Once you notice it, you can’t unsee it: Cincinnati’s political class has turned into a comfort club. The same people congratulating each other, issuing statements, hosting panels and collecting salaries while the rest of us deal with the consequences. They stay in office. We stay stuck. When leaders drift, the city drifts with them. Cincinnati isn’t failing because of a lack of ideas. It’s failing because the people in charge have gotten comfortable. And when leaders become comfortable, the city around them becomes stagnant. We’ve watched the same debates repeat for a decade, the same promises recycled, the same neighborhoods ignored. We don’t need more ribbon cuttings — we need direction.
So here are five pillars for a Cincinnati that actually works for its people again. Not a vision board. Not a press release. A real plan — something you can point to and say, “Finally, someone is actually talking about the city we live in.”
1. Keep young people in Cincinnati by finally building real transit.
At the University of Cincinnati, students talk constantly about where they’re moving after graduation — Columbus, Chicago, Nashville, etc. It’s not because they dislike Cincinnati. It’s because they don’t see a city that’s building for them. Real transit changes that. Cincinnati has spent years treating transit like a theoretical exercise. Meanwhile, the cities that are growing — Salt Lake City, Nashville, Oklahoma City — treat it like infrastructure, not fantasy. They build simple, high-frequency routes that actually get people to work, school and entertainment without guessing when the next bus might show up. If Cincinnati wants to compete, it needs dedicated transit lanes on its busiest corridors, 10-15-minute all-day service, and a system that connects UC, downtown, the hospitals, job centers and neighborhoods without detours or excuses. Young people aren’t asking for a subway. They’re asking for efficiency. Build that, and they’ll stay.
2. Redevelop a police force we respect by making it stronger and fairer.
Public safety isn’t just a talking point to me. I didn’t grow up reading press releases about crime; I grew up hearing my mom tell the stories she brought home from the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office after days that would flatten most people. The kinds of cases that make a city tense, the ones where the stakes feel high and everyone is waiting to exhale. Hearing those stories when I was young taught me what law enforcement actually looks like: stress carried in your shoulders, danger you pretend doesn’t scare you and moments so chaotic nobody forgets them, even if they never get written down. I very much respect the Cincinnati Police Department. Because I respect them, I’m not going to sugarcoat this: we’re trying to handle 2025 problems with a department built for a different decade. We need faster response times. We need officers on the streets where people actually live — the streets that call 911 every day while City Hall pretends everything is fine. And we need the spine to remove the handful of officers who make the job harder for everyone else. If you want models, look at Fort Worth or Tampa, places where visibility and discipline aren’t buzzwords — they’re the basic expectation.
Good officers should get backed all the way. The ones who cut corners or rack up complaints shouldn’t sit on payroll for two years while City Hall hopes nobody brings it up. Everyone knows this happens; pretending it doesn’t is an insult to the officers who still believe in the mission.
Cincinnati has the talent. What it doesn’t have is leadership willing to stop staging press conferences and start setting standards. Give CPD a chief who enforces expectations and gives officers real tools and real technology, and this city will feel different within months. Keep drifting, and we’ll keep getting the same problems dressed up in new talking points.
3. Build, build, build — but make sure ordinary people aren’t steamrolled.
If Cincinnati wants to grow, it has to build, but growth without guardrails is just displacement with better marketing. We can’t keep shoveling incentives to out-of-town developers while working families get priced out of neighborhoods they’ve anchored for generations. Loosen zoning. Allow more density. Build more housing — without letting anyone treat our neighborhoods like blank slates. Good development should add density without erasing identity — more housing above the street, not housing instead of the street. Growth shouldn’t feel like an eviction notice disguised as progress. It should feel like a city expanding into the future with room for everyone. It starts with making the decisions everyone knows are necessary — but everyone hopes someone else will make.
4. Cut the waste. All of it.
We’ve seen pilot projects launched with fanfare only to fade out quietly after a year. We’ve seen grant money sit untouched while business corridors fall apart. And we’ve watched major city initiatives burn through millions without basic tracking or accountability, operating on momentum instead of measurable results. Everyone knows the pattern — motion without progress, announcements without follow-through. This isn’t drift anymore, it’s inertia disguised as leadership. A city that can’t keep track of its own projects has no business asking people for more money. Fix the basics before passing the bill to everyone else.
Cincinnati doesn’t need higher taxes. It needs adults who stop wasting the money we already have. Every resident can feel the waste: endless committees, redundant programs, reports that die in drawers and initiatives that seem designed more to employ insiders than solve problems. Before City Hall asks for another dollar, it should prove it can handle the billions already collected. Cincinnati needs a lean, independent accountability unit with real authority to identify waste, shut down useless spending and force City Hall to justify every program with results, not press conferences.
5. Clean up our neighborhoods and bring back real business.
People don’t leave cities because of ideology. They leave because their neighborhoods feel abandoned — dirty streets, broken lights, empty storefronts and a City Hall that only pays attention when it needs a photo op. Cincinnati doesn’t need another marketing campaign. It needs basics: clean streets, functioning corridors, small-business support that doesn’t require three months of paperwork and a city government that treats every neighborhood like it matters. A great city doesn’t start with slogans. It starts with the corners of everyday life feeling cared for again.
Cincinnati can do better. So can its leaders. And yes — either the people in charge change, or this city will need people who actually will. Cincinnati has far more potential than anyone in power seems willing to acknowledge, buried under routines and rituals that haven’t meant anything in years. The insiders won’t change it — they’re the only ones the current version of the city still works for. Everyone else is stuck living between the Cincinnati we have and the one we keep describing: a city that keeps its young people, backs its police, builds without bulldozing, stops wasting money and treats every neighborhood like it matters. Low turnout isn’t confusion about elections, it’s people quietly admitting they don’t believe City Hall’s decisions have much to do with their lives anymore.
Cities don’t fall behind because they lack ideas. They fall behind when the people in charge get comfortable and start mistaking motion for progress. Cincinnati has been doing that for a long time. You can hear it in the speeches, feel it in the drift, see it in the neighborhoods that haven’t been touched in a decade. A city becomes the story it tells itself, and right now Cincinnati is telling a story much smaller than its own reality. Committees and press releases aren’t progress, and nobody outside the comfort circle believes they are. Cincinnati works almost perfectly for the people who run it — just not for the people who live in it. The moment that gap becomes impossible to ignore is the moment everything changes. The drift won’t hide it. And the quiet people won’t stay quiet much longer.
Thomas Maddox is a senior at the University of Cincinnati, studying finance. He writes about Cincinnati politics, development and the issues shaping the city’s future.