HUD Funding Cuts Could Shutter More Than Half of Cleveland’s Community Development Corporations

Aiding Clevelanders in getting their houses up to code. Building new modular homes on the east side. Handing out bags of produce to homeless. Helping entrepreneurs open up coffee shops or clothing boutiques. Cleaning up bike boxes or painting crosswalks.

These are just a few things that Cleveland’s community development corporations do in neighborhoods from east to west.

And all of that is up in the air as the city waits to see whether the Trump administration will cut crucial HUD funding it has received each year.

Cleveland receives roughly $30 million a year from HUD to fuel its Department of Community Development. As the “2024-2025 Action Plan” details, that funding is slotted for a whole range of good things—from $1.5 million to help demolishing or board-up vacant homes, $623,454 to assist homeless Clevelanders, $284,393 to provide medical aid to those with AIDS.

Dollars are also passed along by Cleveland to various nonprofits and to Cleveland’s 18 CDCs, like Ohio City Inc. and Famicos, that operate partially or wholly on federal money to fill in the gaps for resident aid where the city falls short.

Historically, by this point of the calendar year, Cleveland has already received an estimate from the Feds on how much to expect. Not so this year. Which could signal that the administration and DOGE have their eyes on cuts.

“Worried about those cuts? Absolutely,” Ben Trimble, Ohio City Inc.’s real estate director told Scene in a phone call Wednesday. “We’re getting by. We’re used to working with little. But you just try and put one foot in front of the other—control the things you can control.”

Ohio City Inc., Trimble said, gets about $200,000 a year to fund a fourth of its operating budget, mostly paying the salaries of their ten employees. And if DOGE says bye-bye to HUD funding? “Oh, we’d have to lay off a significant portion of our staff.”

A spokesperson for City Hall did not comment on exactly how the city might make up for a potential $30 million loss, though noted that Cleveland’s Storefront Renovation Program, which received $452,000 last year from HUD, is lined up to be fueled by the city’s general fund.

In a letter emailed to 63 nonprofits, including those CDCs, on Wednesday, Mayor Justin Bibb and Alyssa Hernandez, the director of the Department of Community Development, were clear in their message: no spending anything until there’s “complete clarity on the funding landscape.”

“The Trump administration’s policies have created chaos across the country and weakened the social safety net,” the letter read, “and this, not any policy from the city or other organization, has put us in the challenging place we find ourselves in.”

And as Cleveland.com reported, City Council President Blaine Griffin on Monday said that most of the 81 jobs in Cleveland’s Department of Community Development are paid for with those HUD funds, meaning layoffs and cuts would be in store in the worst-case scenario.

“I’ll be honest with you guys, there’s a lot of uncertainty around this,” Griffin said. “It’s even as severe as they may wake up one day and have to lay off that entire department.”

Tania Menesse, the director of Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, a nonprofit that assists Cleveland’s CDCs in carrying out its programming, told Scene that a complete zeroing out of HUD funds to cities like Cleveland could spell disaster: “12 of 18 CDCs will basically be inoperable by the holidays,” she said.

“I mean, it’s totally understandable that the city is concerned about making commitments,” she added, “when they don’t have confidence the federal government is actually going to carry through.”

Beyond housing projects and advocacy, local CDCs help host 162 community events a year, she said. In 2024, they helped 472 people open new businesses. “All across the city,” she said.

And that includes Shaker Square, one of her favorite projects that CNP has a stake in.

Since 2022, Menesse has helped oversee elevator installations, doors being painted, landscape mainteance, and new cafés opening up in vacant storefronts. It’s quite possible, she said, that HUD’s potential cuts could hamper Shaker Square’s progress towards rebirth.

Which has left her in a kind of state of dissonance: the Feds don’t want part in our food bank, in our arts scene, in our libraries, in our schools, in our lakefront, in our tree planting and, now, in our neighborhood betterment.

“I just feel there’s this ongoing sense [from people] that, you know, government doesn’t have a place in our communities, and doesn’t have a function,” Menesse said. “I think that people are going to really start to feel that.”

This article appears in Cleveland SCENE 3/27/25.