In Cleveland's Ward 14, A Tale Of Two Neighborhoods

The City of Cleveland is in the middle of an election season overflowing with candidates and pitched battles about where the city is headed. Besides a mayor’s race with nine candidates on the ballot, all of the 17 seats on city council have at least one challenger.

One of those contests is in Ward 14, which starts at the western edge of Tremont, near Downtown and goes south and west from there, eventuality ending way out at 97 ^th St.

It’s the ward that’s been closely contested going back years. That’s unusual in Cleveland City Council politics. 

And it covers two neighborhoods where you can find a similar tension as the political debate that's going on citywide. The two main neighborhoods are Clark-Fulton and Stockyards. One, Clark-Fulton is targeted for development. The other, Stockyards, is chronically underdeveloped.

[All maps prepared by Professor Mark Salling, Northern Ohio Data and Information Service (NODIS) at Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University. Larger versions of maps can be found in pictures at top of post]

Stockyards is a bit of an orphaned neighborhood. Council boundaries changed in 2009 and again in 2013. In 8 years, it’s been part of three different wards, with three different council people. Now it’s split between Ward 14 and Ward 3, the Downtown/Ohio City/Tremont ward, which is not exactly a logical fit.

Voter turnout throughout Ward 14 is low. It’s a largely immigrant neighborhood, about 40 percent Hispanic, with a large Spanish speaking population.

“It’s people in this neighborhood that aren't very demanding about things,” says Gordon Martin, a pastor in Stockyards. “They just want to live life, as they see it, be happy, have their basic needs met. They’re very lively and vibrant about what they do in their cultures and they kind of take care of that on their own, they don’t demand a lot from the city or any public officials.”

And to the east, in Clark-Fulton, the picture is a little different than in Stockyards. This is the part of the ward thought of as receiving the city’s attention. The claims of unfairness in this part of the city are similar to what you hear in the city at large – a few neighborhoods get the attention, the rest languish.

Along 25 ^th, in Ward 14, there’s a commercial corridor planned, new housing going in and the redevelopment that’s expected to come with the new MetroHealth campus.

But even more than development, it’s still all about constituent services.

“We had some people that moved in behind us and those people were dumping stuff into our yard and we were like, ok dude, we’re chill, don’t do this, I have kids, I have a dog, I don't want them like eating something or tripping on something and getting hurt,” says Waleska Gachuk, a Clark-Fulton resident who supports the current councilman, Brian Cummins. “So I called him and the councilman had somebody out here the next day to see what was going on and the problem got resolved right away.”

In this year’s election, there are four challengers running against Cummins. 

Volunteers for one of the challengers, Jasmin Santana, are heading out to knock on doors on a sunny Saturday afternoon in July. Santana’s campaign manager, Diane Morgan, sends off volunteers two at a time, with a clipboard and flyers in hand. About a dozen people, a mix of white and Hispanic, older men and young women wearing red campaign shirts gather around a folding table, just off the sidewalk, in a community garden on a busy commercial street.

The houses along 56 ^th Street, north of Storer Avenue, are a mix of abandoned and well maintained, kids play basketball on hoops set up in the street, and the voter list is riddled with people who have moved away. Jasmin Santana worked at the Hispanic Alliance, a community organization in Clark-Fulton, until taking a leave of absence recently. This is her first attempt at politics.

“So I’m going around just trying to understand the concerns of our community,” says Santana, at the first door where someone answers.

“Look – the empty lots, the rundown houses, the empty houses, on this street particularly where people don’t use the speed limit.”

Santana began canvassing in March and she depicts the incumbent, Brian Cummins, as letting this part of his job go.

“That’s a big fault for me. You have to be present as a council. Whether you have the answer or not, you have to be present and at least communicate with our community,” says Santana.

And Cummins is vulnerable. In 2013, he held onto the seat by nineteen votes. Four years earlier, he won by about 300. Santana received the endorsement of the ward’s Democratic party leadership and the county progressives.

But according to Cummins, his detractors refuse to see how far the ward has come.

“Actually it’s two maps,” says Cummins as he looks through a stack of maps in his ward office. “This is the foreclosures and shows how hard the community was hit.”

Cummins is a former community development corporation director and sees the path forward through a developer’s lens.

“I think what people get tired of or impatient with is when will we see market investment?” says Cummins.

He points to West 25 ^th Street and projects like International Village, housing around a school for immigrants, as signs that things are turning around. Cummins says the addition of Clark-Fulton in Mayor Jackson’s $25 million Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, is another step forward. The initiative was originally intended for the east side. Clark-Fulton was added late in the process, raising questions about a backroom deal with the mayor.

“We are clearly ethical, principled elected officials. There was no quid pro quo in terms of my Quicken Loans Arena vote in what was going to happen with the bond fund money,” says Cummins.

Cummins switched late in the process from a no-vote on whether to commit $88 million in tax revenue to renovate the Q. Cummins says he learned a lesson after spending years on council as a member of the Green Party. He rejoined the Democratic Party last year, and along the way was the target of redistricting that left him without a ward in 2009.

“Anyone in the council or administration can tell you that I have evolved in my processes. I began working much more closely with Council President [Kevin] Kelley than I had with Council President [Martin] Sweeney, began developing my relationships with the mayor,” says Cummins.

According to another of the challengers for Cummins’ seat, that close relationship is part of the problem with council today.

At La Fiesta, a busy Mexican Restaurant in the western part of the ward, Nelson Cintron explains his main critique of Cummins and city council today.

“You have the power as a legislator to reject the mayor’s financing package or modify it. And I think these members of council who are in power failed us. I think this is why you're seeing so many people running for office,” says Cintron.

Cintron was elected councilman for Ward 14 in 1997 and served two terms. Cintron wants back in, partly because there’s a redistricting coming up after the 2020 census.

“We drove down Clark Avenue, you saw all those storefronts that are empty, it’s because it's split between two members of council. When we went up 65th St, same thing, it's split,” says Cintron.

Cintron says the ward needs an experienced councilman, used to the backroom deals that he says still go on at city council, to fix the ward’s boundaries.

There are two other candidates running in Ward 14 – Kyle Cassidy and Omar Medina – who we were unable to reach for this story.

The primary for all 17 council races and mayor of Cleveland is on Sept. 12 ^th. The top two finishers in each race move onto November’s general election.