Mark Oprea
Christopher Alvarado (right), the executive director of the Slavic Village Development Corporation, picks up ugly debris on the corner of East 65th and Sebert Ave. Friday morning.
After seven years operating a pet-centered nonprofit on East 65th and Sebert Avenue, Becca Britton became fed up with the surrounding litter.
She was sick of the stray Lay's bags, the empty condom wrappers, the spattering of heroin needles. Neighborhood Pets is stuck in the heart of Cleveland's Slavic Village, a neighborhood of 20,100 bedeviled by boarded-up stores and, to Britton's eye, rampant drug usage.
"That's my office, right over there," Britton said, standing before a trash heap on East 65th and Sebert on Friday. "I look at this here every day. I see the users shoot up, I see the needles on the sidewalk. And everyone just doesn't care."
Britton's plight—operating a poverty-focused nonprofit in an embattled neighborhood—could be seen, in a nutshell version, as the reason Slavic Village officials and residents gathered Friday morning to rid 3724 East 65th of its ugly debris.
The group pick-up, which attracted about a dozen, was spearheaded by Ward 12 Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer as both a precursor to her six spring clean-ups and as public display of the inevitable result of homes owned by limited liability companies.
Mark Oprea
Ward 12 Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer helps pick up trash on the corner of East 65th and Sebert, a sort of precursor to her ward's six spring clean-up efforts.
In January, a 39-year-old man was shot and killed some blocks away from Britton's nonprofit. And, just last week, according to Maurer, another was shot in the apartment above Neighborhood Pets.
"This intersection has been an issue for a long time," Maurer said Friday, in between grabbing chip bags and other debris. "And, after the shooting last Friday, this parcel was getting into worse and worse and worse condition, and we just said, 'Alright, enough is enough."
The parcel, according to Britton, used to host two storefronts until it was abandoned. Due to petty theft and nearby drug usage, a bar and a restaurant across East 65th both closed up shop last year. "And you know, there's Saint Stan's right over there?" Britton said, pointing to Saint Stanislaus, a Cleveland Central Catholic elementary school in sight of Sebert.
Though 3724, Maurer said, is owned by a mom and pop landlord—not a notorious property group like Holton-Wise, which does own a handful of homes in Slavic Village—she believes that cracking down on such LLCs this year could have a bettering impact on neighborhood decay.
And all the ugly trash.
"I think the most important thing that we can do is tighten up our rental registry and our registration process," Maurer said, referring to the new housing laws, set for city council introduction in April, "so that these LLCs can't hide behind nameless names anymore."
Beyond dealing with the effects of distant landlords, Slavic Village Development Corporation is attempting to arm its residents with the tools—and, sometimes, the cash—to chip in to help beautify their streets.
Mark Oprea
Neighborhood Pets, owned by Becca Britton, sits across the way from Friday's trash clean-up at 3724 East 65th St. Last week, Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer said, a man was shot in the second story apartment.
"The negative ramifications of the trash of criminal activity falls on residents and businesses and organizations that are here to do good work for the neighborhood," Alvarado said in a brief press conference. "Certainly what we do, sometimes it feels like we're trying to roll a boulder uphill, but by having a lot of folks come together, it makes that load a lot lighter."
For Britton, who doesn't see herself moving Neighbor Pets to a different address any time soon, any help will have to arrive from Alvarado's or Maurer's offices. She had spent the past year and a half notfiying local police of the users and litterers, yet has come to feel alone in the battle to both beautify and secure Slavic Village's heart.
"There's no police presence over here," Britton said, taking off dirtied gardener's gloves as light rain began to pour. She looked around the yard, which, an hour in, had begun to resemble something normal. "Well, I guess that's why we're here."
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