In Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, Miami students immerse themselves in the dynamics of a community.

A dozen Miami University students spent last fall working with Over-the-Rhine community organizations and renovating apartments to help revitalize the historic Cincinnati neighborhood that too many see only as stricken with crime and poverty.

Although Miami architecture and interior design students have been assisting in that neighborhood’s building projects for a decade, the fall 2006 semester was quite different. For the first time, students from other majors participated. And unlike their predecessors, the students didn’t commute from Oxford, but lived in the inner-city community for 15 weeks. The streets became their classroom, the residents their teachers.

“I went down there like I’m ‘Mr. Know-It-All.’ I was from the city. But when I got down there, I actually learned things too,” said Shawn Thomas, an architecture major from Dayton who was the only black student among the 12 participants in Miami’s first Over-the-Rhine Residency Program.

The community welcomed the students and made them feel at home, said Thomas, who wasn’t sure if they’d be accepted in a neighborhood where rioting occurred in 2001 and made national headlines after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer.

Over-the-Rhine is near downtown Cincinnati and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places because of its 19th century architecture. Despite its hundreds of empty buildings and vacant lots and the neighborhood’s continuing challenges in its efforts to rebound, “there was such a sense of community,” said Thomas, now a Miami senior.

“The majority of people there are black, and they just took in all the people in the residency program like we had been there for years,” he said. “We felt safe and everything.”

Other students said their time in Over-the-Rhine changed the way they viewed the world.

“Before setting foot in Over-the-Rhine, poverty didn’t exist,” architecture major Andrew Shreiner of Indianapolis wrote in a summary paper.

“Secluded by the picket fences, cul-de-sacs, half-acre lawns, and strip malls, my perception was that everyone had the resources and money necessary to live in America. I also believed in the idea of economic opportunity for everyone. However, Over-the-Rhine hit me like a bat hitting an apple.”

Architecture professor Thomas Dutton, director of the program, hoped the students’ experiences would challenge the way they examined issues involving urban life — and that’s what happened.

“When Drew says, ‘It hit me like a bat hitting an apple,’ I think what happened is the way he understood the world kind of crumbled and he had to reconstruct it. That’s hard work,” said Dutton, in his 31st year at Miami. “That needs to happen more often. People need to face uncertainty. When you face uncertainty is when you struggle for meaning in life, and that’s when the learning really occurs.”

As part of the program, students attended classes in Over-the-Rhine, learning about urban planning, gentrification, social work, community engagement, and civil rights.

They also learned outside of class. When they looked out their windows, ventured into the streets, or interacted with community residents, the course material came to life.

“There is still hesitation in my breath as I walk down the sidewalk in Over-the-Rhine,” wrote Shreiner, now a senior. “Should I fear congregated young black males listening to music sitting right outside my stoop? Or what about the men and women who just stumbled out of the alley and can barely open their eyes?”

In her final paper, architecture major Britni Rex of Greenville, Ohio, seems to capture the complexity of students’ feelings when she describes her interaction with community members, which included “pimped out cars with their loud music, the kids on the corner with no supervision, the out-of-town cars passing through where they don’t belong, the cops with their sirens, flashing lights, and loud speakers outside my window, one lonely gunshot late one night, the smell of pot around a corner. …”

Rex, who is set to graduate in December, closes the paragraph by writing: “I cherish every moment I’ve had in OTR.”

Bonnie Neumeier, an Over-the-Rhine resident since 1974 who is the residency program’s community liaison, conducted journal-writing sessions to help students process what they were experiencing.

“Students come with stereotypes and assumptions about the neighborhood and get a chance to break down the stereotypes and see who they are because they get to talk to us, look us in the eyes, and find out who we are,” Neumeier said.

Dutton began bringing architecture and interior design students down to Over-the-Rhine on a consistent basis in 1996 after an architecture student said he wanted practical experience. Dutton, whose education included training in urban design, had worked with Over-the-Rhine housing agencies since the 1980s.

By developing partnerships with groups trying to fix up the neighborhood once the home of German immigrants, architecture students would have the chance to make their classroom designs come to life.

“This was attempting to not only come up with credible designs, but to act on those designs and to build them out,” said Dutton, who wanted students to work with community groups “trying to meet the needs of lower- and moderate-income people.”

For the next 10 years Miami students, interacting mostly with a nonprofit housing development corporation, helped rehabilitate homes and businesses as part of the core of their curriculum, known as the design-build studio. The students drove from Oxford to Cincinnati on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, spent three hours working, then drove home. They learned “an awful lot about architecture and materials and old buildings” but wanted more, Dutton said.

“They were the ones who started saying, ‘Tom, this is really great … but we’re just not learning all that much, or we’re not learning enough about the community.’ ”

The dialogue helped lead to the Miami University Center for Community Engagement, which gives Miami what Dutton calls a “full-time presence” in Over-the-Rhine and also allows students from outside the architecture department to participate in the residency program.

The program’s first year included six architecture majors and six students majoring in other areas including psychology, philosophy, social work, and teacher education. This fall seven of the 12 living and working in Over-the-Rhine are non-architecture students.

While the architecture majors work at their job site under the direction of design-build coordinator John Blake ’92 MArch ’00, the others spend at least 15 hours a week performing community service in such places as neighborhood community centers, the homeless shelter, and Washington Park Elementary School.

Residents welcome their contributions because Dutton and past Miami students have built strong relationships with community members, said Neumeier, adding that the students have been invited into the community, which helps alleviate any mistrust.

“It’s a mutual benefit; it’s not only about the students, the neighborhood benefits too. We’re better off for having them here,” she said.

Students wanting a spot in the program must submit a letter explaining why they’re interested, provide two references and their academic record, and be interviewed by Dutton. Once accepted, students pay for their housing in Over-the-Rhine as well as university tuition.

William Lohr, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s in interdisciplinary studies and a minor in urban planning, said he was hoping the program would help him learn more about the social theories covered in his classes.

From his first night in Over-the-Rhine, the suburban Columbus native realized he was immersing himself in a much different environment.

There is “street activity all the way up until 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning,” Lohr said. “There’s no air conditioning, so windows are open and you can hear a lot of things. I think it’s definitely a little scary.”

Annaliese Newmeyer, who graduated in December with a psychology degree, said she began to view drug dealers in a different light: “I see them as men who maybe had some problems in school and maybe don’t have any other choice to support their families.” However, she said seeing addicts who aren’t getting treatment “can be really psychologically grueling.”

Lohr said he witnessed fights and drug-related activity but didn’t consider either a threat to Miami students because of an extensive orientation program. Students are told not to go out by themselves and are advised against giving panhandlers money “because they will always ask you for it,” Dutton said.

They “learn very quickly to stay out of alleys and learn quickly which corners are the drug corners,” said Dutton, who admits he’s had to assuage parents’ concerns about safety issues in a program that was modeled after a similar effort at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

“There’s no magic thing that I can say,” said Dutton, who tells parents that the only Xavier student to get into trouble in Over-the-Rhine was behaving inappropriately.

Lohr and Newmeyer, a Toledo native whose parents were social workers, remained in the community after graduating. Both have full-time jobs at the Peaslee Neighborhood Center, where they worked during the residency program. Newmeyer lives in Over-the-Rhine, and Lohr lives nearby.

“After coming down here and really experiencing it — I don’t want to say ‘live it’ because I’m just observing it — it made me realize this is really what I wanted to be doing,” Lohr said.

Newmeyer now hangs out with her co-workers from Peaslee, women who are “barely getting by,” she said.

Living in the community helps her “empathize with their struggles,” she added. “Now I’m poor too. I’m in the same boat almost as them. So it definitely makes me appreciate where I’ve come from.”

Thomas wasn’t expecting his white classmates to have such good experiences with the residency program.

“I thought they might regret it, somebody’s car might get stolen, it might leave them with a more negative view than they had. But to see how it changed their lives was a really big thing for me too.”

The students’ growing attachment for the community surfaced in the journal-writing sessions.

About halfway through the semester, after making a trip to Oxford to hear a lecture, the students revealed that they started feeling more comfortable in Over-the-Rhine than at Miami, Dutton said, explaining, “They felt they were part of something that was much larger than their individual selves.”

For more details, visit www.fna.muohio.edu/cce.

Andy Resnik ’97 is a Columbus-based journalist.

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