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and a Realtor, Reiber earned enough to live large in L.A., buying a house in the coveted West Hollywood neighborhood.“Los Angeles was my home,” he says.“Cincinnati was just where my parents lived.” But the Queen City started to loosen up as Tinseltown was tightening. “As I got older, I wanted a change,” says Reiber. “The traffic started to drive me crazy. Cincinnati offered the opportunity to work less, travel more, and have a better quality of life without so much stress.” From his new home in Walnut Hills, he divides his time between working remotely, globetrotting, and volunteering. Kok and Reiber are the new breed of urbanites ushering worldly sophistication into Cincinnati’s core neighborhoods. That tide, in turn, draws in like-minded people. The area’s cost-of-living advantage is, as the kids say, redonk. In addition, the pandemic has shone new, positive light on secondtier cities where people, who are increasingly working from wherever, can inhabit larger living spaces in greener settings. Cincinnati’s population is stable, perhaps even growing, as more denizens seek work/life balance and start families here. Of course, Cincinnati isn’t the only affordable hamlet in the country. There are myriad other reasons people are choosing it over, say, Nashville or Philadelphia. The appeal is not just tangible goodies like affordable symphony tickets, insanely lush parks, and our darling Fiona. It’s the cumulative je ne sais quoi, where geography meets ethnicity—a soft Southern-adjacent body with a sturdy Teutonic backbone.
SEEKING CONNECTEDNESS, BEAUTIFUL SURROUNDINGS, AND KIND PEOPLE, I MADE MY HOMETOWN HOME AGAIN. By Laurie Pike
as we settled into the intimate venue. I cocked my head like a perplexed puppy. “Polyamorous,” she explained. “People who engage in shared open relationships.” That, too, was new to me. As I pondered the concept, two men approached our table and started to chat us up. Unlike the hippie-ish, middle-aged poly posse, they were clean-cut and young, maybe still teenagers. Holy Porkopolis, I realized. They’re Amish on Rumspringa! That was that. I was moving back to Cincinnati. The city was definitely stimulating and weird enough for me. To the surprise of my colleagues and friends, I flew back to L.A., packed up my old Volvo, and drove across the country. I’m not the only one who unexpectedly ricocheted. “There’s more to do in Cincinnati now than there was when I left it,” says James Kok, a 41-year-old management executive who moved to Manhattan in 2001. He returned in 2015 after a telecommuting job opened the possibility of being on hand to help his parents run the Blue Gibbon restaurant in Paddock Hills. “Findlay Market reminds me a bit of New York,” he says. “And when I saw that a place downtown had hung lanterns for a Chinese New Year, I thought, Things have changed.” As an Asian American, he was abundantly aware of being a minority in Cincinnati. Less so in New York, of course, and he brought a newfound self-assurance back home with him. “My three nephews here in Cincinnati are not teased for being Chinese the way I was in grade school,” he says. “I was called Fortune Cookie. They get love notes!” Unlike Kok, another recent boomerang, Tom Reiber, 53, says he Cincinnati offered could not have returned during the me something ascending years of his career.“I was unexpected on my ashamed to be from Cincinnati,” visit home: excitehe says, citing the Robert Mapment. So I packed plethorpe art show controversy up my old Volvo of 1990 and other things that in L.A. and drove underscored the city’s puritanical reputation. As a lawyer back here to live.
“CINCINNATI HAS GREAT ENERGY,” SAYS ABBY ALLEN, WHO runs the brand strategy and marketing agency Neon Butterfly. “Spiritual energy,” she adds, referencing Serpent Mound. A self-described “New Yorker through and through” with an Ivy League degree, Allen would parachute in from the coasts for meetings with Procter & Gamble. Her colleagues would deride the destination as a backwater. “I remember wondering, Why is Cincinnati the butt of all these jokes?” she says. Though the city felt “foreign” to her on business trips, she sensed something different in Cincinnati when she looked through the lens of possible residency—the respite she’d been seeking from the rat race and the opportunity to make a bigger impact in local and even national politics. (“As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”) She worked on Kate Schroder’s campaign for Congress last year, while her fiancé, Ethan Perry, became president of the North Avondale Neighborhood Association. Perry, a Southern California native who works in tech, was visually seduced by Cincinnati. “The juxtaposition of the old architecture with public art, like the murals, plus all the revitalization were signs that good things were happening.” Cincinnatians he met were almost suspiciously enthusiastic about the city. “There’s a stereotypical Midwest politeness that I was not used to.” Allen and Perry are not without their reservations about Cincinnati, and neither am I. We all find it hard to make friends. Social circles seem less fluid here. The slower pace can be frustrating; Allen was pulled over by a cop after honking at a motorist camped at a green light. Much more seriously, everyday racist remarks and microaggressions are C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 4 0 39