With Residential Units Rising on Part of the Scranton Peninsula, Will Retail and Development Follow on Its Industrial Half?

The Collins, the first apartment complex to open up on Scranton Peninsula, is also the start of the area-as-neighborhood. Credit: Mark Oprea

When Arnold Hines began his search for a new apartment earlier this year, he took into account price, space, amenities and areas where he could ride his e-bike.

In early August, Hines picked out The Collins, a new apartment complex that opened its doors in January on the southwestern part of the Scranton Peninsula. During a recent tour, Hines told Scene its location was one of the reasons he ended up leasing there.

“I love the fact that it’s in the Flats, its adjacent to Ohio City and Tremont and Downtown,” Hines, an events producer in his fifties, said in mid-August in the complex’s courtyard. “Really, we’re right here, in the center of everything.”

Hines is pretty much right. The Collins, and its soon-to-open neighbor across Carter Road to the west, Silver Hills, is the first official notch forward in a master plan for the peninsula going back to at least 2018. And the first residential property ever built there.

The blossoming neighborhood will boast more than 600 units of housing for about a thousand people by the end of the decade.

Living at The Collins, where rents start around $2,000 a month, comes with standard luxury perks: An outdoor pool flanked by flatscreen TVs and grills. A gym stocked with all-black equipment. Ritzy coffee machines and garage of complimentary bikes.

It certainly seems like the latest master plan, released by Geis and JRoc Development, in 2021, is beginning to come to fruition. One imagined with blocks of taprooms, happy cyclists, boutique offices and coffee shops.

“You can start to see some vision of that,” Aaron Pechota, vice president of develop at the NRP Group, the developers behind The Collins, told Scene. “It’s a really cool residential neighborhood with some commercial uses.”

But go up Carter Road, past BrewDog and a stunning sight of Downtown, and another world appears. Overgrown grass lots fenced in with barbed wire. Construction companies and riverfront yacht services. Marine workers lugging orange cones. Yards of idled cars waiting to be repaired or junked. And, further down Scranton Road, rows of faceless brick buildings abutting brownstones that haven’t been touched in decades.

Since 2023, the Bibb administration has touted its interest in reshaping Cleveland in the image of the 15-minute city, a city with everything a resident may need—groceries, meds, groceries, coffee, hardware—within the span of a 15-minute walk or quick bike ride. Cleveland City Planning’s pursuit of testing out Smart Code, the planning code embedded with this philosophy, could boost this citywide if passed.

A huge swath of Scranton Peninsula—roughly 70 acres—is owned by Scranton Averell, Inc., land that hosts yacht service companies, construction firms or industrial wasteland. Credit: Mark Oprea

Scranton Peninsula isn’t exactly making strides towards such a status. Yet.

The Collins’ three buildings have no retail spaces; neither does Silver Hills’ buildings. So far, the only for-sure commercial uses with neighborhood benefits are BrewDog, a Scottish brewery which opened up on the peninsula’s north side in 2021; and Great Lakes Brewing Co.’s possible site for a brew garden and new facility, situated directly south of The Collins.

Pechota said the decision not to include storefronts along Carter was admittedly a conservative one, based on high interest rates and a city tax abatement policy tons of developers like him balk at.

“It’s just not a high-traffic area,” Pechota said. “I mean, to try and convince Giant Eagle or Kroger to move down there? There’s just not enough traffic.”

“Seeing glass is nice and it’s pretty,” he added. “But unless it’s in a dense area, a lot of times they sit vacant.”

As brokers love to gab about, retail is a numbers game: grocers or Chipotles decide to lease out storefronts based mostly on how many live in and around that storefront. About 60 percent of The Collins’ 314 apartments—about 190 units—is leased up as of early September, a spokesperson for NRP told Scene.

And the area itself is still clearly growing. Carter Road, which was resurfaced this year, has sidewalks that seem bare and almost purposeless with no one walking on them. Even The Collins has yet to complete its sky lounge and kick off its bike rental program.

“It may just be one of those things—if you get the people first, then the rest will follow,” Michael Mitro, the community manager of The Collins, told Scene on a recent tour. “And I hope it does.”

If Scranton is to get its own grocer, dog grooming shop or bakery, then it’s most likely going to happen outside of the apartment complexes on its western edge. That is, on some of the 70 acres or so that lie around it, built on those grassy lots, or converted from those vacant buildings. (Like BrewDog itself, from a century-old sawmill.)

The problem is that, at least from the perspective of the hopeful developer, that land in and around The Collins and Silver Hills isn’t set to be sold anytime soon.

“We don’t have any intentions of selling anything,” Dennis Troyan, a realtor who’s helped broker with Realty Professional since the late 1970s, said in a phone call. “When we do decide to do something, we’ll do it.”

Troyan, whose name is splattered across a handful of signs that look like they were designed in the 1990s, is the broker for Scranton Averell, Inc., an inscrutable group of investors situated across the globe that own control of every single lot outside of what’s been recently developed. Land that hosts truck terminals or junk yards.

To put it simply: if those 70 or so acres are going to one day host a Constantino’s, a bike co-op or a new bookstore, then Troyan and Scranton Averell are probably going to be involved in that transition. And that transaction, Troyan confirmed with an air of acerbic tone, doesn’t seem to be tilted towards apartment living.

“I think the bloom is off the rose,” Troyan said. “I don’t think they’re renting as fast. I don’t think multifamily has the attraction it does years ago.”

Scene reached out to Scranton Averell to gauge their opinion on Scranton as a neighborhood. “There is no one here you can talk to,” they said in a phone call. “This is law firm. This is a law firm you’re calling. Thank you. Bye.”

Scranton Peninsula may fall short, at least for the next decade or so, of its neighborhood concept envisioned by JRoc years ago.

Even as the land nearby develops — whether that be the Metroparks’ park plans for the former Cantanese Classics to the west, or the Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center to the northeast, the Bedrock “Rock Block” neighborhood straight across to the north.

And after all, maybe that’s just what the Flats is? A tug-of-war identity pull between the maritime and city living.

“What’s one of the attractive things about the riverfront? You have freighters making there way 300 times a year to Cleveland Cliffs,” Jim Haviland, head of Flats Forward, said. “There’s nothing like seeing these vessels passing by—whether you’re living there or not.”