IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME ALREADY.

Drive east out of downtown Cleveland, and it’s just a few minutes
before you come to one of the city’s starkest divides between the haves
and the have-nots, at the exit for the tony lakeshore enclave of
Bratenahl and the cratered Glenville home of Superman. Turn left, and
there are manicured mansions and not a pothole in sight. Turn right,
and it’s like a city that got overrun by wolves. It’s in this
neighborhood and in Slavic Village on the city’s south side — two
neighborhoods that are poster children for the ravages of the
foreclosure crisis — that the county land bank will kick off its
work, expanding upon the city’s efforts to reshape and rethink the
Cleveland of tomorrow.

It’s obvious why they’re starting here: You glean right away there’s
something precious to save. You can see the succession of successes and
failures. The vacant row house boarded up and peeling apart, across the
street from the well-kept branch of the public library. The trim, clean
Glenville Plaza and East Side Market, then the empty grocery store and
the battered storefronts. Grand, well-tended gingerbread houses with
views of the Cultural Gardens, surrounded by others with shards for
windows, inhabited only by ghosts.

“Five, six, seven, eight — it’s unbelievable,” says Tracey
Kirksey, steering her red Mini Cooper through the streets she oversees
as executive director of Glenville Development Corp. “Oh, wait —
there’s nine there now. There once was a time when we rivaled downtown
for retail and restaurants and all that; we were known as the
Gold Coast. Now, people come back to see how the neighborhoods are
doing, and what they see is how this economy has devastated so many
parts of it.”

It’s the map that was handed to Kirksey when she came aboard 14
years ago. The addresses are the same, but the view has changed. On one
block, nearly half of the 40 homes are abandoned and nearly stripped.
Nearly a thousand addresses in all, she estimates, are distressed,
vacant or demolished. The ones that remain have been left with new
surroundings and forestalled plans. About half the people in
Glenville’s 8,000-plus homes (average income: $22,392) truly care what
happens to their neighborhood. The other half, she laments, couldn’t
give a shit.

But help is coming, in the form of $47 million in federal dollars
from the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of ’08. At the same time,
the county’s Common Pleas Foreclosure Mediation Program has started
rolling, and recent reports show the possibility that the level of
foreclosures is hitting, at least, a holding pattern.

It’s a good time for the county land bank, which county treasurer
Jim Rokakis fought in Columbus to establish and which was
unceremoniously funded with a million federal dollars a few weeks ago
by the county commissioners, to get things started on a county-wide
scale. With even more federal stimulus money expected to flow in down
the road, folks like Kirksey haven’t felt this optimistic in years. For
the last eight years, they felt like winning the lottery was more
likely than a concerted federal response. Then again, that will only
lay the groundwork for another needed investment: making all the vacant
lots look like part of the neighborhood again.

“Hey,” she says, “greenery is better than this. I had a period there
where I said, ‘I don’t know if we can fix this,’ but now I feel
hopeful. We’ve got Barack in there. And really: Cleveland is a strong
city with a lot of people who believe in partnerships. I have to hang
my hat on the belief that we can get through this.”

The city of Cleveland already has a land bank, started more than a
decade ago and bolstered recently by about $11 million in the last
round of federal stimulus. It’s more than doubling the number of
demolitions this year, giving the CDCs hope of more seeds than they’ve
seen before. The foundations are concentrating their dollars on
neighborhood development too. In total, Cleveland has gotten about half
of the $47.9 million in state and federal stimulus funding that’s come
so far for foreclosure remediation. And for good reason.

All the county’s municipalities started using the money in February,
mostly for demolition but also for larger loans for redevelopment and
for $40,000 forgivable loans for families to buy foreclosed homes.

The county land bank, modeled after a successful program in Flint,
Michigan, is designed to bring regional coordination to this effort,
giving the county many of the same tools in the suburbs that the city
currently has. Its main goal, according to a discussion paper from the
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, is “to focus on the conversion of
vacant, abandoned and tax delinquent properties into productive
use.”

County planners could have started in all areas immediately, but
they decided to focus first on Cleveland’s two most devastated areas
— Glenville and Slavic Village — where redevelopment will
most likely mean gardens and trees. Then they’ll branch out.

“Every house that’s gone dark now is not going to be repopulated,”
says Rokakis. “But also, we’ve got to save who’s still in these houses
now and educate — or after all of them are stripped out, we can
get them ready for the demo list too.”

About 30,000 homes in the region that are funded by a mortgage about
to explode were just sent educational letters, urging the homeowners to
seek the better deal that thousands of mortgage buyers have gotten in
the past several years through advocacy groups and court
intervention.

Though he’s open to donations from the public and foundation
support, Rokakis hopes market forces will balloon the size of the pot
— both its money and properties — which would facilitate
faster development deals on bigger and bigger lots. He believes the
bank will bloom to as large as $4 million soon, once it starts scooping
up all the unpaid property taxes on foreclosed properties. After that,
he says, “We’re going to the bond market this summer and borrow as much
as we can.”

And he wants to flip the flippers, speculators who buy distressed
properties to quickly sell them for profit.

“We want to intercede between the financial institutions and the
next round of flippers,” he says. The banks had already brought him
about 550 properties by the time we spoke a few weeks ago. “As far as
I’m concerned, they need to give them all to us. Most just need to be
torn down anyway.”

And since it’s dealing with thousands of owners now, the slow growth
of assets in the land bank that will take place on the regional level
will allow oversight that’s been absent for too long.

“It’s an esoteric thing, a land bank,” says Rokakis. “Getting a
clean title, as opposed to a toxic title, can sometimes be all you need
to make a difference.”

Most of the land bank’s cash will go toward demo. But Rokakis says
it will also, on a broader level, seek to educate people and to reform
lending practices, as well as reposition property for a myriad of
view-improving uses. That’s next.

“If we don’t get them down, what are they going to be? Movie sets?”
he wonders aloud. “Just leave them up for the people who’re left … to
watch their property values shrink to nothing?”

But he’s under no illusions. Demos cost about $10,000 apiece;
renovations — for areas not envisioned as future pocket parks,
gardens or parking lots — cost a lot more. For just demo, there’s
about $150 million of work to do countywide.

Through the drizzle, two teens in white Ts approach a reporter
taking notes in a car. Thanks, but no thanks. Then, up the block and
just around the corner on Oakview, there’s an elderly woman who just
tore up all the bug-strewn sod and planted new seed for spring. Yeah,
she knows about the drug boys. And she says she knows about the people
who look like me they bring around too. But she’s most concerned about
the other eyesores. Standing on the front porch, out of the rain, she
leans on her hoe and laments the way things have gone on the street
where she’s lived for 48 years.

“It’s all naked now,” she says, pointing out the holes in the
horizon. “Something needs to be done. Maybe they’ll put in some more
gardens.” What about her? I tell her about the land banks, all the
stimulus money. “Well, I agree with that. Bring it in. I’m gonna die
here; I’m 78 years old. But I can only do this.” She points at her
patch of dirt.

It’s better now than when husks of houses were standing in all those
places. She points to three different lots that appeared in recent
years. There aren’t many empty homes on this little section of street.
The city has already torn down the long-vacant ones. She wonders what
they’ll do with the lots.

By 2019, maybe sooner, she could have an answer. That’s the goal of
numerous planners, thanks to David Abbott, executive director of the
Gund Foundation, who’s recently pushed forward the idea of a
decade-long recovery, followed by an immeasurable period of growth and
grit. The planning is already done for the housing-crisis end of that
transformation, anyway, so much that Neighborhood Progress, with
funding from the Surdna Foundation in New York, has just released
“Re-imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland,” a 35-page report that
illustrates the ease with which municipalities can fill in all their
holes, money provided. The report, crafted by 35 of the city’s best
planners, contains a slew of suggestions, one to fit just about every
crusted cranny. And almost every wallet.

The core development areas are quickly identified; the rest of the
report deals with everywhere else: community garden support; tiny
little parks on more corners; Metroparks gifting; ecosystem
improvement; naturally landscaped bio-swales for clean drainage;
geothermal energy plants; urban farms and retail-oriented parking
spaces. An orchard will soon bloom in the Detroit-Shoreway and Old
Brooklyn neighborhoods.

“It should be our goal to create a new kind of city for Cleveland
— a city that is sustainable, that works for everybody and
especially one that’s tackled its environmental issues,” says Bobbi
Reichtell, senior vice president for programs at Neighborhood Progress.
“So I’m thinking of this as a 10-year initiative. The first step is to
see what works and what doesn’t, and then we figure out how to bring it
to scale. And for old industrial cities like Cleveland that have really
built the wealth of this country for the last 100 years, there needs to
be a federal response.”

A large one is anticipated if it costs $150 million just to erase
the board.

“The number of vacant lots is only going to skyrocket now,” says
Reichtell. “But with the county land bank, a lot of those will be put
back on the market.” The land bank “takes properties with value and
potential to be redeveloped and sells them, and grows the bank.”

That, in turn, means more opportunities to re-imagine the urban
outback.

“We were surprised at the openness and receptivity of this idea, and
think that’s because we weren’t just looking at, ‘What are we going to
do with this vacant land?'” says Reichtell. “It puts forward a vision
that’s very exciting, that looks at sustainable ecosystems,
opportunities for energy generation, food production — for making
Cleveland a little more holistic in its land use.”

Cleveland’s already ranked No. 2 in the country for its local food
movement and the variety of community and market gardens. Reichtell
says an application process has already begun to select $500,000 worth
of pilot projects. She’s talking about an urban farm incubator, more
gardens, playgrounds and rainwater capturing. Bigger lot sizes and
better footprints.

“Here’s the challenge,” says Reichtell. “We need to raise money to
create a green infrastructure in Cleveland. A lot of people can reach
an agreement on, ‘Yes, this is the right thing to do,’ and be excited
about their vision. But it comes down to how we’re going to fund these
things.”

Applications for pilot projects are now being accepted at
Neighborhood Progress. The organization’s goal is to raise $1 million
dollars in the first 18-month period. Since the county commissioners
just sent away a billion dollars for a downtown convention center, a
county sales tax is probably out of the question. So the county land
bank is also accepting applications for support. “It’s still unclear
how generous that response will be,” says Reichtell.

Terry Schwarz, senior planner in charge of vacant land work at Kent
State’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, says the only fault of
the “Reimagining” report, which she had a hand in crafting, is its
focus on Cleveland to the exclusion of the outlying areas. But
everything else is spot-on, in her estimation.

“Nothing’s ever easy,” she says. “It’s not a plan for every vacant
site in the city, but it’s a decisive framework.” If somebody wants to
put a townhouse in the wrong place — “and frankly we’ve done
that,” says Schwarz — there’s now a database to consult to show
why that’s a bad idea. The same goes for farms and gardens.

“The report is a framework for getting a return, whether that’s an
economic return or public-health benefit,” she says. “It’s not about
big- government intervention, where we’re just paying for 3,300 vacant
acres. It’s a public intervention, grabbing vacant land and returning
it to productive use.”

And she doesn’t think money will be a barrier: “If we implement this
process correctly, the vacant land strategy, we’ll be providing real
economic benefits to the city and the region.”

That’s how the county’s development director Paul Oyaski is thinking
these days too. It’s hard to find someone with a government job who’s
willing to say they’re skeptical, even though only enough money has
been promised to start something, not to finish it. But the land bank
will be a bigger hammer to wield in the fight.

“There’s not so much a question of authority now, because it’s a
corporation that can do just about anything else any other corporation
can do in terms of buying, selling, holding and demoing property,” says
Oyaski. “So, to me the central question is how to use limited resources
to have the maximum impact.”

The bank itself, the first in Ohio, is on a probationary period too.
After two years, it has to show measurable successes, as the one in
Flint has. So the bank is in Glenville and Slavic Village now, hawking
for properties to scoop up and demo, or scoop up and fix. And then,
maybe, a new Cleveland will blossom from the cracks.

“Each property has its own story and its own potential,” says
Oyaski, who walked his ward to win a seat on Euclid City Council in
1977 and remembers maybe one vacancy a street. Now there’s five, six,
seven …

So many stories lost. So many left to write.

dharkins@clevescene.com

View a slideshow of Rose Marincil’s abandoned house photos on
clevescene.com

This article appears in May 6-12, 2009.