Inspired by the community effort that went into the rehabilitation of the Historic JournalNews Building, architect Mike Dingeldein said he will retire from his partnership in SHP Leading Design to pursue similar community-based projects.

Dingeldein and his wife, Cindy, an interior designer who retired from SHP three years ago, have formed Community Design Alliance to support the revitalization of downtown Hamilton.

“The Journal building was a wake-up call for me,” he said. “It took a lot of effort by a lot of people to find someone to buy it, someone to use it, someone to finance it. It took a lot of players, a lot of leaps of faith and 18 months to bring people together.

The building is currently under renovation, making significant alterations to the interior and the entrances, yet retaining as much of the original style and character of the building as possible. Its tenants currently include Miami Valley Ballet Theatre and portions of the Options Academy of Butler Tech. Hamilton City School District’s ABLE adult learning classes will also be located there.

“Someone has to orchestrate the process and that’s where I see myself,” he said. “I’ve been doing things like this my whole career, but it’s really been dominated by big public projects.”

Doing this kind of work, he said, wasn’t a fit for SHP, whose work is largely focused on those “big public projects,” such as the Hamilton City School District’s recent construction efforts, Dingeldein said.

“Mike will retain a role at SHP as a principal on key projects,” said SHP president Lauren Della Bella, “but will spin off a new storefront community design practice.”

“Mike has tremendous personal passion for the economic development of communities,” Della Bella said.

“SHP is our first and greatest alliance,” Dingeldein said. “All of their resources will be available to me, but we will be a small firm with small overhead and able to take on smaller projects.”

Some of the projects, however, may not be so small. There are a lot of unused spaces in Hamilton that Dingeldein has an eye on, from the former Champion/Smart paper plant and the empty Elder Beerman building to the Hungry Bunny storefront next to the SHP offices, which Community Design Alliance will share in the Mercantile Building on High Street.

“This building is a good example of that,” Dingeldein said. “It was weeks away from demolition, but acquiring Historic Preservation Tax Credits allowed us to step in and save it.”

The Dingeldeins believe the availability of those credits may be the key to revitalizing downtown Hamilton.

“A lot of people perceive historical development to be the only game in town,” Cindy Dingeldein said. “All these buildings are just sitting there, fabulous structures that need rehabilitation and creative ideas, and that’s where we come in. We’ll be small enough to do small projects but have the resources behind us to take on the bigger ones, too.”

“We believe in the potential for the city to regain it’s status,” Mike Dingeldein said. “A vital downtown really is an ingredient to a successful city. SHP has been in Hamilton for 110 years, but when we moved downtown, we had a huge impact on the downtown core.

The Dingeldeins will also assume leadership of the recently-announced CORE Fund, a public-private partnership led by the City of Hamilton, the Hamilton Community Foundation and First Financial Bank to provide resources such as tax credits and financing options for projects within the urban core.