Cleveland In several meetings with community development and housing experts in Cleveland, they kept pointing us east. Not just to the east side of Cleveland which had historically housed the largest African-American communities in the city, but to the near suburb and separate city of East Cleveland, so with an organizer from ACORN Canada’s Ottawa office, we hit the doors for several hours while driving around the area to get the measure of the area.
According to census figures, East Cleveland is now about 94.5% African-American in a population that has dropped to less than 18,000 from almost 40,000 in 1970. The median household income is now $20,660 compared to almost $49,000 statewide in Ohio with a poverty rate over 42% compared to almost 16% statewide. The median home value is just shy of $37,000 with 65% renters and a general housing vacancy rate of over 37%. The school district regularly ranks as the lowest in the state of Ohio, and the city has been on the verge of bankruptcy for years, unable to pay police and fire personnel.
On the other hand it is hardly a mile from the expanding campus of Case Western University, museums, the botanical garden, and hospitals associated with the world-famous Cleveland Clinic. Part of the area was the Forest Hills estate of John D. Rockefeller who built the Standard Oil monopoly in Cleveland and lived here. Some of the houses and apartment complexes in the area are huge, both occupied and abandoned. There are case studies that argue that this contradiction was not just deindustrialization and white flight, but a more systematic result of governmental racial housing discrimination over years of the type brought to attention more recently in Richard Rothstein’s book, The Color of Law.
The Thriving Communities Institute has made East Cleveland a poster child. A $100 million fund diverted from the state of Ohio’s foreclosure relief money was earmarked for demolitions, but excluded multi-family dwellings. They argue that a 20-acre tract is hopeless and should be cleared for development and housing. The Institute, which supports land banks, chafes at criticism that it is only about demolitions, and claims that they rehab one house for every three they take down.
Driving through East Cleveland and visiting with families there, it was easier to see the demolitions, and in fact when looking for dumpsters which are the markers for rehab, we saw none. But, visiting with families, ACORN’s Home Savers Campaign was impressed with the enthusiasm that families had for the area, and their commitment to owning their homes, even though they were now on land contracts. Of five families, we met four who were African-American, one white, and one Hispanic. They weren’t running. They were hunkering down. Their repair projects were serious, but the gains were palpable in the large two-story houses with basements that they were trying to make their own.
The economics are brutal though, because for homes that most were contracting to buy for $25,000 or so, the Institute’s back-of-the-envelope figures spitballed at me in various meetings meant that $20,000 in repairs might only increase the value by $5000 in the home on the general sales market, hardly moving the needle on tax revenues and not offering much in collateral for bank loans. In a scary way, this is almost an argument for land contracts to implement rehabilitation, but in another way, it is also an argument for government to step in to create the long term fix that it helped create and that short term capitalist calculations are continuing to enforce.