Unchecked urban sprawl is weakening Greater Cleveland, causing disinvestment and abandonment of inner-city neighborhoods and threatening the character of rural communities in the surrounding counties, said a panel of local government officials Wednesday.

“Greater Cleveland’s population stopped growing in 1970,” said Northern Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) Chief Executive Grace Gallucci. “But we have continued to develop formerly open land, build new infrastructure, and expand the footprint of our community with dire consequences for environmental sustainability, economic efficiency, and racial equity.”

Gallucci spoke as a panelist on a Cleveland City Club virtual forum titled “Sprawl Versus Smart Growth: Building an Equitable and Thriving Region.” Joining Gallucci on the panel were Maple Heights Mayor Annette Blackwell and Solon Mayor Eddy Krause.

Since 1970, when the population of the five-county Greater Cleveland metropolitan area peaked at 2.3 million, the region’s population has declined by more than 5 percent. But during the same period the amount of developed land has increased by 20 percent. As a result, fewer Greater Clevelanders are now paying to build and maintain significantly more neighborhoods, roads, bridges, schools, commercial buildings, fire stations, and other costly services. A less efficient use of dwindling resources could scarcely be imagined.

Worse, unchecked sprawl is inexorably hollowing out the core of the urban area, causing large-scale disinvestment and abandonment and contributing to higher levels of poverty, crime, racial segregation, and economic inequality. In a region with no population growth, every house or business constructed on undeveloped land on the region’s periphery means one more vacant housing unit or commercial building in the center of the city.

None of this is news, of course.

Greater Cleveland has been expanding outward for more than one hundred years. The first ‘streetcar suburbs’ in Cuyahoga County – East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, and Lakewood – were developed in the first two decades of the twentieth century in areas immediately adjacent to the City of Cleveland.  Through the 1920’s, a second ring of transit-dependent suburbs formed, including Maple Heights, Rocky River, Garfield Heights, Shaker Heights, and Euclid. Today we refer to these communities as ‘inner ring suburbs,’ and they are struggling with declining population, job losses, and increasing poverty as economic growth moves farther away from the central city.

During the 1930’s and 1940’s, the depression and World War II slowed growth in suburban areas, but once the war was over the combination of pent-up demand for new housing and federal transportation and housing policies led to the rapid development of a ring of auto-centric suburbs beyond the earlier suburbs, including Parma, Bay Village, Lyndhurst, and Fairview Park. Growth of these suburbs was widely celebrated, and the steady flow of job-seekers into the region maintained population growth.

By the 1960’s though, Greater Cleveland and other urban areas across the Great Lakes region saw their economies savaged by massive losses of manufacturing jobs which led to a reduction of in-migration and an end to decades of population growth. Yet construction of new homes and businesses continued in an outer ring of suburbs, including Westlake, Solon, Strongsville, North Royalton, North Olmsted, and Brecksville.  Today, development has shifted into surrounding counties, where it continues. The result is that our region is now comprised of a declining core of poor – and getting poorer – communities surrounded by a ring of threatened suburbs surrounded by a ring of stable communities surrounded by a final ring of ongoing development.

While sprawl has been historically driven by the desire of residents and businesses to move away from the urban core for open space, larger homes, less expensive land; to escape pollution, crime, and poverty; and to avoid racial integration; government policies have played an outsized role.

As late as the 1960’s, said Gallucci, regional planners believed that Greater Cleveland’s population – which had been growing steadily for 150 years – would continue to grow and the region would gain a million new residents by 2010. Highway projects and other forms of public infrastructure were designed to accommodate this larger population. But the unexpected loss of manufacturing jobs reduced in-migration to the region and halted population growth. Yet the drivers of sprawl remained in place.

As a result, sprawl has continued to bleed residents, jobs, and money from Cleveland and its inner ring suburbs and transfer entire neighborhoods and associated economic activity to outer suburbs and surrounding counties, even as the devastating consequences are well-understood.   

“Continuing our pattern of ever-expanding sprawl will increase disinvestment and abandonment in neighborhoods in the center of the region,” said Gallucci, “exacerbating racial and economic segregation and inequality – making all of our problems worse and undercutting our efforts to redevelop the city.”

The distressing reality is that with a stagnant population, every new home or commercial building constructed in the outer reaches of Greater Cleveland means an abandoned home or structure in the urban core and a corresponding loss of economic activity and tax revenues.

Growth in one part of the region should not result in disinvestment in other parts, Gallucci said. What we need is smart growth. Rather than continually developing open land on the region’s periphery, we should find ways to encourage redevelopment in areas where infrastructure already exists.

But that has been a message that communities on the periphery of the region have been happy to ignore. Instead, suburbs across Greater Cleveland have engaged in decades of self-defeating efforts to poach businesses and residents from each other – fighting over economic scraps rather than working together as fellow members of an integrated economic unit that is facing serious challenges from other regions throughout the nation and the world.

It is past time for that region-wide infighting to stop, said Solon mayor Eddy Krause. Located on Cuyahoga County’s southeastern edge, Solon has emerged as one of the big winners in the sprawl sweepstakes. The city is now home to the second largest concentration of jobs in the region, trailing only downtown Cleveland. But Krause realizes that his suburb’s continued success depends on finding a way to share Solon’s good fortune with the city and its inner ring suburbs.

 “Our competition isn’t each other,” he said. “Our competition is Dublin, Ohio; Indianapolis; Pittsburgh; Austin, Texas.”

Greater Cleveland communities need to work together, he said.

That’s an attitude that Maple Heights mayor Annette Blackwell welcomes. Her city has been sledgehammered by sprawl-induced disinvestment. Once a tidy middle-class suburb, Maple Heights has suffered enormously from the closure of local businesses, declining population, dwindling property values and rising poverty.

Blackwell agrees that cities across the region need to work together, and she believes it is happening more and more. “But that wasn’t always the case,” she pointed out. “I didn’t feel that way six years ago. There is still work to do.”

Sprawl is not just a threat to areas in the urban core, said Gallucci. Rural communities on the outskirts of the region and farmers have expressed concern that development will destroy productive agricultural land, reduce wildlife habitat, cause flooding, and permanently alter the character of smaller communities.

“We have to do better,” said Blackwell. “We are forced to do better.”

February 6, 2021

Photo credit: Angie Schmitt, Streetsblog USA

See also:

https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2019/03/suburban-sprawl-has-already-devoured-clevelands-seed-corn-now-its-threatening-the-region-brent-larkin.html

https://www.ideastream.org/news/northeast-ohio-must-change-the-way-it-grows-urban-planning-groups-say

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2020/12/noaca-board-approves-new-policy-on-interchanges-that-could-limit-sprawl-encourage-smart-growth.html

https://www.cleveland.com/architecture/2014/04/smart_growth_america_report_gi.html

There’s never been a better time for Cuyahoga County homeowners to invest in rooftop solar arrays. That was the message delivered by Solar United Neighbors Ohio Program Director Tristan Rader at an information session held at the Bay Village Public Library Thursday evening.

The combination of falling prices for solar arrays, federal tax incentives, low interest loan programs, and lower electrical bills can cut the cost of a residential system by thousands of dollars, said Rader. In addition, homeowners now have an opportunity to join a County-sponsored solar co-op which can lower the costs of a solar array even further.

Solar United is a non-profit organization that is partnering with Cuyahoga County to create a cooperative group of potential solar customers to reduce the cost of installing solar arrays. “We leverage the power of multiple residents in the cooperative,” said Rader. “By providing a larger customer base, we can achieve lower prices.”

The co-op solicits bids from vendors and all members receive the benefit of the reduced rates. Generally, costs for each co-op member are between 10 percent and 20 percent less than if they contracted with the solar providers individually, said Rader.

Solar United has assisted more than 200 co-ops in twelve states, with more than 100,000 members total, and has supported the installation of more than 4,600 solar arrays. This is their second Cuyahoga County co-op, and the third that the county has organized.

“Our mission is to provide education and information,” said Rader. “We support homeowners throughout the process.”

Installing solar panels can save homeowners significant money on their electric bills over the estimated 25-year life of their system. Cuyahoga County residents who participated in the county’s previous co-op programs will likely save $25,000 over 25 years, according to Cuyahoga County Director of Sustainability, Mike Foley, in a press release.

A residential system will usually cost between $10,000 and $20,000, depending on the amount of power the array can provide. A typical residential solar array can cover anywhere from 20 percent to 80 percent of a home’s electrical needs, said Rader.

If a homeowner’s system generates more power than the home requires, the excess power will be added to the power grid and the homeowner will receive a credit from the electric company that can offset the cost of power that is purchased later.

There is no cost to join the co-op and no obligation to purchase an array, said Rader. Once the co-op selects a vendor, that supplier will visit each co-op member’s home to determine what size system makes the most sense, how and where it should be installed, and how much the installation will cost. The member can then decide if he or she wants to move ahead with the project.

During the visit the vendor can answer any questions about the technology and the installation process, while Solar United representatives can provide information about available low-interest loan programs or other financing options.

The cost of generating electricity using solar panels has declined every year since 2009, and is expected to continue declining, according to the United States Department of Energy. Installation and permitting costs are also dropping. In some parts of the U.S. solar power is already cost-competitive with power supplied by the local electric utility.

In addition to economic advantages, solar power generation produces no greenhouse gases, helps reduce America’s dependence on imported fuels, contributes to a more diversified and robust energy system, and supports hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

Homeowners and business owners in Cuyahoga County can join the county’s current solar co-op until February 2020.

For more information or to join the co-op, go to www.SolarUnitedNeighbors.org/Cuyahoga.

(Photo: Courtesy of Ohio Sun)

October 24, 2019

After many years of stagnation and decline, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District is again moving forward.

That was the upbeat message delivered last week by Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon at his 2019 State of the School address at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel.

The district is now one of the fastest improving school districts in Ohio on K-3 literacy, performance index (standard test scores), and graduation rates, Gordon said. “We are moving upward. We know we have a long way to go. We have not yet arrived, but we are certainly on our way.”

The district’s progress is the result of The Cleveland Plan, a comprehensive school improvement program that the district and the city initiated in 2011, said Gordon. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, the Cleveland Board of Education, and the numerous community partners that have stepped up to support the district have played key roles. But equally important have been the efforts of Cleveland students who each day demonstrate an unflagging enthusiasm for learning and the district’s dedicated and tireless educators and staff.

“And we all owe a debt of gratitude to the people of the Cleveland School District, whose support of Issue 107, Issue 4 and Issue 108 enabled us to not only implement and sustain reforms outlined in The Cleveland Plan, but also to modernize and revitalize schools across the city,” said Gordon.

While the district ranking remains perilously low – 601st of 608 Ohio districts on Ohio’s latest performance index ranking – students across the district are succeeding every day on complex academic tasks not easily measured by test scores, said Gordon. He cited more than a half dozen examples, including a student-created app that improved the Bar Association’s website, a student-run café, a student project that created a working prosthetic hand for a classmate, a student project that developed synthetic gasoline that powered their teacher’s automobile, and a student project to repair a Cleveland Police car that had been nearly destroyed by celebrants after the Cavalier’s 2016 championship.

In 2011 the district was ranked dead last among all Ohio school districts and was “financially bankrupt and had lost all public trust,” said Gordon. Today, the district is one of the 25 fastest improving districts in Ohio, he noted. In the latest state rankings, the district earned a D, one step up from the F’s that the district had received in previous years.

“I want to make clear that we are not celebrating that we earned a D,” said Gordon. “What moving from F to D tells us is that we continue to move upward and there is a lot more yet to achieve.”

But huge challenges remain. It is no coincidence that the district’s performance ranking – based on student scores on standardized tests – is nearly identical to the district’s rank when districts are listed by household median income. Cleveland’s median household income ranks 604th, while the district’s performance index rank is 601.

The link between poverty and school performance is well-understood.  Intractable poverty affects students’ readiness to learn in countless ways.

Even as the district gains positive momentum, said Gordon, “it is important to recognize that we cannot rest.  We must maintain and build on our momentum. But at the same time, pay attention to every force that threatens to slow or even stop our progress.”

One of those forces is public perception. Near the end of his presentation, Gordon was asked by a Cleveland student, “If you could change one thing, what would it be?” Without hesitation Gordon replied, “Get rid of the Cleveland Schools stink.”

Despite the massive investment city residents have made in the district, despite the hard work of educators and staff, despite the many community organizations that support the district, and despite the extraordinary efforts of thousands of starkly disadvantaged students, the district’s reputation remains abysmal.

“When people think of the Cleveland Schools, they assume that nothing good is happening there,” said Gordon. “They don’t know about the amazing things that are happening in our classrooms. Because it is Cleveland, they assume that good things are not happening like they are in suburban districts.” Looking at some of the dozens of CMSD students in the audience, Gordon said, “They don’t know you.”

September 28, 2019

Photo: Cleveland Metropolitan School District

It was the grandest of grand openings, but it wasn’t the beginning of an era, it was the end.

On June 28, 1930, 2,500 of Cleveland’s most prominent citizens gathered to celebrate the opening of the city’s massive Union Terminal complex. Centered on the two-level Union Terminal Station and crowned by the 52-story Terminal Tower, the complex was the largest mixed-use, multi-building development in the United States. New York’s Rockefeller Center – similar in concept but greater in execution – wouldn’t be completed until later in the decade.

The grand opening was the culmination of more than twenty years of effort by the railroad-owning Van Sweringen brothers, who hoped to replace Cleveland’s five separate railway stations with a single, lavish terminal. As planning progressed, their vision expanded, and they ultimately proposed a project that would reshape the face of the city. The six gleaming buildings that comprised the complex, with a seventh under construction and an eighth planned, confirmed Cleveland’s position as one of the most prosperous cities in America.

Today, as Cleveland struggles with all of the ills associated with declining manufacturing, racial discord, public corruption, and intractable poverty, it is hard to recall just how esteemed the city was in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Author Lincoln Steffins famously called Cleveland “the best-governed city in the United States.” And, for a time, the city was well-governed. City schools, the police department, the public library, and many civic and cultural institutions were nationally respected. Elliott Ness had been the safety director, John D. Rockefeller started Standard Oil in the city, and Cleveland industrialist Mark Hanna had obtained the presidency for his protégé, William McKinley.

From the time of the Civil War, transportation links, industry, and immigration fueled Cleveland’s ascent as a manufacturing powerhouse. The city’s combination of steel-making, auto manufacturing, metal casting, and paint production provided jobs and profits. From 1900 to 1910, the city’s population grew from 381,000 to 560,000. By 1930, as revelers gathered to celebrate the opening of the Union Terminal complex, the city’s population had reached 900,000, making Cleveland the sixth largest city in America and the third largest metropolitan area, trailing only New York and Chicago.

The Union Terminal complex was a gargantuan, mixed-use, multi-modal transportation hub, built before anyone knew what multi-modal meant. The complex accommodated long-distance passenger trains, interurban trains, rapid transit trains, taxis, buses, and private automobiles. The project replaced 35 acres of mostly deteriorating structures, displacing 15,000 residents and countless businesses.

At its opening, the complex included six interconnected buildings: the station, a hotel, and four office buildings, including the Terminal Tower, which would remain the tallest building outside New York City until 1967. A department store was under construction and a massive post office was planned. It was a city-within-a-city, where more than 10,000 people worked and many thousands more passed through each day.

The project itself embodied many of the elements that made Cleveland great. Immigrants fueled the city’s industrial rise, and thousands of immigrant laborers worked on the Terminal complex. Excellent transportation links via the lake, the Ohio Canal, and numerous railroads made Cleveland a great commercial center, and the Union Terminal complex was at heart a transportation nexus. As the city itself was originally founded as a real estate venture, the Union Terminal was also intended originally to support the Van Sweringen’s property enterprise in Shaker Heights by linking the new suburb to the city center by rapid transit.

So, there was plenty to celebrate, as the $179 million project prepared to open.

But there were dark clouds on the horizon. Probably no one enjoying the glitz of the grand opening luncheon suspected that the Union Terminal’s opening would prove to be the high-water mark of Cleveland’s century-long rise. And not one of the many distinguished speakers hinted that Cleveland’s glory days were numbered.

A perceptive observer might have recognized a few ominous portends. The stock market crash of October 1929 had already shaved 33 percent off the market’s value. The number of unemployed workers in the city had jumped from 40,000 in 1929 to more than 100,000 in 1930, leaving more than a third of the city’s workers without jobs. During the 1920’s, passenger railroad traffic nationwide had dropped by 45 percent. Mass immigration had been ended by the First World War and anti-immigration legislation. City residents were moving to the suburbs in increasing numbers and manufacturing output had begun to decline. The many engines of Cleveland’s prosperity were grinding to a halt.

In retrospect, the signs were more than a dark smudge on the horizon. They were a tornado warning siren that couldn’t be turned off.

Today, Cleveland is still struggling to adapt to wrenching changes in America’s economy, decades of indifferent leadership, widespread disinvestment, racial animus, poverty, and the rest of the malevolent ills that have beset America’s former industrial heartland.

But the Union Terminal group still anchors a revitalized Pubic Square and the Terminal Tower still reigns as the city’s iconic symbol. The last passenger train left the station in 1977, but the terminal’s arched and columned concourses have been repurposed as a retail center and rapid transit trains still deliver thousands of passengers each workday. The department store is a casino now, but the hotel remains and the stately office buildings that comprised the bulk of the project still teem with workers.

The Van Sweringen’s railroad empire collapsed into bankruptcy in the mid-1930’s, but the steel, concrete, and marble evidence of their vision remains.

March 10, 2019

“If I must fall, may it be from a high place.”

Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

It was a small fire, as fires go, and it wasn’t the first time that a river choked with industrial waste had burned. But a brief mention in Time Magazine in August, 1969 about burning fuel on the Cuyahoga River came to epitomize the sorry state of America’s environment in the years before the Clean Water Act and other seminal environmental legislation became law.

The fire on the Cuyahoga became “the emblem for all that was wrong with industrial America,” said environmental activist Denis Hayes yesterday, during a discussion at the Cleveland City Club. Hayes rose to prominence as an environmentalist in 1970 when he coordinated the first Earth Day event at the request of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. That first Earth Day drew 20 million participants to rallies, protests and other environmental events across the nation.

Thanks to Time Magazine, the Cuyahoga River fire became widely known, said Hayes. But suggestions that it sparked the American environmental movement overstate the importance of the incident.

America’s patience with massive industrial pollution had already given out. Environmental groups had been working to reduce industrial pollution and had already made significant progress. An oil spill off Santa Barbara in January and February 1969 contaminated more than 200 miles of California coastline, highlighting the problem. The Cuyahoga River fire on June 19, 1969, though immortalized in Time, was just one more outrage.

But Time’s story, though brief, caught the public’s attention, said Hayes. “It was a teachable moment for Americans.”

It was not, however, the first time the Cuyahoga River had burned. Nor was it the most serious fire ever to occur on the river. Flammable liquids on the river had burned at least a dozen times previously, and a fire in 1912 had killed five people, according to researcher Doug Kusak. Industrial rivers in other cities had also suffered fires. But the myth that the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and major environmental legislation persists.

Regardless of the role the Cuyahoga River played in raising America’s environmental consciousness, since 1969 the nation has made great progress, said Hayes. He expects that the U.S. economy will continue to evolve from its past reliance on heavy industry to a more sustainable model that is less damaging to the environment.

But now we face new threats, including climate change, mass extinctions, and plastic loading in the oceans. These are international problems, said Hayes, and taking effective action internationally is much more difficult than taking action nationally.

We have already passed several tilting points, he said. No matter what we do now, hurricanes will continue to get stronger, extinct species will never come back, and ocean acidification will never be reversed.

While solving large-scale international problems, like climate change and mass extinctions, will require coordinated efforts by governments and industry, individuals can make a difference, said Hayes. Most importantly, individuals can take local action and demand effective action by their elected officials. “The real Earth Day is election day,” he said.

While supporters of environmental action might have science on their side, said Hayes, their opponents have been more motivated and more effective. People who support efforts to preserve and protect the environment must match the passion of these other groups. While Hayes does not believe that single-issue voting is appropriate, he said citizens concerned about the environment should make clear that candidates who do not understand the critical importance of environmental issues – including climate change – should not be considered qualified to serve.

Individuals can also make a difference through their purchasing decisions, said Hayes. Consumers should demand environmentally sound manufacturing processes, products, and packaging “There is one way our economy works,” he said, “when there is a demand for something, it tends to be produced.”

Despite the significant environmental problems facing us today, Hayes believes that positive change is possible, but will require international cooperation and collaboration and effective leadership by the United States. “Across the world, there are different solutions, different economies, different cultures, different problems,” he said. “We all need to come together.”

January 19, 2019

Burn on Big River

There’s a red moon rising
On the Cuyahoga River
Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s a red moon rising
On the Cuyahoga River
Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s an oil barge winding
Down the Cuyahoga River
Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s an oil barge winding
Down the Cuyahoga River
Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

Cleveland city of light city of magic
Cleveland city of light you’re calling me
Cleveland, even now I can remember
Cause the Cuyahoga River
Goes smokin’ through my dreams

Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on
Now the Lord can make you tumble
And the Lord can make you turn
And the Lord can make you overflow
But the Lord can’t make you burn

Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on

Burn on Big River by Randy Newman

https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/37064/

For more information about the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River, see:

https://https://www.ideastream.org/news/fact-checking-five-myths-of-the-1969-fire-on-the-cuyahoga-river

January 19, 2019

photo: Jim Ridge / Share the River