Cuyahoga County has created a new website to promote more apartments and development in areas that boast access to transit and bike lanes.
The launch comes as five regional bodies — Cuyahoga County, the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, RTA, the City of Cleveland and the Port of Cleveland — this week announced a long-term collaborative partnership to push for transit-oriented development.
The goal is to house information surrounding transit-oriented development in one place, mostly for developers hoping to score county loans (up to $2.5 million) or tax perks for building a quarter mile or less away from transit lines.
The county’s TOD push, which kicked off in 2022, has led to a handful of mixed-use projects around RTA lines. The Depot on Detroit; Arcadia in Shaker Heights; The Ambler in Ohio City; Circle Square in University Circle; and Lorain West near West 53rd and Lorain are all apartment complexes that fit in the county’s TOD model.
“We think putting all of this in one place helps,” Mary Cierebiej, the executive director of the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, told Scene in a phone call.
“We’ve had communities come to us in the past to say, hey, we want to really develop this site. It’d be great for transit-oriented development. Who should we send it to? Where should it go?” she added “People didn’t necessarily know where those types of opportunities were.”
A new Cuyahoga TOD Navigator shows a kind of two-fold view of the county. Updated, mixed-use-friendly zoning in Lakewood or Detroit-Shoreway, a walkable revision of the North Olmsted Mall, or a planned bus line for West 25th, are all factors relevant to TOD and its proponents.
But its map reveals something else: just how little transit-oriented developments have been built in Cleveland’s suburbs. Berea, Strongsville, North Royalton, Solon, Brecksville and Bedford show no pending TOD projects or infrastructure in planning stages.
Hewitt knows that convincing city governments in car-reliant areas takes time, to see both the direct benefits (tax boosts) and the indirect perks (healthier people overall). The county’s mixed-use zoning overlay—a kind of zoning blueprint for TOD-style planning—has been adapted in some way, he said, in Fairview Park, South Euclid, North Olmsted and East Cleveland.
And other suburbs?
“What we found during our study [in 2022] was that the answer was largely no,” Hewitt said. Only about six percent of land “in our most frequent transit corridors was zoned in a manner that would even let you build mixed-use, walkable development.”
The county’s push echoes similar movement at Cleveland City Hall, where city planners have implemented pilot rollouts of form-based zoning code (or “Smart Code”) in select neighborhoods. A menu of transit-demand perks for developers, for, say, building bike racks or handing out RTA cards, rolled out last year.
Hewitt believe selling the rest of the county, and not just the obvious stakeholders, is key to luring the right developers into actually shaping what Northeast Ohio looks like in the next century.
“What we typically hear from folks is that they would like a Main Street,” he said. “They would like a place where they can walk safely and comfortably with trees and businesses and parks.”
“And what they’re talking about is transit-oriented development,” he said.
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