Spring brings renewed hope for rebuilding the Rust Belt. In Cleveland, we had a trifecta of victories for sustainable land use. First, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District voted to form a stormwater agency, and will start charging an assessment on property using a sliding scale based on the size of impervious surface on your lot (hello Big Box parking lots). $40 million a year to restore natural systems and deal with the flooding issues of decades of haphazard, low density development patterns. In addition, Cleveland, at the center of the donut, will begin exploring locations for catalytic projects as defined by the ReImagine a More Sustainable Cleveland project, an innovative framework for regenerating vacant land. ReImagine also includes 58 pilot projects where Cleveland residents are being given an opportunity to temporarily convert vacant land into gardens, pocket parks and experiments remediating soil with plants. While the pilots only occupy 15 acres of total land, in a city that has reached 7% of its total in vacancy, they are a sign that Mayor Jackson is ready to invest in what he calls Cleveland’s ‘self-help economy’.Next up? Cleveland has formed eight committees who will match plans for greenways, urban agriculture, and maybe entrepreneurial ventures to generate renewable energy with large swaths of vacant land.  By May city will announce locations for proposed green interventions, and find partners to either buy or lease the land. It’s not just pie in the sky greenie stuff here. The committees involve city planners and technical experts from EPA to local agriculture heroes at the Ohio State University Extension urban agriculture program. In the mix is a newly formed Cuyahoga County Land Bank, which will begin taking control of foreclosed properties this spring.Perhaps our cities are ready to move beyond a predictable, rationalist discussion of solutions. Is ReImagine the bold next act for Cleveland? The cynics look at the new green movement forming from the ashes of a central city eviscerated by wealth flight and decades of mismanagement and, well, lose the forest for the trees. We cannot know what catalytic projects will do for the concentrations of poverty festering in the inner city, but some recent initiatives show that uncertainty doesn’t have to equal complacency.  For instance, if the Garden Boyz in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood are any indication, when you give boys from the projects who would otherwise get dragged into drug gangs a good job, that is, a chance to grow and sell their own food, something wonderful happens. As Sharon Glaspie, the Garden Boyz’ coordinator, says, these 13 to 17 year olds who have few choices finding work are suddenly learning to name the plants they’re growing, harvesting their first bunch of collard greens and taking them to market, making change, and walking home with $50 in their pocket, which one young man used to buy his brother shoes for school.  Some of the Garden Boyz bring home some fresh veggies for their family and others are cooking meals for their workmates. If we can replicate that small success by the tens of thousands, the future looks bright indeed.

The nature of the artist is to help us reimagine the future. A combination of group and solo shows currently at Cleveland’s Spaces Gallery focuses on what happens after the built environment disintegrates.In the group show, 15 artists from Athens, OH to New York rethink the future of the Rust Belt as they draw between the lines of abandonment and sprawl. Photos of shuttered plants and an abandoned Dairy Queen are whimsically adorned with rosy captions indicating the dreams of urban planners like green technology center or high performance home. “Green tech center” is the caption for a bombed out warehouse; “high performance home” is under an empty Dairy Queen. Is this meant to be a critique of urban planners or of our disposable culture? Perhaps there’s a simpler explanation – they are ways of rethinking these “liabilities” as potential assets.Then there’s the Ohio University School of Art Critical Regionalism Initiative in Athens where they reckon with the destructive forces of mining coal and burning it for power. They picked up 800 pounds of coal in a Prius and drove it to the gallery where it symbolizes the amount of power it will take (4,000 kilowatt hours) to keep the lights on during the run of their show (3 months). Didactic images of mining and community are imposed on a map that was painted using the acid spoils that are readily available from coal mines.Bright ribbons illuminate trash and the rusted pylons leaning on abandoned lots in Corrie Slawson’s Work Party 118. The title refers to an in-gallery and on-site installation on abandoned lots in Midtown Cleveland (the parcel numbers all start with 118). This past weekend, Slawson and twenty volunteer ‘workers’ gathered on snow covered lots to stretch strands of colorful ribbon and illuminate interesting fragments of the landscape in the city’s donut hole – some trash, bits of wall with barbed wire, a pocket park framed by small trees growing bright orange fruit. What was nice was the occasion to stop and enjoy vacant land, and to create an opportunity for new interactions.Instead of always seeing it as a liability or a depressing reminder of poverty in the city, twenty people who might otherwise pass these lots without a reason to interact with them shared a whole day of really fun participatory art and left behind big swaths of candy colored lines stretched over a ‘blank’ canvas. Or as Doug Max Utter wrote in his review in Cleveland Scene, “the resulting triangular shapes shimmered above the snow, vibrating in the breeze like a stringed instrument. Nobody was expecting anything quite so sweet.”Some curiosity seekers and pedestrians strolling by seemed taken (or taken aback) by the goings on, and we had a chance to share what we were doing with anyone who asked, including one gentleman who shared that instead of being promised another development scheme, as least this was something he could see happening.

Cleveland took a huge step this month in solidifying sustainability as a major organizing force for change. First, Mayor Jackson promoted sustainability program director Andrew Watterson to a cabinet-level position. Second, vacant land took on new meaning as an asset when the Cleveland Foundation awarded $250,000 to three urban sustainability groups for their proposal to implement their very innovative Shrinking Cities plan.

Parkworks, The Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and Neighborhood Progress, Inc. will hire designers to identify specific parcels where green infrastructure, renewable energy and urban agriculture make sense. It will be the first large-scale implementation of this kind…anywhere. Right here in Cleveland. How did it happen? Certainly not overnight.

Chris Warren, the city’s regional development director, credits the Reimagine a More Sustainable Cleveland study (pdf) funded by Surdna Foundation. The ‘ReImagine’ study made a strong argument for seeing land through the lens of sustainability as a new model of economic development for Rust Belt cities blessed and cursed with vacancy.

A dozen or so ideas that NPI solicited from the community are about to be funded with city-directed $500,000 in federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds. But Warren also credits a group of his Boomer-era peers who cut their teeth as community activists agitating for change back in the 1970s when the feds were still funding their jobs through Community Development Corporations.

The 70s zeitgeist continues with a voluntary group led by Frank Ford at NPI working in concert with County Treasurer Jim Rokakis. The group has focused on the foreclosure scourge, and testified before the Ohio General Assembly on the need for enabling legislation for the Cuyahoga County Landbank—also a groundbreaking land-use tool modeled after Genessee County, Michigan. It would still be in discussion rather than in start-up and acquiring its first properties for reuse if not for Warren, Ford, Rokakis and other leaders who remembered the power of organizing.

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A group of us vacationed to Western Pennsylvania recently. We toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterwork, Falling Water, spent a day tooling around Pittsburgh, hiked in the Laurel Highlands and gorged on cable TV. I’m way impressed with what I saw in Pittsburgh. Clevelanders are lectured about how Pittsburgh turned the corner from steel to new economy earlier, and maybe that state of recognition is behind the great little revitalization of city neighborhoods like Northside. What a gem.

We hung out with the tropical birds at The National Aviary, walked and soaked up the Gothic architecture and some Asian noodles in Allegheny West, and took in the old Carnegie Library and The Warhol Museum before calling it quits at a Peruvian taqueria in the Strip District. At the Warhol we picked up a comic book featuring Northside sites. Produced by the ToonSeum as part of something called the Charm Bracelet Project Fund, local comix artists did the whole thing. It’s real cool.

Common themes that GLUE formed around—re-imagining the Rust Belt through collaboration and engaging young creative minds—came to life at the recent Rust Belt to Artist Belt 2.0 (RBAB2), a two-day conference in Cleveland’s up-and-coming Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. The Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC)—the driving force behind Cuyahoga County’s $18 million (annual for each of ten years) cigarette levy for the arts—invited speakers to talk about their experience “using arts as a tool for revitalizing urban neighborhoods.”

Detroit-Shoreway has its corollaries in other Rust Belt cities—Highland Square in Akron, The Penn Arts District in Pittsburgh, Hamtramck in Detroit. Organic redevelopment, the experience of these neighborhoods has shown, doesn’t spring up overnight. Such was the case in this Near West Side neighborhood. D-S was built around a streetcar and the city’s highest concentration of people who walked to work—at Everready Battery Factory and Westinghouse—until both shuttered and moved away in the 1970s.

Young urbanites are rediscovering the affordable historic housing, an adaptive reuse of the battery factory, and the short walks to Edgewater Beach and Lake Erie and five-minute bike ride over the Vet’s Memorial Bridge to downtown.Groundwork for today’s indie shop influx and revitalization of the Capitol Theater, an old vaudeville stage into an arthouse movie theater on the main drag, Detroit Avenue, was laid in the 1980s by pioneering Cleveland Public Theater founder James Levin, who bought the old Laughlin’s Dance Hall and for the last 25 years has stitched together an arts district by dint of personality and a singular dedication to building Cleveland’s strongest avant-garde theater in a neighborhood that most theater patrons from the well-heeled east side frankly had trouble wrapping their heads around. Levin’s story is the real deal.

CPAC director Tom Shorgyl promises to take RBAB3 on the road to a Rust Belt city that makes the case why it needs it (word has it a contingent from Pittsburgh was making a strong case at the bar after day one).

Industrial reuse was also top of the agenda at the German Marshall Fund’s economic development conference in Cleveland and Detroit in the same week. Michael Schwarze-Rodrian of Metropole Ruhr, which directed the conversion of giant factories in Germany into uber cool arts and sports complexes, rejected the notion that Europe has a deeper-rooted respect for aesthetics than America.

Still, it’s tempting to imagine the US government with only a fraction of Germany’s welfare state as the guiding hand that pays artists salaries and creates the environment for arts and arts-driven redevelopment to flourish. The differences in tone and scale of industrial heritage recapture between German and American Rust Belts are enormous.

The Ruhr will see millions more pour in being named the 2010 Capital of Culture, and meanwhile, in Cleveland a scrappy bunch of artists and “bohemian dreamers” as the New York Times called us in its “36 Hours in Cleveland” column took over the abandoned lower former subway deck of the Vet’s Memorial Bridge at The Bridge Project for another irreverent temporary use that cries out for more attention to our industrial heritage.

Schwarze-Rodrian noted how lighting the bridges shows we care, but The Bridge Project (and organizers, Pop Up City and Ingenuity Fest) reminds us that artists don’t wait for conditions to be perfect; they dive in and shed new light on our greatest latent assets.

Marc Lefkowitz is a GLUE civic journalist blogging on the process and outcomes of the Living Cities American City Agenda in Cleveland, OH with the generous support of The George Gund Foundation.

As I listened to The President address Congress about health care reform, I thought about the cause of our health care problem: The cost of end of life care and chronic diseases found in overwhelming numbers in the U.S., such as obesity and diabetes. Americans are a sedentary lot. On one side, the low walkability of new suburbs and the tantalizing ease of car use is slowly and expensively killing us.On the other, thousands of Clevelanders, like the residents of many inner cities, are living in food deserts – neighborhoods where grocery stores and fresh food are as scarce as economic opportunity. Grocery stores left the city back in the 1970s and as density continues to diminish they argue that it isn’t possible to come back (with some notable exceptions such as Dave’s, a local chain).

Food deserts as wide as five miles are not uncommon in Rust Belt cities, says Mark Winne, food rights professional and author of Closing the Food Gap. Winne sees fresh food and shrinking food deserts as a human rights issue. It’s also a human health issue and an economic issue. The answer to our health care dilemma may lie in our economic dilemma – train Clevelanders to grow food on our vacant land like The Cleveland Botanical Garden’s six neighborhood-based Green Corps. urban gardens. Or expand CityFresh, a great program bridging the gap between fresh food and low income households.

The Cleveland-Cuyahoga Food Policy Coalition screened a segment of “Polycultures”, a locally produced documentary on the power of local food, at their quarterly meeting last week. It looks at the amazing growth in three years of New Agrarian Center and OSU Extension’s program, from one to sixteen FreshStops where Clevelanders pay for fresh fruits and veggies from local farms and pick them up by the bagful each week. It’s a testament to the growing demand for fresh food in the city. Food comes from farms like NAC’s George Jones Farm, a 70-acre farm that was converted from conventional to organic in Oberlin.

A recent study done in four Cleveland neighborhoods found that price, quality, choice, access to information and transportation are the big issues for people living in ‘food deserts’.

Recent college grad Jenita McGowan led the study (community meetings, really) with Cleveland residents while signed on as a Cleveland Executive Fellow. She spoke to seniors living in Slavic Village to young adults in Glenville. Common solutions emerged.

“Kids want more variety in school lunch programs,” she said. “People want healthier options even if they’re in the corner stores. They want to coordinate rideshares to the Coit Road Farmer’s Market (which is open year-round). They want to reopen the Eastside Market. They want to create a method to share information with each other about getting fresh, healthy, affordable food.”

Health care on the national level is tied closely to eradicating food deserts in Cleveland—and on both levels has real economic implications. This issue is also at heart, a fundamental principal: as President Obama said, it’s about our ability to stand in other’s shoes.

Marc Lefkowitz is a GLUE civic journalist blogging on the process and outcomes of the Living Cities American City Agenda in Cleveland, OH with the generous support of The George Gund Foundation.

This may be the last time I ask, but, is Living Cities’ American City Agenda for real? I’m tempted to swallow the blue pill and find out. Anything that sets an agenda as ambitious as “transforming the old paradigm of community development” and “breaking down the ossified silos of government bureaucracy” raises hopes and, if you’ve lived in the Rust Belt your entire life, some trepidation.

Let’s take this agenda at face value and look at LCACA’s first eight months of performance. With its outsized bully pulpit and unparalleled resources, Living Cities has managed to assemble Mayor Jackson’s and Governor Strickland’s top aides such as Board of Regents head Eric Fingerhut, Marvin Hayes, the governor’s lead on urban development and his counterpart at Cleveland, Chris Warren, Jackson’s chief of regional development. These parties are meeting regularly, coordinating their plans and hiring consultants to implement new programs that five years ago they could only dream of. They must be feeling the wind at their back that the combination of two Democratic administrations and a funded mandate for change offers.

Living Cities has Neil Kleiman as ringmaster for the Cleveland pilot project, and he’s no lightweight having run a think tank in New York City similar to Bruce Katz’s at the Brookings Institute. I spoke to Kleiman this week about the progress LCACA has or will soon make. It’s impressive by Cleveland standards, but whether Living Cities can pull off broad transformative change in the way we understand community development to work is still far from clear. Kleiman admits the work is half done, but failing that, it appears a number of programs are being supported with essentially whatever is necessary and that bodes well since the programs which the steering committee identified as key to broad impact are indeed large scale.

I asked Kleiman what would transformative change look like and he had a clear, direct answer:

What we’re trying to do is begin acting on a new paradigm of community development. Most of the public systems we have were constructed in the 1930s or the Sixties. We need to reengineer the systems. Funding streams and agencies are outmoded and often times not equipped to address complicated and daunting issues.

We felt Cleveland is best positioned to begin that re-engineering. A new set of institutions and a new set of critical actors redefining what are the problems and new policies and funding a more holistic approach. That all sounds heady and pie in the sky, but what’s remarkable is many people are calling for a new way.

This has never been about speechifying, but getting the critical actors and mashing them up. Having the right people attack the problem and address it with any means necessary, whether that’s money, policy reform or technical assistance. We have the right people, we’ve identified the problem, we’ve sketched out a work plan and we have eight to ten months to define what are policies and programs.

Here are some milestones from LCACA’s work in Cleveland and Kleiman’s insights on what they mean for Cleveland. The common thread? Where best practices from around the country apply, LCACA is bringing in the key actors who were responsible for getting those leading practices off the ground, or they will help establish similar programs here.

Funded a position to help draw up an action plan to implement Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative’s groundbreaking Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland study.

“A lot of cities in the Midwest know they need to rethink land use in radical ways,” Kleiman says. “We finally have people willing to say it publicly and a public that understands that this needs to happen, but nobody has really done it. There’s a lot of talk. We think the ReImagining work has the chance to be a national model because Cleveland is about to embark on significant action once they map out exactly what needs to get done. If they want, we’re going to keep pushing them to move forward in this area, and to have money dangled might be the push that enables them to succeed.”

Fund a staff person for Opportunity Corridor (a proposed boulevard connecting an existing highway to University Circle)

The transportation budget in Ohio is nationally known for its reliance on highways rather than walk- and bike-friendly neighborhoods. The mayor wants to use as one of his leading initiatives Opportunity Corridor, as a way to spark redevelopment of those neighborhood in the Forgotten Triangle. This could be a spark to get it done with dollars from the state; new transportation dollars are only allocated to mitigate congestion. One of our benchmarks, if we’re successful, is will this lead the state to change its transportation policy and have it more oriented toward walkable neighborhoods, and oriented toward Reimagining vacant land.

Fund an audit of college prep offerings and recommendations for a program focused on helping Cleveland Municipal students gain access to college.

It’s atypical for institutions of higher learning to help student get prepared for college, so we’re working with Eric Fingerhut and hired Mark McDaniel at University of North Carolina who did a similar audit for Cincinnati that the city is doing a lot to move on; we hope (Cleveland) will emulate that effort. In Cincinnati, nonprofit group, Strive, is helping young people gain exposure and assistance to gain admittance to college.

Made a $150,000 grant toward Cleveland’s home energy efficiency program

The focus of this group is energy efficiency retrofit and beside having (members of the city administration) attend a “green boot camp” at Harvard with green teams from around the country we made a $150,000 grant to work on this, to get city more focused on a large scale energy efficiency program. The city should have a plan pretty far along by this winter.

GLUE can continue to be the eyes and ears on the ground as this process unfolds. Are we seeing transformative change or is incremental change good enough? The LCACA working groups meet again in Cleveland on September 10 – we’ll have a chance to hear more updates and talk to the committee members. Stay tuned.

I’ve been thinking about Rahm Emanuel’s famous charge, “Don’t waste a good crisis” and the implications for Cleveland and Cuyahoga County with our 11% unemployment rate. As a Clevelander, a journalist and an urban planner, I’m in a bit of a gray area on how to critique the Living Cities project, an effort that aims to reengineer the fundamentals (funding, policy and practice) in Cleveland. I want to throw caution to the wind and ask, where is the harm in aggressively pursuing change if the alternative is wait for the economic recession to hit us with the same tsunami force as did the foreclosure crisis?

In Cleveland, it’s assumed we’re our own worst enemy. We’ve all heard the stories of the transplant to Cleveland who’s asked with a healthy dose of incredulity, why did you move here? I just wanted to put into context the skepticism a Clevelander and a journalist might—just might—bring to this topic. Living Cities has been facilitating a working group process where they’re bringing to bear the resources and expectation of an all-star cast of philanthropic actors along with key cabinet members from Mayor Jackson and Governor Strickland’s administrations. There is a ‘failure is not an option’ feeling inherent in Living Cities presence in Cleveland where systematic change comes slowly if at all.

Yet, the strength of the community development community here—our well-organized CDCs have received the lion’s share of Living Cities’ funding support to date for affordable housing—is the reason why we were selected to be the first in the nation for this effort. We have a very well organized and highly professional system of non-profit community development leaders who seamlessly transition into important advisory or directly into public administration. Arguably, Living Cities has handed them a ‘blank check’ to re-imagine Cleveland at a time when the city needs it most—and when it may be most receptive to massive change, or at the very least, accelerating change in these areas: Re-imagining land use; College & Career Access and Success; Expanded Income; Energy Efficiency Retrofit; Transit Oriented Development; Anchor-based economic development at the state level and at the local level; Regional Growth; Green collar job development; State-based expanded income.

Consider the counterforces in the ledger: The foreclosure crisis has hit Cleveland with devastating force, the loss of 500,000 jobs in the state of Ohio during the last decade in advance of what will surely be a more troubling year ahead as Cleveland braces for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Or have we already hit bottom and we’re ready to finally turn the corner?

Here’s how an outsider involved in Living Cities sees the situation in Cleveland:

The city is so much more advanced in terms of the current economic crisis. You’re very much in the creative stage of what to do now as evidenced in the re-imagining vacant land and sustainability work and many others. It’s a reason the project has gone so well. Here, people are less beholden to outdate and ossified silos and systems that no longer work in the 21st century.

After a year convening its work groups in Cleveland, Living Cities is starting to move the dial. It has funded the Green Academy at Tri-C and the Re-imaging a More Sustainable Cleveland (a re-greening vacant land project) – two of the most significant sustainability initiatives happening in the city. They got the ball rolling on two important dialogues: Education/pathway to careers and merging workforce training and social services benefits. These latter two still have a long way to go, and in that balance lays the true promise of this process.

Cleveland cannot afford to wait – it must engage with its leaders engaging in Living Cities, and in game changing initiatives like this week’s “Sustainable Cleveland 2019: Building an Economic Engine to Empower a Green City on a Blue Lake”. It must act like its very future depends on it, as Brent Larkin of the Plain Dealer wrote today. There may be no turning back.

Greetings GLUEsters,

I’m excited to connect with you and hear about your vision for regenerating cities like Cleveland. I’m also looking forward to exploring what makes Living Cities tick. It sounds like a real catalyst for the important work at the confluence of Cleveland’s and the State of Ohio’s urban agendas.

Here’s a little background on me: For the past decade I’ve written about the arts then business and now urban issues. I was fortunate enough to work with a group of writers and artists to start up hotelbruce.com, a blog and online ‘zine about the cross-section of urban planning and arts in Cleveland.

Since 2006, I’ve been blogging for and editing GreenCityBlueLake, which is charting the progress toward a more sustainable future in Cleveland. I’ve met hundreds if not thousands of people who are striving to make Northeast Ohio more sustainable. It’s a dream job for a writer who left a traditional journalism job to pursue a Master’s degree in Urban Planning from Cleveland State University (BA from Ohio State in English Literature and Journalism). I wanted to write and advocate for the change that I wanted to see.

For me, it all started in 2000 when I was writing an article for a local business magazine about this new trend called green building. I realized, here is a movement taking hold, and, I want to be part of it. That experience revealed how visionaries act, such as EcoCity Cleveland founder David Beach and Sadhu Johnston, who founded the Cleveland Green Building Coalition and co-developed the Cleveland Environmental Center as a fresh-faced graduate of Oberlin College. It was inspiring.

The more I write about this movement, the more I see that sustainability is about connections. It’s not green building over there and wind turbines on Lake Erie over here. What will make cities like Cleveland magnetic is a combination of more bike lanes, transit lines, access to Lake Erie and a walkable downtown packed with parks, shops and lofts (with green roofs and solar panels !). We also need to encourage the organic growth of communities like Cleveland’s Near West Side where artists, entrepreneurs, and young people who love cities are flocking. Frankly, it’s what Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Youngstown and Detroit must focus their attention on—even though it is sometimes at odds with the macro trends like sprawl—to attract new leaders.

As much ground as we’re gaining, we still need new blood. And we need to encourage our existing leaders to come to the table and collaborate as never before. It appears that is what Living Cities is doing for Cleveland. Driven by both the realization that the nation’s largest philanthropic organizations are pushing and pulling for them to make change, leaders from Cleveland and Ohio are moving toward action around key programs. Living Cities is not about more research and big reports, I’m told, it’s about identifying barriers and acting on opportunities. What’s interesting is a lot of great minds were already on the task, but Living Cities could end up being the fuse to this powder keg called urban regeneration.

I’m looking forward to meeting the GLUE network, here in Cleveland and around the Great Lakes. Drop me a line through this gluespace blog if you have an idea or just want to chat.