New Direction for Ohio's New Deal Town
By Margaret Foster | Online Only | Sept. 22, 2009
All of the four-family houses on DeWitt Court, built in the 1930s, will be gone after the village of Greenhills, Ohio, completes demolition.
Credit: Cincinnati Preservation Alliance
This month a New Deal town in Ohio is in the process of taking down two of its original houses, built in the 1930s. Located 12 miles north of Cincinnati, Greenhills, Ohio, is one of only three of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposed 20 "green" suburbs.
Leaders of the village of nearly 4,000 came up with a plan six years ago to combat blight in its National Register-listed historic district. Since then, 52 housing units have come down. Local developer Potterhill Homes has built nine new prefabricated houses in the area, but empty lots remain in place of other houses that the village has demolished.
The village is in the process of renovating 22 properties, according to Village Manager Jane Berry, who owns a Potterhill house. But "It' not economically feasible to try and rehab some of them. We're a small village; we don't have deep pockets," she says. "It is not about the architecture or the individual buildings; it's about what the New Deal is all about. It's about that sense of place in a community that literally was built from the ground up. That is what really needs to be preserved."
Historic House Hunting?
The village of Greenhills has renovated several houses that are on the market for less than $80,000, Berry says. "We have some homes that are a steal." For more information, call 513-885-0296.
Preservation groups say that if the village wants to be designated a National Historic Landmark, it should be concerned by the loss of any building in its historic district, including the two multi-family houses on DeWitt Court.
"The loss of the buildings on DeWitt is tragic. The court was a beautifully designed, small landscape within the historic district," says Margo Warminski, preservation director of the Cincinnati Preservation Association. "We don't quite understand why [the village] is in such a rush to take the buildings down."
Critics of the village's gentrification plan say some of the houses that have been demolished were in good condition.
"They like to say the buildings are bad, but there's nothing to back that up—there are no experts coming in," says Terri Treinen, board member of the Greenhills Historical Society and a 30-year resident. "It's pretty heartbreaking." (Berry says "many inspections" were done on the houses.)
To make matters worse, original houses are being replaced by "residences that are out of scale and character," in the neighborhood, according to Royce Yeater, director of the Midwest Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in a letter dated April 3, 2006.
At one point, the village owned 135 housing units; today it owns 55, Berry says. When DeWitt Court's structures are gone, the village will own 66 units. "There are no more plans at this point in time to take down any more," Berry says.
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