The intersection of Grand Avenue and East 70th Street has been a dead-end economically for decades. But that’s about to change for this urban prairie. Recently called the Forgotten Triangle, this site is along the Opportunity Corridor Boulevard seen in the background at left. East 70th will be vacated and the land-bank lots around here will be assembled and marketed to job creators (Google). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Sites along Opportunity Corridor, NS railroad ID’d
Digging through public records can reveal a lot of interesting things sometimes. One of those is where Cleveland’s new Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund, Cuyahoga Land Bank and the city’s Department of Economic Development (ED) are focusing their efforts to assemble land for new employers.
For now, much of that effort appears to be focused on an area roughly south of Euclid Avenue and north of the 2022-built Opportunity Corridor (OC) Boulevard, between Downtown and University Circle. It includes parts of the Central, Kinsman, Buckeye-Woodhill and Fairfax neighborhoods.
In some of those areas, it’s difficult to tell that you’re in the urban core of a major metropolitan area. City planners use terms like urban doughnut hole or urban prairie to describe such swaths of abandoned land, where there are few residents or employers — yet there are streets, sewers and utilities.
When former Cleveland City Planning Director Hunter Morrison became a consultant, he urged that Rust Belt cities pay to remove the few remaining houses or businesses in urban prairies so that their aging, taxpayer-supported infrastructure can be abandoned too. And someday, once the land is cleaned up, he said these vacated lands could be compete for jobs with their opposite counterparts in exurbia.
That’s similar to what Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund is doing, but without surrendering the existing infrastructure. Instead, Mayor Justin Bibb and Cleveland City Council launched the Site Readiness Fund (SRF) in 2023 as an independent nonprofit entity to reactivate 1,000 acres of disinvested industrial brownfields. It was seeded with $50 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds.
Sites mentioned in this article are identified on this map which can be enlarged by clicking on it. Among the features is the East Side Trail & Innovation Hub, the orange line, planned along 1.5 miles of the Norfolk Southern railroad from near Carnegie Avenue south to the Opportunity Corridor Boulevard. Also identified is the white line of the HealthLine bus rapid transit, plus the Red Line and Blue/Green rail rapid transit lines (Google/KJP).
City officials created the independent SRF because converting old, abandoned, polluted industrial sites to new, clean, productive ones often takes longer than a mayoral or councilmanic term or two in office. They said the land reactivation process cannot be turned on or off depending on who’s in office at the time. And Cleveland’s working families can’t wait for mother nature to take back these sites instead.
The goal is to create 25,000 jobs that, unlike the employment popping up in the pristine greenfields beyond Cuyahoga County, will be accessible to all Greater Cleveland’s residents. One-fourth of Cleveland households don’t have cars, Census data shows, making it difficult for them to escape poverty. The clean up efforts are also intended to reduce environmental risks, promote sustainability, and build neighborhood wealth.
SRF isn’t working alone. The Cuyahoga Land Bank, a countywide nonprofit, serves as its fiscal agent. It works with Cleveland’s ED Department, a part of city government. It collaborates with the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority. And it partners with neighborhood-based community development corporations.
All of them also work directly with developers and other end users of properties to assemble and reactivate sites. SRF has also engaged Russell Berusch, president of Berusch Development Partners, who has worked the for-profit and nonprofit sides of real estate for four decades. Brad Whitehead, SRF’s managing director, described Berusch as a seasoned professional in the real estate business.
Cleveland’s working families can’t wait for mother nature to take back the city’s abandoned industrial inventory so it can be productive again. That process needs to be greatly accelerated, which is what the Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund and others are pursuing. This is the scene along East 67th Street south of Central Avenue (Google).
Some businesses that have shown a long-term commitment to Cleveland and are willing to be patient to assemble lands on their own are doing so. One of those is Miceli Dairy Products, 2721 E. 90th St. Their development arm, the Miceli-Lograsso Development Co., has been acquiring lands near the OC Boulevard for years to enable a $128 million expansion — the first phase of which is starting this spring.
Another is Beachwood-based TurnDev’s Opportunity Commerce Park, 4900 Woodland Ave., with up to 230,000 square feet of warehouse, cold storage or industrial space. It won two Ohio Brownfield Program grants totaling $4 million in the last three years to clean up the 16-acre site so it can ready for construction next year.
Meanwhile, Premier Development Partners of Independence has cleared a 15-acre site called Gateway 55, 2966 E. 55th St., just south of the OC Boulevard, for up to 250,000 square feet of a build-to-suit warehouse or industrial building. But it’s competing with exurban sites offering up to 120 acres.
The SRF is busy too. NEOtrans has compiled a list of some of the focus areas in Cleveland where land is being acquired, assembled, cleared and cleaned up into larger sites of about 10 acres or more.
At Central Avenue and Ashland Road are more relics of Cleveland’s prolific industrial past — the former Westinghouse-TAPCO plant at left, and the Cleveland Railway Co.’s streetcar power station at right. They are being razed to make way for Cleveland’s future which city officials hope will be filled with more jobs than nostalgia (Google).
Former Wellman-Seaver Engineering Co.,7000 Central Ave. — SRF paid $845,000 for the 10-acre parcel with a vacant, 183,000-square-foot, 123-year-old factory on it. This was SRF’s first property acquisition. It is one of several large property assembly and clean-up efforts located next to the elevated Norfolk Southern railroad. Another NS line parallels the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s Red Line.
The purchase of 7000 Central was done in partnership with the Cuyahoga Land Bank and the Burten Bell Carr Development Corp. which is using a prior grant from the Fund for our Economic Future to be an investor in the project. It could become a modular housing factory as the city is vetting potential production partners.
Former Westinghouse Electric/Thompson Aircraft Products Co. (TAPCO) and ex-Cleveland Railway Co. power house, 2162-2209 Ashland Rd. — Cuyahoga Land Bank acquired these properties totaling 4.8 acres from state forfeiture last year. The site is along both sides of the elevated NS railroad and hold hollowed-out structures ranging from 85-127 years old that have partially collapsed in their three decades of inactivity. Additional properties nearby are sought.
69th Street Property Portfolio LLC, 2363 E. 69th St. — On the west side of the NS tracks from the old Wellman-Seaver site, SRF is acquiring this 27-parcel, 8-acre site with more than 236,000 square feet of buildings on it in various conditions. Oldest structures date to 1917 for the Interior Steel Equipment Co. which made lockers for schools, workplaces and gyms.
With all these cars parked on a closed-off section of East 69th Street, it looks like a bustling albeit faded industrial site. Instead, they’re among hundreds of junked cars littering a portfolio of 27 small properties and factories, some of which are collapsing from neglect. This was the site of locker-maker Interior Steel Equipment Co. (Google).
The largest and most recent site user is Storage Solutions Inc. There are many junked vehicles littering the site. The property owner changed names in February because its old name was identical to another Ohio company, complicating the site’s sale to the SRF. Whitehead says “A lot of clean up work will be needed to get that property ready for the market and we are sorting that out now.”
Former National Acme plant, 170 E. 131st St. — Not all aging industrial sites are or will be concentrated along or just north of the OC Boulevard. City records show that, in February, the Cuyahoga Land Bank hired Clean Harbors Environmental Services Inc. of Norwell, Mass. to demolish and clean up the old National Acme plant located where Glenville meets Collinwood.
Mayor Bibb will be joined by Councilmen Mike Polensek and Anthony Hairston at an April 3 event to kick off that cleanup. For $10.5 million, this 13.4-acre site will be returned to productive use and neighbors will no longer suffer living next to the polluted site, said Polensek who represents Ward 8. The land bank won $7.6 million in Ohio Brownfield Program funding and received $3.5 million from the SRF.
OC Boulevard/East 75th Street/Grand Avenue development site — One of several sites along the OC Boulevard, this 13-acre swath of public and private properties was originally proposed to be the location of the city’s new Division of Police headquarters. But when the city decided to redevelop the historic ArtCraft Building for the new police HQ, that had left this site in limbo.
A large factory, the former National Acme plant on East 131st Street where Glenville meets Collinwood, is hiding amid growing vegetation. The factory is being cleaned up, demolished and cleared so its 13-acre site can be returned to productive use (Google).
Although Whitehead said SRF is working closely with the city to make this site marketable, he said its many moving parts means the city’s ED Department is best positioned to take the lead on it. City Council is moving legislation to vacate two street stub-end streets (East 70th and 73rd) and is working to secure parcels owned by the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority and Ohio Department of Transportation, although their spokespersons declined to comment.
OC Boulevard/East 79th Street development site — Aging structures on East 79th Street are being razed to either allow for the future expansion of the new Nor-Am Cold Storage warehouse, 2797 E. 75th St., or for potential mixed-use development next to the rebuilt Blue/Green Line light-rail station as shown in neighborhood masterplans.
City Planning Commission on March 7 gave thumbs up to a joint request by the city’s ED Department and its Demolition Bureau at the Department of Building and Housing to demolish two buildings. By taking down structures at 2826 E. 79th and 2806 E. 79th, it creates a more marketable development site.
“The Opportunity Corridor Development Zone contains the largest concentration of vacant land,” said Elizabeth Mackey, Cleveland’s demolition compliance officer. “By combining targeted demolitions with these vacant lands the department of economic development will advance investment in physical development human capital development and economic opportunities.”
It’s not a dusty prairie somewhere in America’s Great Plains. It’s Grand Avenue just west of East 75th Street along the Opportunity Corridor. This swath of abandonment is being gathered up by Cleveland’s Economic Development Department for future development. Former Mayor Frank Jackson proposed putting the new Division of Police headquarters here (Google).
OC Boulevard/East 105th Street/New Economy Neighborhood — Farther east along the OC Boulevard, where it turns into East 105th Street, it’s not abandoned, polluted industrial sites that are being cleared. Instead, it’s the few remaining homes in what Fairfax Renaissance Development Corp. dubbed a decade ago as The New Economy Neighborhood, a future mixed-use technology and research district.
While hundreds of new apartments and single-family homes are getting built west of East 105th in the Innovation District, dilapidated houses east of East 105th are getting acquired and razed one at a time in the New Economy Neighborhood. Four more houses on Hudson and Norman avenues were approved for demolition March 7 by the Planning Commission. Cleveland officials hope Canon Healthcare USA and others will expand their presence here.
“These (demolition) project sites are in proximity to the existing Opportunity Corridor and are within the footprint of the Opportunity Corridor Development Zone,” Mackay told the commission. “For more than 10 years, the city of Cleveland, community development corporations and various other partners have invested significant time, energy and resources with planning development activities in the development zone.”
She said the vision for the development zone continues to create sites as part of a targeted planning initiative to offer a pipeline of economic opportunities that will provide residents with employment and housing. And the city is seeking more ways to physically connect residents with jobs. As noted earlier, many job seekers are without cars. Others must share a car with multiple wage earners in the same household.
Where some see abandonment and regret, others see opportunity and hope. But turning former residential neighborhoods like this one, at Hudson and Norman avenues near University Circle, takes a lot of money, paper work and patience to turn into clean, single-parcel, construction-ready sites than can compete for jobs with a farm or forest in the counties surrounding Cuyahoga (Google).
Existing roadways, including the OC Boulevard and an all-purpose trail which flanks it, are one way to access these potential job sites. Another new trail is planned along the busy NS tracks from the OC Boulevard and the East 79th Red Line rapid transit station north to Carnegie Avenue which is being rebuilt starting this month with new pedestrian- and bike-friendly infrastructure.
This new trail, called the East Side Trail & Innovation Hub (ESTIH), would be about 1.5 miles long and provide access to the HealthLine bus rapid transit corridor on Euclid Avenue at Midtown. Extending north one block from Carnegie to Euclid is complicated by the presence of an active freight rail spur into the American Sugar Refining Co.
In January, the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded the Site Readiness Fund a three-year $985,000 Innovative Finance and Asset Concession Grant to launch a public asset management strategy for parcels near key public transportation lines in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood to connect the local workforce to economic opportunity.
“We are looking for a consultant who will work closely with our team to develop a comprehensive market analysis that will shape the future of this transformative project,” said a spokesperson for the Site Readiness Fund in a written statement. The consultant is due to be hired by April and is expected to deliver its analysis in August.
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