I have tried to unravel the story behind this. I have heard a lot of different ones, but I would like to know the truth behind why there are a series of modern mansions or luxury homes along Chester Avenue between about E. 70th thru E. 90th St. You have beautiful new homes all along Chester, but you have torn apart drug houses and unlivable homes just a few houses down the streets. I like the idea, but I wish I knew how it happened, who started it and where it is headed!!

 

I have heard two explanations for the houses:

 

1) Wealthy people who want to live near the Cleveland Clinic

2) Wealthy gay people creating their own well-to-do area

 

So, are either true, and if not, what's the scoop!!!!!!????

"2) Wealthy gay people creating their own well-to-do area"

 

No. See Edgewater/Clifton, Lakewood along Lake and Edgewater, parts of Rocky River, a handful of the homes on Cedar-Fairmount, and spots in Ohio City and Tremont. Sure, "my people" are all over the place but Hough? Not really.

 

Quite a few of the homes were built on 'urban meadows' - lots that were once part of a vibrant Hough area but were burned to the ground in the race riots. The city sold the lots for a very low price to people (predominantly African-American) who wanted to re-invest in their neighborhood.

 

From my understanding, here are the components of the Chester Avenue mansions:

 

1. Cheap land- $100/lot land bank

2. Tax Abatement

3. Additional incentives and grants, I think

4. Most of the people in those houses grew up in Hough

5. Most of those people aren't that rich- what they would have gotten without the incentives would have been vastly less than a mansion

I agree with both X and MayDay said.  Lots of people who lived in hough/fairfax wanted to reinvest in the neighborhood. 

 

There is a growing gay black population there.  One of the first people to buy an old victorian home and expand it is a gay man and his partner.  They also got friends to buy in the area. 

 

The one things I, personally, didnt like is some of the owners bought two lots - one for the rebuild/expanded/rehabed home and the other for a yard.

 

 

Just a visual reference...

 

"2) Wealthy gay people creating their own well-to-do area"

 

No. See Edgewater/Clifton, Lakewood along Lake and Edgewater, parts of Rocky River, a handful of the homes on Cedar-Fairmount, and spots in Ohio City and Tremont. Sure, "my people" are all over the place but Hough? Not really.

 

Don't forget there is a prominent gay population in the Shaker Sq./Larchmere and Mt. Pleasant hoods.  There are sparks of "happy homes" in the Sterling Payne, upper prospect as well as the obvious homes in the flats, WHD & Gateway districts within the city.  Coventry, Beachwood (around the mall), Bedford/Oakwood, Parma & Westlake in the burbs all have decent gay populations.

"Bedford/Oakwood, Parma & Westlake in the burbs all have decent gay populations."

 

But why would anyone of our people willingly choose to live in the first two?  :wtf:

 

:wink:

Hey MayDay, your visual reference did not pop up, at least on my computer

From my understanding, here are the components of the Chester Avenue mansions:

 

1. Cheap land- $100/lot land bank

2. Tax Abatement

3. Additional incentives and grants, I think

4. Most of the people in those houses grew up in Hough

5. Most of those people aren't that rich- what they would have gotten without the incentives would have been vastly less than a mansion

 

yup, X completely nailed it. I'm not sure about #3, but the land definately was cheap, and plenty of abatements. And number five is very true, when you pay 10% of property taxes for 20 years, you can afford to double the size of your house

yes, but why the McMansion style???  i know, suburban dreams with urban convenience, but how unfortunate!

It's not exactly what we would think of as an "urban" buying market.  You can't exactly stroll to the cafe or a trendy corner bar or nice restaurant in Hough.  Most of the people buying there are deciding between Hough, where they grew up or currently live, or the suburbs, which is the lifestyle they really want.  But yeah, I don't like most of what is being built in Hough either.

and these are homes along chester which has never been by any stretch of imagination urban

"Bedford/Oakwood, Parma & Westlake in the burbs all have decent gay populations."

 

But why would anyone of our people willingly choose to live in the first two?  :wtf:

 

:wink:

 

Sweetie, your guess is as good as mine!  :? 

 

But the pink flamingos in the Parma area should be a HUGE clue!  lol

 

Anyone ever read 'Home from Nowhere'? I'm reading it right now. James Kuntsler really trashes the McMansions in Hough -- and I agree with every word he says. Fortunately, it seems these things aren't being built anymore. And while Beacon Place and Woodhaven may not be perfect, they do show a learning curve from the days when urban revitalization meant urban suburbanization.

 

Here's an excerpt from Kuntsler's book:

 

"What remains of Cleveland today east of the Cuyahoga River and the ballpark strikes the casual observer as the proverbial hole in the donut. The old inner residential neighborhoods are so wiped out that it seems as if a major war had been fought for the Great Lakes around the time of my college career -- and perhaps I was too stoned to hear about it. Rubble fields punctuated by rows of slums occupy block after block of the old grid. Here and there a once-grand Victorian house totters darkly like the ghost of something from an Edward Hopper painting. You round a corner in your rent-a-car and there, suddenly, is the most incongruous sight, a brand-new suburban 'colonial' on a quarter-acre lot with its complete kit-of-parts: the lawn, the driveway, the garage door, the juniper shurbs along the foundation, the scraggly saplings -- right in downtown Cleveland, surrounded by hectares of desolation. The only nod to urban reality is the iron grillwork over the 'picture' window to keep burglars out. I realized, naturally, that this was nothing more than the 'little cabin in the woods,' inserted into a new kind of wildnerness.

 

I saw dozens of these on my tour of the city in the summer of 1994. It alarmed me to think that this was the city's idea of residential redevelopment -- as though the city itself had forgotten what being urban meant, what being Cleveland meant, and had capitulated completely to some numbskull Leave-It-to-Beaver fantasy imposed on it by the vengeful Rotarians of suburban Chagrin Falls -- for clearly the city must have given its permission for these things to be built."

 

He then goes on to trash the Church Square strip mall on Chester Avenue in equally colorful language.

 

I hope Kuntsler comes back soon; this book was published in 1996 and his tour of Cleveland was in '94. I think he'd see much more cause for optimism now, and the beginnings of a return to true urban design.

thanks for bringing the reading to my attention

Let me pose this question: Does anyone here actually like the McMansions?

I think they are pretty much what the Cleveland market desires in an area like Hough.  Do I like them?  They are okay yet most importantly, they are signs of progress.  My fealing is that might be what it takes to initially move a family into that area.  In time as the area fills in more, better urban designs may be implemented.  I think that Hough still may be to risky to build a large scale urban developement and few people in the market are in the position to take that risk.  The biggest risk worth taking may be just a single home at this point, however, as the area takes a turn for the better, it may draw developers in with new plans. 

I like the McMansions a lot.  However, these ones don't have enough vinyl siding for my tastes.

regarding those mcmansions. my opinion is : Bleh! stylewise, they fit better out in the exurbs. I was watching some show where communities with exurban Mcmansions were referred to as Vulgaria. given vulgar defination, this works in many cases.( tasteless or ostentatious: showing a lack of taste or reasonable moderation.. lacking refinement: lacking in courtesy and manners). I should be happy that people are living in the city though, shouldnt I? forgive me for stereoyping, but most gay people I know don't want to live in homes with no style around people with no style (i.e westlake, parma etc) -often the people are not very open minded either.

 

 

 

I think they are pretty much what the Cleveland market desires in an area like Hough.  Do I like them?  They are okay yet most importantly, they are signs of progress.  My fealing is that might be what it takes to initially move a family into that area.  In time as the area fills in more, better urban designs may be implemented.  I think that Hough still may be to risky to build a large scale urban developement and few people in the market are in the position to take that risk.  The biggest risk worth taking may be just a single home at this point, however, as the area takes a turn for the better, it may draw developers in with new plans. 

 

The problem is that the amount of lost buildings (mostly grand old brownstone apartments) means that there is no longer the urban fabric left to draw urbanites back or to build off of.  Add to that the number of those mansions built, and the fact that they have taken up most of the desirable and easily developable land, and that they have cut up the fabric of the neighborhood with this incongruous development.  It seems unlikely that anyone will be doing any comprehensive redevelopment of Hough anytime soon.

yeah, every year they do those little homebuliding shows in hough. Where a handful of homebuilders basically fill in one block (mostly vacant properties) with more bland 1500 sq ft homes. At least they are filling in the gaps, even if it is one block at a time

I think Hough needs another riot so those ugly-ass houses get burned down and we can start over AGAIN.

 

Even though it's nice to see the investment, I get a sick feeling in my stomach every time I think of the dense, mixed-use neighborhood that had existed there. It was the kind of neighborhood that developers are trying to replicate today with lifestyle centers and they still can't match what Hough had.

 

If you haven't already, visit http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=2047.0

 

Or just look at this picture of Hough in the 1950s (scroll right to see the whole image):

 

yeah, every year they do those little homebuliding shows in hough. Where a handful of homebuilders basically fill in one block (mostly vacant properties) with more bland 1500 sq ft homes. At least they are filling in the gaps, even if it is one block at a time

 

I believe you're talking about the Citirama developments. The recent ones at least attempt to reflect the surrounding vernacular architecture. Last year's Citirama in Glenville, for example, featured woodframe houses on original city lots, all with front porches and many with hidden garages and small front yards.

 

The Hough monstrosities, on the other hand, have nothing to do with the existing city whatsoever. Granted, most of Hough had been leveled by the time they were built, but they still look way out of place. Even (especially?) an outsider like Kuntsler can see this.

Though I think they are definantly out of place, I am glad to see the development taking place in Hough.  I remember when I first saw them there about 3-4 years ago, I almost had to do a double-take while I was driving.  I would definantly prefer to see more urban housing developments being planned in the area, but progress is progress any way you look at it.

The 2005 Citirama thread has some photos that I took and a little commentary (http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=4599.0).  I think that this type of infill with homeownership units is ideal for these neighborhoods, but it needs to happen on a wider scale.  The Cleveland Housing Network does a lot of work on this scale, with single and multiple lot renovations and infill and it helps.  Every time a house goes vacant, the surrounding houses start to slip as well.  The same happens in reverse.  Someone builds a block or a single new house, the effect radiates.  Other homeowners are inspired to paint, plant and invest in their properties.  This type of thing is contagious and it works both positively and negatively.

 

As for the McMansions, I'm definitely not a fan.  I think the context is incredibly poor.  But then I think about the position that the City and the Ward would have had when these were on the table.  If a neighborhood family says that they have a hundred thousand-plus dollars and income to match and that they want to built a home in Hough or Fairfax in the early 1990s, how can you tell them, "we don't want your investment here."  You can't really.  And zoning code/design guidelines may have been overlooked in order to accommodate them, but that's just the position we were in.  The same goes, as far as I'm concerned, with the auto-centric strip centers that were built all over the city at the time.  I don't like them either, but their target markets were driving by, not walking, and the investment in neighborhood amenities was too good to forgo.  We're seeing this on a much larger scale today with Steelyard Commons.

 

Today, however, it appears that we have more bargaining power and more people (developers and homeowners) who are looking to build in the City.  We have new overlay districts and hopefully re-invigorated CDCs and City Planning officials who will be able to push more for design standards and sustainable urban development.  I'm not expecting to see any more McMansions on Chester, but I still think that we stand to improve significantly on the Beacon Place/Woodhaven-style development.  Stepping stones, right?  The next one should be bigger, with better connections to the neighborhood, a mixture of uses and ideally a mixture of income levels and tenure. 

 

And I said all this without even mentioning that the Councilperson from Ward 7 (north of Chester) is a developer's worst nightmare...ooops!  I said it!

"And I said all this without even mentioning that the Councilperson from Ward 7 (north of Chester) is a developer's worst nightmare...ooops!  I said it!"

 

Bah! Kiss my Fannie!  :lol:

The same goes, as far as I'm concerned, with the auto-centric strip centers that were built all over the city at the time.  I don't like them either, but their target markets were driving by, not walking...

 

Yet as Kuntsler notes in his book, more than half the residents of Hough in the mid-1990s were without cars. What message was Church Square, surrounded by its forboding moat of parking, sending them? Even today, I have heard that one third of all city residents do not own a car (I think that's based on the 2000 Census). We're not as auto dependent as developers and city planners seem to think we are.

You're right there, B12, and the new Arbor Park in Central is proof of this.  As those of you who've been there may have noticed, there are no garages for those hundreds of homes...no back alleys either.  All parking is on-street and the community wanted it that way.  They don't need garages and driveways because they don't have the cars to fill them!

 

Now, my point about the building of Church Square was that the developer didn't build it for the residents of Hough.  They built it for the tens of thousands of people who drove by the site every day on their way to Downtown, Midtown and the Clinic.  This is where the money was coming from and this is why it was built with parking as a big feature (why it has to be prominently placed in front is something that I still don't understand).  Regardless of who the developers built it for, though, the neighborhood residents still benefit from the addition of these retail amenities in their community...amenities that would likely not have been built based on their buying power alone.  This is one of the positive arguments for gentrification...not that anyone would say that Fairfax or Hough are gentrifying.

That's what I'm getting at -- why make the thing so blatantly auto-oriented, when you have a large resident population without cars? Even if it was to serve commuters, did we have to advertise that and turn our backs so resolutely on the neighborhood?

 

You're right, of course, that stores are better than no stores. But sheesh, what terrible -- in fact exclusionary -- urban design.

 

That said, I do agree that we are learning from our past mistakes. (Though plans for the new Asia Town Center on Superior and E. 37th, to be fronted by surface parking, are a throw-back to the bad old days.)

Oh, definitely, the design doesn't HAVE to be so auto-centric, though it could've been much worse.  But I'll need to have some conversations with the architects/planners who come up with this sort of development to understand why they put the cars in front of the shops at places like Church Square and the one at West 25th & Lorain.  The latter is much more of a mystery to me, as its neighborhood is much more pedestrian oriented. 

I don't have the info to back this up but I would think two big reasons Church Square and the other newer shopping centers in the city have so much surface parking (and why it's in front) are  1. the local residents with the cars are the ones with more money to spend (and sadly, I think the average non-ideologically driven city resident likes to drive as much as the average suburban schmo) and 2. the national chain tenants require it, which means the lenders require it.

Someone needs to provide a photo.

just make the five hour drive

^It's four.

 

Here's an example of the Church Square shopping center from ecocitycleveland.org on how "not" to do things:

^It's four.

 

 

 

i figured he wanted to stop in mansfield