7GEN Visioning East Cleveland Squared

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Wed, 08/02/2006 - 12:19.

The area in the city of East Cleveland and Cleveland that is most certainly blighted is the corner bounded by Euclid Avenue on the North and Lake View Cemetery on the west and south, which is a serious dead end in two ways. One is the lack of flow through of traffic and healthy human activity. The other major issue is that the most remote inner corner of this dead end happens to be in Cleveland, isolated in East Cleveland away from the rest of Cleveland by part of Lakeview Cemetery (it's just east of the gates on Euclid). So this corner does not get good Cleveland police and other services and has deteriorated into a very rundown and unhealthy area - the impact zone extends about four or five blocks east into East Cleveland. At that point, the neighborhood becomes lovely, with large historic homes that tend to be largely well kept. Investment in helping this historic zone really fix up their homes and heighborhood would really pay off for homeowners and the city.

The energy potential map above shows the current condition of this zone, and no amount of infill or clearing out abandoned structures will solve the problem. The location by the cemetery and area isolated from Cleveland are not appropriate for residential use - the dead zone is beyond hope - there are few if any historically significant homes in the area, except property actually on Euclid avenue, and at least 50% of the property in the dead zone is already vacant or in complete disrepair. If there are any properties worth saving, they could be included in future development, but the first priority is to assemble and clear all other property in the dead zone and put it into immediate, well planned new urban development, transforming the worst zone in East Cleveland into the most economically and culturally diverse.

The zone is the approximate area of mixed commercial core and some housing of and around Shaker Square, with a healthy buffer in every direction - and that is the energy dynamic shown in the diagram below, which also features the main transportation routes is heavy red lines.

The dead zone location is actually excellent but the current use is blighted multifamily residential - all of which must go. Knowing with one single development all the blight of a neighborhood can be eliminated and an entirely new energy and destination created, I thought of what would work and fit best in that space and the Shaker Square model is perfect. So I mapped Shaker Square into this problem spot in East Cleveland and you'll see below it reinvents the entire area around Lakeview and the Star Complex, making it much easier to transform the rest of that community. This is a type of mixed use quasi big box development for which there area few developers in town - Wolstein, Stark and Rubin in particular. That can be done.

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