the 1920s that makes up much of the housing stock in Fairfax. "They don't want tiny closets or just one bathroom, and we only got one square mile of the village." So, very little space for newer upscale housing developments.
Fairfax has also attracted retirees Dick and Sally Neff, who moved to Germania Street from out of town about eight years ago to be closer to their grandchildren. They learned about Mariemont after staying there for their son’s wedding years ago, and liked it. “We wanted to live in Mariemont, but the taxes there are very steep,” says Dick, who, at 93, has been retired for decades. So they found the one-bedroom, one-bath house on Germania for $149,900 and now enjoy the quiet street from their front porch.
They are not concerned either about the teardown across the street from them, or the one two doors down. “I think it’s great because the value of all the houses will go up,” Dick says.
But at least one of the new homes on another street caused a dispute with the next-door neighbor when it was built too close. And there are concerns about grading and water runoff from the new construction. Those are the kinds of concerns that can be addressed in a zoning code. The new code is also meant to be simpler and easier for developers, businesses, and regular citizens to navigate.
“It's going to be easier for anyone looking at it to know right away whether they can do what they want, be it a business or a residence, with the property they're looking at,” Kessel says. “Before, it just wasn't very clear.”
Fairfax’s zoning came into play recently on a large vacant property on Wooster Pike (U.S. 50), the main drag through town. The property had been zoned mixed use/light industrial and could have been used to build a warehouse, fast food drive-through, or car wash. But the town changed the zoning to residential, allowing what is expected to be 30 townhomes to be built there instead, and protecting the highly visible property from commercial development.
Schneider says updated zoning allows community leaders to control how their towns develop and evolve. Kaminer agrees. “We want to be able to control the land use in our community,” she says.
That is critical in any community, but especially so in older, first-ring suburbs, many of which are largely built out but still need to attract new residents to stay healthy.
The dry work of keeping zoning current with the times is critical to influence how a community and its built environment look. “It should be a reflection of how the leaders of a community see their vision,” Schneider says. “Their long-range plan and the code should be a reflection of that.”
The First Suburbs—Beyond Borders series is made possible with support from a coalition of stakeholders including the Murray & Agnes Seasongood Good Government Foundation - The Seasongood Foundation is devoted to the cause of good local government; Hamilton County Planning Partnership; plus First Suburbs Consortium of Southwest Ohio, an association of elected and appointed officials representing older suburban communities in Hamilton County, Ohio.