inlovewithCLE

Metroparks just ditched the plan

I believe the state is gonna have to force the issue. Tie it to the fact that EC has been in fiscal emergency for almost a decade. The legislature doesn’t give a damn about home rule anyway, so just do it. Force the merger. Put $100 million on the table and force it

And this is what angers me. They’ll continue to let their people starve because of their arrogance and ignorance

Lol. FACTS. I really don’t understand why people enjoy opining on things they know nothing about. If you don’t even know what cities border East Cleveland, u probably shouldn’t be talking about it lol.

I actually don’t think it would take that long to fix EC if it was part of Cleveland. We already know the explosive demand that UC has. And it could stretch to EC with no problem because you don’t have to deal with as much of the sensitive issues of displacement/gentrification that you have in other neighborhoods close to UC. EC is a city built for 50,000 people that has 14,000 people in it. There’s whole streets that are either vacant or with one or two households with actual people in it. It’s the closest thing to a blank canvas that you could get in a fully developed county. But it’ll never happen with EC as an independent city. No one with money and a fully functioning brain would heavily invest in an independent EC

There are so many people here who have smartly responded that there’s no need for me to address this

The SCLC is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. You know, the civil rights organization founded by someone you may have heard of before, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Maybe now my incredulous response to that ridiculous reaction (that you just doubled down on) makes more sense to you.

East Cleveland shouldn’t exist as an independent city anymore. They need to merge with Cleveland. Period. I don’t have any sympathy for them on this. Another GE division will still be at Nela but we know it’s only a matter of time, especially with the city in the states that it’s in. They need to merge. EC is a disaster

You don’t know who the SCLC is? It’s not just some “group out of Atlanta”. Lol. The Black contractors group isn’t either. And it is important that SHW makes sure that there’s some black contractors as part of this project. It shouldn’t even be controversial to ask for that

Yup

This. All of this.

@KJPin reference to your last paragraph: https://www.cleveland.com/news/2021/08/cleveland-planning-commission-approves-plans-for-controversial-construction-institute-in-opportunity-corridor.html

“CloudKitchens, the international network of ghost kitchens operated by Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick, has been quietly building out a Cleveland facility in MidTown. Located in the former Audio Craft building at 3915 Carnegie Ave., the 16,000-square-foot operation is expected to go live in late September or early October, according to company representative Megan Gilroy.” https://m.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2021/08/18/global-ghost-kitchen-provider-cloudkitchens-to-open-cleveland-facility-this-fall

For once I agree with you lol. It’s absurd to act like population loss doesn’t matter

And that’s a huge problem. The east side is down to such a degree that piecemeal efforts aren’t fixing it

Fine

The reason those homes stopped getting built is 1: there was a change in strategy in city hall that stopped making it easier for people who wanted those plots of land to get them. 2: the housing crisis. 3: the Great Recession. 4: the death of Fannie Lewis. That’s what happened. You cannot expect people to go to what was one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city of Cleveland and live on top of each other again. It’s not gonna happen. They’ll stay in Solon and Bedford and Beachwood. And the larger point (and I know this for a fact) is that those houses were built because the COMMUNITY WANTED THEM THERE. That’s what they wanted. And those houses sell out every time they get built. In fact, there are newer houses being built in Hough RIGHT NOW that are smaller than McMansions but bigger than the average Cleveland house and most of them are already sold out. That is what that neighborhood wants.

It amazes me that there are 34 neighborhoods in the city of Cleveland and people get in a tizzy if one neighborhood doesn’t build things exactly the way that they want it to. To hell with what the people in that ward want. To hell with what the people who have purchased those homes want. To hell with what the people who want to move back in that neighborhood wants. Amazing

We’ve made multiple posts about the city failing to invest in the east side, but the Hough houses are somehow a “failed experiment”. Not the housing crisis. Not the Great Recession. Not the death of Fannie Lewis. Not the lack of a focused, deliberate strategy targeting east side neighborhoods. No! It’s those big ole houses that taxpayers are living in that’s the problem. That’s what “failed”.

Oh, good, another brother. So we can do this all day. Because I do have ties to that community and have had them for years and have family still in that community. So if you want the smoke, we can do this bro! So let me ask you, how many of those houses are empty? Virtually none. “Failed” experiment. Really? That tells me right there that you don’t know what happened in Hough And let me ask you. I’m just curious. Are you from Cleveland originally? Also, were you born into the middle class or did you enter it later on? Just curious. Cause you’re right, I can’t speak for you. BUT I can speak for many of the people who came back to Hough to live in those houses, who built those homes and the ones who want to come back if the community looked more like that. I got all day. You want it, let’s go

Here’s the issue with that. I do think you have to keep growing the gentrified neighborhoods. But you can no longer just hope that it spills over. You have to make it happen. Deliberate targeting of those neighborhoods with resources and development to MAKE it happen. Cleveland will not prosper as a whole until the east side is fixed, and doing it in pockets just isn’t enough

As a black man, I’m not arguing with anybody about what black people want. Period. So most of what you said is just not going to l get a response from me because I’m not wasting my time. BUT I do have to address this, as my family originally is from Hough. It wasn’t an “experiment”. It was a deliberate strategy to build those houses BECAUSE THATS WHAT THE PEOPLE WANTED. The (mostly black) occupants of those houses and the people in the neighborhood wanted those houses to be there because they viewed it as a way to restore Hough to its former glory before racial strife and before the riots that the neighborhood is still trying to rid itself of the stigma of. But thank you. Thank you for proving my point, about everything I said about the attitude around here when it comes to building the houses that middle class black people want to live in

There’s so many issues here, and you touched on several of them in your post. I have been on a crusade on the pages of UO to anyone who will listen (and probably some that don’t want to listen) that the city HAS TO be more aggressive about getting the black middle class back into the city. You’re not going to reverse the decline if you don’t. And that also means that you’re gonna have to be ok with some neighborhoods having development patterns that people around here are uncomfortable with, like McMansions in Hough. If you’re black, and particularly if you’re originally from the city, you’re not moving back here to be on the same small plot of land you grew up in when you left. It’s not gonna happen. We know obviously that a lot of the white folks that have moved back to the city (or into the city for the first time) are looking for urbanity in many cases. For a lot of black people, especially middle class black people, it’s the opposite. You grew up in the deteriorating east side neighborhoods. Many of them want to move back into the city, but they are not going to come back to the same neighborhoods that they left. It has to be different, and the lifestyle has to be comparable to what they can get somewhere else. And people around here have to be ok with it. Cause it ain’t about you (I don’t mean you specially but the general “you”). We can’t grow the city without stopping the bleeding on the east side. And we can’t stop the bleeding on the east side without targeting at least some of those neighborhoods to go aggressively after the black middle class. And you can’t do that by trying to force them to live in the duplexes they grew up in as opposed to the houses they can have built in Bedford or Solon or Warrensville. I do believe that Mike White cared about the east side. The problem is that the approach at the time was ineffective. Everybody talks about giving more money to the east side, but what was happening back then is that the money was allocated by city hall but controlled by the councilmen. Which means it turned into a professional slush fund. There was no planning, no strategy, which is why if you drive through the east side today, there are pockets of newer development surrounded by dilapidation. There wasn’t a cohesive development strategy. Now, regardless of what anyone has to say about Mayor Jackson, he has a cohesive development strategy concerning the east side. It’s the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative and the Middle Neighborhoods Initiative. Those can work. It’s a really smart way to do it. The problem is that they came so late in his tenure. We already see the NTI being super effective on the edges of Glenville. With only being around for like 2 or 3 years. Now imagine what the east side would’ve looked like if the NTI would’ve started 6 or 7 years ago, vs 2 or 3. And the Middle Neighborhoods plan just started within the last 12 months.

I like it!

Turn it up to 23, not 13 lol