The CORE Fund is hoping to put some economic meat on Hamilton’s “good bones.”

The Consortium for Ongoing Reinvestment Efforts Fund kicked off Wednesday afternoon with a gathering of stakeholders — including investors, city government and local business leaders — at Miami Hamilton Downtown to unveil an effort to take advantage of the momentum that has been building in recent years.

“This is an idea that’s been long in coming and took a lot of people to pull it together,” said Executive Director Mike Dingeldein.

CORE is a not-for-profit organization that has been designed to pro-actively orchestrate economic development efforts between public and private entities, focusing on — but not limiting itself to — three specific areas of Hamilton: the downtown central business district, the area around the former Champion/Smart paper plant, and the East High Street/Dayton Lane area.

“We know that for every million dollars in investment, we expect a return of $10 million,” said City Manager Joshua Smith on the possible economic impact for the city.

The CORE Fund operates by pulling together “special financial resources in the re-development toolbox,” Dingeldein said, and providing planning and design assistance for businesses and individuals looking to invest in the re-development of existing city resources.

Its board of directors includes Claude Davis, CEO of First Financial Bank; John Guidugli, president of the Hamilton Community Foundation; and local attorney Lee Parrish, who also serves as general counsel for CORE.

Using models from across the country of successful urban re-development initiatives, including Cincinnati’s recent revitalization of the Over The Rhine district, Dingeldein said that the time is right for CORE for three main reasons.

First is the fact that American cities are starting to rediscover the value of the “urban fabric,” and that for the first time since the 1950s, over one-third of the population is now living inside cities.

The second thread, then, is the existence of a number of existing buildings that are ripe for development in a way that is less expensive and have a greater return than destroying and rebuilding.

“We have a city of good bones,” he said. “The economy does not allow us to do large-scale development anymore, and the more stakeholders we have involved the more resources we have.

“We take it for granted because we were born here, but (Hamilton) was built on the backs of the industrial age. Those industries are gone, but not really. People come here and tell us how fortunate we are” to still have the infrastructure in place that the industrial prosperity of the region provided.

“If you let your fabric build and you don’t screw it up, it’s still there when you need it,” he said. “We made some of it look stupid and ugly, but we didn’t destroy it, so we have set our own stage.”

The third thread is good timing. The city has an economic development department of young, energetic people who “get it,” Dingeldein said.

“They get what we have, and they get where we need to go,” he said. “We need to start right now. If we wait a year, we’ve missed a year. If we wait two years, we’ve missed the boat.”

There are several projects underway, all of them in or near the 200 block of High Street, that helped inspire and inform the development of CORE, Dingeldein said, beginning with the renovation of the Robinson-Schwenn Building, also known as the Opera House, where Miami Hamilton Downtown is now located, as well as the Mercantile Buildings where the CORE fund will be housed, the Historic JournalNews building being renovated to house Butler Tech Arts Academy and other arts and education programs, and the Strauss Building, which will soon see the false facade come down as the first step in turning it into 42 apartments and artist studios through the efforts of the Minneapolis-based Artspace development company.