During my senior year at UC, I wrote some articles for my journalism classes with the peerless professor Jenny Wohlfarth. While they didn’t end up getting published, I still appreciate them, and so I figured I’d post them here as writing samples.

This article covers the Brent Spence Bridge expansion and its effect on the historically neglected West End neighborhood. I wrote it in May, which means it’s already pretty outdated in how it evaluates the city’s planning. The new promise to build a cap over the highway downtown is cool, but I would think it rules out the Ezzard Charles cap that I mention in the article, which I think is a shame.

Regardless, I am deeply thankful to Noah O’Brien and Mackenly Herron for giving me their time. Noah especially made me thoroughly reevaluate my thoughts on the subject. We progressives love to imagine a city where all the housing is affordable and all the transit is perfectly local and sustainable, but the realities in a neighborhood like the West End are infinitely more complex than we on the outside often think. This 2024 Enquirer article is a great resource on the housing policies that still plague the community, and the people fighting for a better future.

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April 24th, 2026

In the middle of the 20^th century, I-75 was built on top of a graveyard. To make way for the highway, the Queensgate factory district, and the suburban investment that would come with it, the city of Cincinnati bulldozed nearly 3,700 buildings across 450 acres. Over 25,000 people—97% of whom were Black—were displaced. This story played out in cities across the country as the interstate highway system was constructed, in places like the Bronx in New York City and Sweet Auburn in Atlanta. Like those other Black neighborhoods, the West End was sent into decades of poverty and neglect. Over the last decade, an average of 35 people have been shot each year in the neighborhood. The median household income hovers around $20,000 per year, with nearly half of all residents below the poverty line.

The neighborhood may currently be facing its most significant inflection point since that highway construction. After years of grumbling from constituents around the tri-state, the Brent Spence Bridge Corridor is finally being developed into a more modern iteration. The corridor, where I-75 and I-71 combine to cross the river into Kentucky, has long been maligned as a bottleneck that combines long-haul cargo with local downtown traffic, all along a bridge in desperate need of a makeover. The new plan is to build a new bridge to separate local and commercial traffic among 16 lanes, which requires I-75 to be reconstructed for a mile in either direction, through Covington and the West End. In April, the city broke ground on the highway realignment to set the stage for a project that will likely cost north of $4.4 billion over six years. With that kind of investment, Cincinnati has a rare opportunity to repair the damage done to the West End.

Noah O’Brien, who has served on the West End Community Council’s executive board for nearly a decade, is no stranger to hardship. As a young man, he dropped out of high school, ran with a bad crowd, and ended up serving 8 years in prison on federal drug and firearm trafficking charges. After being released and renting a cheap apartment in the West End, he quickly learned that, “If you’re poor, you really don’t have housing choice. There’s no tree-lined street in Madeira where I’m going to live coming out of prison.” He began working in a St. Bernard chemical plant, which funded him all the way through Master’s degrees in engineering and business. He now lives on Mound Street, in the same predominantly Jewish corner where his wife’s grandmother grew up.

O’Brien says the Community Council began to rethink its development approach with the construction of TQL Stadium in 2021, which caused an uproar among progressives over the preservation of housing. It was around the same time that developers like Seven Hills Neighborhood House began pushing hard to develop more income-restricted housing in the neighborhood. Seven Hills, whose chair Alexis Kidd has never lived in the West End, “is essentially all of the city’s community engagement,” according to O’Brien. “What does community engagement mean? It means different things to different people. To the city, it’s just a box to check.” He did his own community outreach along Linn Street to discern the balance between gentrification and abandonment. “Each way, I would ask every single person I went by whether they wanted the stadium,” he says. “100-percent of the people said yes. I said, ‘But what about displacement? What about all this negative stuff people are saying?’ And about 80-percent of the people said, as one man put it, ‘It’s about the jobs, baby.’”

The city required FC Cincinnati to fund a housing study to quantify how the stadium would affect local housing. That study ended up outlining for the Council exactly how much of the neighborhood was income-restricted: close to 80-percent. “It really hit us on the Community Council side,” says O’Brien. “We get this data that was supposed to be the ammo to attack [FC Cincinnati.] And it was actually the ammo to show that this is designed for failure.” Rather than showing a need for affordable housing, it showed an excess of it, and a glaring need for market-rate housing to support a working population. the report put the Council on a trail that eventually led to a 2024 lawsuit against the city under the Fair Housing Act, alleging that the city had intentionally flooded the neighborhood with income-restricted housing to protect affluent White areas. O’Brien, along with other local leaders like Chris Griffin, Nick Johnson, and the late O’Dell Owens, began campaigning against affordable housing in the neighborhood.

“The kids in this neighborhood really need economic diversity,” says O’Brien. “When a kid walks out his front door, and he looks 300 doors this way, 300 doors that way, he’ll never see somebody that has a normal job. What’s he going to aspire to be in life? You’re a product of your environment, and this is the environment they have intentionally designed. They’ve literally created zones that can be nothing but poverty.” When locals look at the highway realignment, economic development is among their primary concerns, contrary to the city’s political sentiment of fighting gentrification and investing in social infrastructure. “We just built CityLink 15 years ago in the West End,” says O’Brien. “It was over $20 million, that project. They have amazing programs, mental health counseling… We already did it and more people got shot. Clearly that’s not the causation variable.”

The Fair Housing lawsuit will likely be considered for a formal investigation this fall, but before the city can worry about that, it must deal with another 2024 complaint that could hold up the Brent Spence Corridor project altogether. This one comes on environmental grounds, citing the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA.) The Coalition for Transit and Sustainable Development (CTSD,) an organization that advocates for accessible, multimodal transit in Cincinnati, claims that developers did not properly investigate the potential environmental impacts of the project. The goal of the lawsuit, which is currently being considered for trial by a district court, is to force the city to consider alternative strategies that would reduce the impacts of pollution, habitat loss, and car dependent infrastructure.

Mackenly Herron is an organizer for CTSD, two years out from an Environmental Science degree at UC. “This is not a political thing,” She says of the lawsuit. “This is a standard procedure… you need to consider the environmental effects of other possibilities.” The Coalition has built their advocacy on a grassroots door-knocking campaign led by organizers like Herron, particularly focused in Covington and OTR. “The majority of people didn’t even know about the highway expansion and didn’t want it,” says Herron. “People who live on one side of the river and work on the other… they don’t want to drive a car and have to look for parking. They want to take a bus or a train and get to work in five minutes.”

CTSD’s argument against the highway expansion is one that’s been widely supported by research: widening highways doesn’t typically reduce traffic in the long run. A 2015 report by the National Center for Sustainable Transportation found that most recent highway expansions across the country saw traffic volume catch up with, or even exceed the new capacity within 10 years. The theory of induced demand posits that adding lanes to a highway naturally incentivizes more drivers to use those lanes.

Brad Mank, professor of environmental law at UC, says the NEPA case is “much weaker now than it would have been in 2024.” Since the original filing, federal powers have significantly reduced NEPA’s effectiveness as federal law. President Trump’s ‘Unleashing American Energy’ executive order repealed the federal authority to enforce NEPA guidelines given by the Carter administration, leaving the law as little more than a suggestion for developers. With NEPA precedents largely wiped out, the case can only appeal to the internal regulations of state transportation authorities, which Mank says “aren’t as broad as the [federal] regulations were. There’s still some regulations, but not as many.”

Even more damaging, Mank says, was a unanimous 2025 Supreme Court decision on Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which set a precedent that local agencies should “focus just on direct impacts, not indirect impacts” in regard to the environment. “That puts in question whether they have a duty to look at climate change or any of these generalized things.” While CTSD does name the specific land costs of the Brent Spence project, particularly 90 acres of forest inhabited by the endangered Indiana bat, the lawsuit is largely predicated on a general opposition to prioritizing highways over more sustainable transit. Even if that sentiment is reflected by the community, it remains to be seen whether it is a legally enforceable standard in 2026.

CTSD is a subsidiary of the Devou Good Foundation, a project of Signature Hardware founders Matt Butler and Rebekah Gensler. In the years since selling their business, they’ve poured the proceeds into a no-car agenda for Cincinnati, paying for traffic calming measures across the city and lobbying for expanded public transit. O’Brien is deeply skeptical of Devou, doubly so given one of the foundation’s primary allies. “They donate money to Seven Hills,” he says. “So Seven Hills adopted their vision of actually closing the highway altogether and making it a boulevard… and I like that aggressive kind of urban planning, but this stuff was just not feasible.” Devou’s most realistic proposition, according to O’Brien, is to create tolls on I-75 to discourage car traffic altogether. “Nobody in the West End will support a toll on that bridge,” he says. “Not one.”

The toll measure and boulevard design are just a few of the alternatives that CTSD proposes in its campaign, and Herron and the other organizers consider tolls to be a last resort. “What we’re really interested in is public transit, walkability, things that make it easier to get around, not harder,” Herron says. “The goal is to not need things like congestion pricing, because not everybody has to drive on the highway.” Her opposition to the highway is predicated on the prospect of redirecting those funds toward a modern rail system or true restoration of the old West End grid. Still, O’Brien characterizes CTSD’s idealism as indicative of an out-of-touch perspective that West Enders have come to resent.

The other transformative vision lobbying the Brent Spence project came from a group called Bridge Forward, led by Ryan Laber and Brian Boland. Laber independently developed a plan to redirect I-75 completely and restore the old pre-highway West End, which he presented to the Community Council back in 2020. O’Brien says it was “literally the most brilliant thing I have ever seen when it comes to urban planning in Cincinnati… you can tear this all out and build the West End again.” When it became clear that City Hall would never agree to such an ambitious vision, Boland, who had developed his own vision for Brent Spence as a Master’s thesis at Xavier, brought Laber onto his Bridge Forward team. Boland had the backing of development firm GBBN, real-estate giant Greg Fischer, and even an unlikely alliance of former mayors John Cranley and Mark Mallory. Devou and CTSD also support Bridge Forward’s ultimate goal of shrinking the highway’s footprint. Together, the team developed a proposal to condense the existing highway and cover it with a cap that would restore up to 30 acres spanning between Fourth and Sixth Street.

Crucially, O’Brien cites Bridge Forward as the first organization to really listen to the Community Council and conduct extensive focus groups to find out what residents wanted. “Bridge Forward ended up being the community engagement,” he says. “That was the missing link to all of this.” Bridge Forward made a priority of reconnecting the street grid and restoring land, pitching the area for retail space and a new arena. Ultimately, as costs for the project ballooned far past the original $2.8 billion, ODOT rejected Bridge Forward’s preferred proposal for a capped highway, but it brought the team in to consult further on the project. Eventually, they landed on a compromise that would restore 11 acres for the West End, which is now the official plan.

For the West End, the priority is twofold: create jobs and bring in market-rate housing. Barring any broken promises from City Hall, that’s exactly what the restored land will be used for. “Having the new neighborhood from freed up land, or even the arena there… that’s a net positive,” O’Brien says. “That’ll impact day-to-day lives and create jobs where West End kids can go break that cycle of poverty. I can’t overstate how important that’s going to be.” While groups like Seven Hills and Devou generally oppose upscale business and above-market-rate housing, O’Brien sees such developments as critical to community restoration. “If that ends up being more income-restricted housing, it would just be devastating after all the work that the community did.”

Possibly as a consolation prize for the cap downtown, the city agreed to create a cap along Ezzard Charles Drive as it crosses the highway towards Union Terminal. O’Brien hopes that space could be another source of valuable jobs, while eliminating a barrier that separates the community from one of Cincinnati’s greatest landmarks. “Please get us retail on that cap,” he says, “We’ll do anything to get retail on that cap. Make it feel like we’re walking over a street, not a highway.” That kind of development is still years away, but the Community Council is clinging to the city’s post-realignment zoning proposition, referred to as “Revive 75,” as a sign that the new land around the new highway won’t be neglected the way it has been. However the housing lawsuit resolves, West End leaders hope it will give them the leverage they need to push the neighborhood in the right direction.

ODOT clearly wants to get the Brent Spence project underway as soon as possible, if only to be done with the decade-long political headache it’s turned into. That may cost Cincinnati the opportunity to consider the more future-minded, sustainable designs presented by CTSD and Bridge Forward, but the economic realities in the West End demand such urgency. “Right now, we have by far the best strategy that they could have picked of all the realistic options, without question,” says O’Brien. “Bridge Forward won the battle over who would be the voice of the community.”