Living Cities in Cleveland - a midterm report

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.