The ‘Building Futures’ program will receive $100,000 in seed funding from Zack Reed’s Ward 2 casino funds, and will utilize the existing training capacities of the Union-Miles Development Corporation, the Mt. Pleasant NOW Development Corporation and Slavic Village Development. A non-profit organization, Passages, will help train participants in soft skills, (things like showing up to work on time, dressing appropriately, managing finances, etc).
“Rebuilding homes, rebuilding neighborhoods, rebuilding lives,” is the program’s (perhaps unofficial) tagline, as uttered by Reed. The councilman continues to prove himself a formidable mayoral challenger, one with a coherent message and with actionable strategies to combat major city problems.
The program, in its current iteration, will provide training to ex-offenders in Ward 2. But Reed said that if he’s elected Mayor, he hopes to expand the program citywide. In fact, it’s an integral part of his campaign. Reed has long decried gun violence in the city, particularly in the Mt. Pleasant and Union-Miles neighborhoods that he represents. For years, he has been carrying around a map of the city with red and blue dots representing annual gun deaths and shootings. He brought the map to the announcement on Reno Avenue, just off of E. 93rd Street, and said that Cleveland was on pace for more than 150 gun deaths in 2017.
“You’re not going to be out selling drugs and gang-banging at two o’clock in the morning,” Reed said, “if you’ve got to go to work at nine.”
The Building Futures program is also an attempt to diversify the city’s approach to blight reduction. Reed has said that while demolition can be an effective tool, the city of Cleveland tends to view it as the only tool.
Tom Stone, Executive Director of Mt. Pleasant NOW, said that of the 1,500 vacant and blighted homes in Ward 2, an estimated 500 of them can be rehabbed and restored to productive use. Instead of a vacant lot that the city (or the CDC, in Mt. Pleasant’s case, using funds from Reed) then has to maintain, a home is restored and resold. The low market values in the area mean the homes remain affordable, typically in the $40,000 – $50,000 range. They are then occupied by families who “buy milk at the corner store,” “buy gas” and “send their children to school.”
“These become productive assets,” said Stone. “[Cleveland] has gotten too comfortable with the cost of demolition.”
Stone and Reed both said that while the relatively low cost of demolition (about $10,000 per home) is attractive, it doesn’t look at community health in the long-term.
“We’re using a sledgehammer,” said Reed, “instead of a real hammer…If we only look at the bottom line, at how much it costs to rehab the house, then we’re losing the bigger picture.”
Stone said that the effort would seek to rehab homes with moderate needs, not those in need of a “full gut rehab.” He estimated the cost per property at about $30,000. Union-Miles already owns several homes that can be rehabbed as part of the program, including the home on Reno Avenue where the press conference took place. Further properties can be purchased from the County Lank Bank at low costs ($5,000 or less, per estimates from the CDCs).
The corps of ex-offenders — largely from Grafton Correctional Institution — who will participate in the Building Futures program can opt for an eight, 12 or 24-week training module after they undergo soft skills training through Passages. The shortest is the Union Miles Agriculture & Green Landscaping Incubator (UMAG). The 12-week program is Mt. Pleasant’s Nehemiah 2:1-5 Project, which was described as “handyperson training.” It teaches participants basic skills in door installation, flooring, drywall, cabinetry, and rudimentary electrical and plumbing work. The full six-month program, coordinated through Union-Miles, will cover similar bases, and is conceived as an apprenticeship program. The goal is to teach participants skills so that they can then work for local contractors, or even start their own businesses. Participants will be paid $10 / hour during the “hard skills” components of their training.
The rehab work will begin by the end of July, said Union Miles Executive Director RoShawn Sample. Each rehab will take approximately four months. Slavic Village Development’s executive director, Chris Alvarado, will serve as the program’s fiscal agent.
Reed, who has always been savvy with the media and is often ridiculed as a grandstander — or, more recently, by Mayor Frank Jackson himself, as a “pimp” — is running an impressive campaign. He has taken his central issue, violence, and erected related policy around it. It was through his advocacy that City Council awarded an additional $500,000 for summer youth employment this year, and he was enraged at last Monday’s council caucus when he learned that Jackson was intending to take credit for it. The Building Futures program is a further illustration of Reed’s double-whammy policy framework: create jobs to reduce violence.
And his personal story fits comfortably inside this narrative.
“We’ve gotten to a point where people think that government doesn’t care about them,” Reed said. “We want [the Building Futures] program to say: ‘We do care about you.’ … Everybody deserves a second chance. You look at me. I’ve gotten more than a second chance. We want to keep telling people, ‘you’re not throwaways. You made a mistake. We all make mistakes.’ For too long, we’ve said to people who’ve made mistakes and have gone to prison, ‘you’re on that side of the road and we’re on this side.’ We want to say: ‘We’re all on one road now. We’re on the road to rebuilding our wards, rebuilding our communities, rebuilding our families.'”
Reed might initially have been a big-mouth sideshow in the 2017 Mayoral race, but no longer. In the campaign season’s early-going he’s blowing the competition out of the water.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2017.
Great plan. It is really nice to see Brandon Chrostowski’s approach to leadership has even inspired his competition in Cleveland’s mayoral race.
Love the idea, but $100,000 won’t cover rehabbing even two of the fifteen-hundred blighted homes in his ward.
Councilman Reed is doing a great job, and is addressing serious problems with serious actions, unlike most who just jibber-jabber about it. I don’t have a horse in the mayors race, but I like to see the upcoming election triggering good moves like this.
Councilman Reed seems the candidate that cares about the neighborhoods on a grassroots level. This program cares about individuals and their role in rebuilding their community.
I think this is a great program and I love that you are using the Fr. Greg Boyle from Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles tagline “nothing stops a bullet like a job”
There’s too much missing perspective. I live in Zack’s ward. That money could go further buying paint and brushes for people to paint their own homes. Sherwin Williams would sell the non-profits the paint at a discount. A portion of it could be used to paint the homes of senior citizens living on $390 a month social security checks in his ward. The disenfranchised group of formerly incarcerated citizens Reed wants to help would have access to more work. More, also, would be accomplished. I don’t like calling them “ex-offenders.” They’ve paid their time. No labels. Citizens. Period.
The city had a paint program before Reed but he doesn’t know that because he hasn’t studied the city or mastered its governing documents. That includes the charter and codified ordinances. It includes all of Title 7 of Ohio’s Revised Code. It includes audits, management letters, bond reports, internal audits, litigation, settlements and reports from HUD’s inspector general or the city’s jail inspection report. What Reed doesn’t know about the city and it’s past programs, and how they worked or could be better, is in the documents he hasn’t read or mastered. If he has Reed doesn’t demonstrate that level of knowledge by way of his deeds or legislation he has “personally” conceived of, researched and written. The idea that he’s considered a viable candidate is sad.
In 16 year’s he’s managed one part-time employee. He was a park ranger. He supervised San Francisco housing authority in a grass cutting program at one of the estates. He sold jeans and sneakers for Jeans West. Cleveland has a $612 million general fund and about $1.5 billion total when the enterprise funds are factored into the budgetary equation. The city has 7900 full and part-time employees and over three dozen labor unions. Reed hasn’t read any of the collective bargaining agreements he’s voted on, and now he wants to manage that much money and that sized workforce.
What’s pathetic is that he’s being taken seriously and “promoted” by people who should be more thoughtful and caring about Cleveland. But since 82 percent of the city’s workforce is non-resident, the suburbanites living well off the tax dollars real Cleveland residents living in his ward are paying need to keep “their guy” in office. I get it. He’s just the type of candidate to maintain the status quo.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s missing in Reed’s announcement.