Why We Should Abolish 3CDC

In 2003, under Mayor Charlie Luken, the city inaugurated a (semi) privately-funded and tax-exempt development corporation, the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation, otherwise known as 3CDC. Their goal was to transform the long scorned and neglected, historically Black, Over-The-Rhine (OTR) and its surrounding areas into an attractive place for wealthy business owners, investors and developers. This decision was made fresh off the heels of unrest in OTR following the 2001 murder of Timothy Thomas, an unarmed Black teenager, by CPD officer Stephen Roach. OTR had become exceedingly unattractive for investors and was, in casually racist fashion, deemed “the most dangerous neighborhood in America.”

Unelected and Unaccountable

According to their Web site, 3CDC has been involved in more than $2 billion in projects since 2004. 3CDC's Board of Directors boasts members of Cincinnati’s powerful corporate class, including executives from Proctor and Gamble, Western & Southern, Kroger, GE Aviation, Fifth Third Bank, Deloitte and Touche, PNC, and Macy's. No labor leader, minister, priest, rabbi, health expert, credentialed urban planner, or ecological researcher sits on the Board. As Miami University professor Thomas A. Dutton wrote in 2024

3CDC is self-appointed and self-incorporated—no one voted for their board but the board itself, and then after its establishment the City essentially surrendered public decision-making to it with no provision for grievance or recourse. 3CDC endures without accountability to anyone but itself for both so-called successes as well as failures.

On top of its funding from private donors, 3CDC also receives local and state tax dollars to support their activities, meaning the average Cincinnati resident has money taken out of their pockets to fund a private entity. Their wealthy Board of Directors enjoys the exclusive right to decide what the redevelopment of Downtown and OTR will look like based on their own economic interests.

Displacement, Gentrification & Homelessness

Instead of securing affordable food and housing for poor and working people in OTR, 3CDC works to have these people removed altogether. Since its inception, 3CDC has overseen the transformation of OTR—by evicting and displacing families who’ve lived there for generations—from an underserved working-class neighborhood into a playground for yuppies and tourists, and a goldmine for landlords and developers. 3CDC’s efforts have effectively destroyed the neighborhood's Black and working-class culture. U.S. Census Bureau data shows that, from 2010 to 2020 (under the purview of 3CDC), OTR’s Black population decreased by 44%, while its white population grew by 74.9%. 

3CDC works for the ruling class, not the people of Cincinnati. So-called “redevelopment” under 3CDC has been a classic neoliberal scheme to convert public wealth into private property for a tiny clique of oligarchs and capitalists.

Cincinnati Socialists supports the development of parks, libraries, schools, and gathering spaces for everyday Cincinnatians. However, we oppose the work of 3CDC because it takes from the broad masses of the city's people and puts profit for the few before the common good. The fate of the Metropole Apartments in the 600 block of Walnut Street is an illustrative example. The Metropole was built in 1912, and since 1971 it served as affordable downtown housing for working-class and poor people. 3CDC bought the building in 2009 for more than six million dollars, and upon acquisition, evicted all 207 of its tenants, many of whom were elderly and disabled. 

3CDC facilitates and actively carries out a process as old as capitalism itself—the process of enclosure and privatization that began in Europe in the 1400s and continued on a global scale in the forms of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialist warfare. 

OTR and 3CDC has also served as the blueprint for private development firms all over Cincinnati. Neighborhoods like College Hill, Northside and Madisonville, to name only a few, are on a similar path of transformation from working-class neighborhoods to places with upscale restaurants and unaffordable housing. The driving up of property value, making housing less and less affordable for working people, has also contributed to Cincinnati’s increase in homelessness. In 2025, homelessness in Cincinnati and across the country is the highest it's ever been. We are seeing the homeless community freezing to the sidewalks because the city’s oligarchs would rather focus on spending $240 million dollars on the Cincinnati Convention Center. 

Resisting 3CDC

In 2017, 3CDC conspired with the Board of Trustees of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County to sell the North Building of the downtown library, again with the goal of developing the property for private profit. This time, however, the outcome was a bit different. Through a tireless campaign of education and public protest, a coalition of socialist organizers, nearby residents, and library patrons was able to halt the sale of the North Building. To be sure, this was a small victory for the people, but it demonstrated that the theft of the commons by 3CDC can be effectively opposed. When the people make their voices heard in the streets, and even take their struggles to the very boardrooms of Cincinnati's oligarchs, we can win. In this struggle, unity and solidarity are crucial. As David Madden and Peter Marcuse have argued in their book In Defense of Housing,

[H]ousing movements can potentially forge mutually supportive alliances with participants in a huge number of other struggles. The concerns of housing activists overlap not only with a variety of urban, anticapitalist, antiracist, and feminist movements, but also potentially with the environmental justice movement, the labor movement, LGBT movements, activism surrounding migrants rights, disability rights, prison reform, community health, and many other sources of mobilization.

The important thing to remember is that the city and its spaces belong to the people. The people's needs—housing, sustenance, leisure, education—must therefore take precedent over profit and property.

For all these reasons, Cincinnati Socialists argues that, in the end, 3CDC should be abolished and replaced with a democratically elected planning commission, one accountable to the public and focusing on the goal of decent housing for everyone.

We also acknowledge that entities like 3CDC, and all the problems for poor and working people that they and others like them bring, are the natural result of capitalist development. As Friedrich Engels says in his 1872 pamphlet “The Housing Question”

As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labor by the working class itself.