DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... City of Cleveland Development

I was back in Cleve for the first time since my mother passed in 2015 for an extended weekend this past summer. My family is from the eastern suburbs, Cleve hts, Shaker and a little further out. Only a sibling, their kid and a few cousins left in Cleveland. Everyone else has scattered to the wind.

We came in from the airport along the “opportunity corridor” which, while being an impressive new road through what used to be a war zone, was mostly surrounded by new pasture land since they’ve seemingly leveled whole derelict neighborhoods. That’s a development policy I can appreciate as nothing is as demoralizing for a city than street after street of abandoned zombie houses but it really made the area feel very empty. We drove a different way back downtown that night and it had the same feeling of large swaths of the city that felt pretty empty. I certainly don’t remember it that way. I know there had been a steady decline in population from the 60’s thru the early 00’s but I thought that had leveled off and stabilized.

I do some real estate investment and I got a little curious about Cleveland. I think mostly because it’s still so affordable. But Nothing would make me happier than investing in Cleveland if it was truly turning the corner. So I started digging in and apart from a few areas it seems like the city proper is still struggling mightily. In lots of areas I looked at real estate has dropped in value from the 90’s until the mid 2010’s. It’s kind of breathtaking, being a current denizen of the east coast, seeing properties that sold in the late 90’s or 00’s for up to 2x what they sold for in the 2010’s. Like, oh my god, what the hell happened? It seems like it’s started to pick up juuuuust in the last couple years… but why, from what?

I feel like we’ve been talking about Cleveland rising from the ashes since the 80’s but in doing my neighborhood by neighborhood analysis I don’t see much in the majority of Cleveland neighborhoods I’m looking at. (I’m only talking about the city of Cleveland, not surrounding areas.) Yes, ohio city and Tremont look exciting. Someone told me larchmont area near shaker and old Brooklyn, but I don’t see those bear out in the numbers. Are there other areas that are turning?

More importantly, apart from the hospitals, is there any news about businesses or industry moving to or growing in Cleveland? There’s a few blogs I’ve found that talk about the police headquarters or Sherwin Williams new joint but again, I feel like I must be missing stuff. Columbus for instance has quite a few big industry projects underway but unless you know where to search or just happen to be in the loop you wouldn’t necessarily hear about it. But the real estate tells you things are happening. So what have you heard? I’m not taking about apartment and housing projects. In fact it worries me when a city backs lots of housing projects without much thought about jobs and who’s going to live them. I’m curious about what might bring actual new jobs to the city proper.

As an outsider looking in, I heard something on the radio on my last trip up that the City Council has 17 members. That is crazy IMO. I looked up Cuyahoga, Co, and it has 11 members which sounds way more reasonable.

With 17 members fighting for money to head in to their neighborhoods, wards, districts, whatever they are called, you are going to have a hard time with anybody agreeing on anything.

The best and only way to attract more business/jobs, it to have a city council who has the interests of the entire city in mind over their own districts. If not, they are just going to dork around and miss out on opportunity, just like they dink/dorked around 30 years ago and ended up losing the Browns. The team should have been moving in to a new stadium about the time they finally made a move to fund a new stadium. By then it was too late.

If you wait until zero hour, "Sorry Charlie, it's too late". It reminds me of a Daniel Day Lewis movie about oil barons, I forget the name of the movie. Some families held out on selling when they were offered, then later when desperate, decided to sell, but it was a day late. With a big straw all that oil had been sucked out from under them. They were now stuck with an old, dry, worthless piece of ground sitting in the middle of abandoned oil derricks.