Whether Jimmy and Dee Haslam will succeed with a controversial plan to move their NFL Browns from Downtown Cleveland to suburban Brook Park by 2029 is often viewed as a standalone saga of money, sports and political influence.
Viewed from another angle, it’s part of a little-noticed big-league smackdown now underway in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County over clashing approaches to urban planning and economic development. The consequences for the region’s future could be enormous.
The counterpart to the Haslams is Dan Gilbert, the Detroit-based billionaire developer, mortgage lender and owner of the NBA Cavaliers.
In contrast to the Haslams’ suburban project, Gilbert is moving ahead on a $3 billion-plus project downtown to build 3.5 million-square-feet of offices, apartments and hotels over two decades along the East Bank of the Cuyahoga River at Huron Road, behind the unfinished back side of the Terminal Tower complex.
Gilbert and the Haslams aren't competing directly, and their projects — two of the biggest envisioned for the region — aren’t often compared. But their plans embody sharply different views of Northeast Ohio, the role of Downtown Cleveland and whether longstanding city and regional plans should be followed.
State of play
News coverage over the past year has focused closely on controversies raised by the Haslams’ desire to move the Browns to a new $2.4 billion covered stadium in suburban Brook Park that they want to build by 2029. The team’s lease at the open-air, city-owned Huntington Bank Field on the Downtown Cleveland lakefront expires after the 2028 NFL season. Up to $1 billion in privately funded development, including hotels, housing and offices, would flank the stadium.
On Monday, the Haslams cleared a major hurdle when Gov. Mike DeWine signed a two-year state budget providing $600 million for the stadium backed by unclaimed funds held by the state, including uncashed insurance claims, utility deposits and other monies. The $600 million would be repaid with interest over 16 years by state tax revenue generated by the project. The Haslams could pay up to $100 million more if revenues fall short.
Obstacles remain for the Brook Park project, including the possibility of a lawsuit challenging the use of unclaimed funds, plus stiff opposition from Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, who say the Brook Park project clashes with decades of public policy and investment focused on revitalizing Downtown Cleveland.
Ronayne is resisting the idea that Cuyahoga County should borrow $600 million to support the Brook Park plan, with the debt to be repaid from project-related income.
Gilbert’s project, meanwhile, is positioned to benefit from $1 billion in tax increment financing, or TIF, approved by City Council last year.
Under the primary TIF approved by Council, increases in property value leveraged by new development across downtown including the riverfront will help pay for ground-level infrastructure to support the Gilbert development. Other projects, including on the lakefront and city neighborhoods, will also benefit.
Bedrock, Gilbert’s real estate company, broke ground last year on the first piece of the project — the 210,000-square-foot Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center. The building will house a sports medicine center at the water’s edge that will include a new Cavaliers’ training facility, replacing the current one in suburban Independence.
Future components will include a 12-acre riverfront park, hotels, apartments and entertainment venues. Bedrock CEO Kofi Bonner said the company hopes to share plans for the next major chunk of development by late this year.
The riverfront project is designed to capitalize on Gilbert’s other assets downtown, including Tower City Center and the Cavaliers, who play at nearby Rocket Arena, where he owns naming rights, and a recently-awarded new WNBA franchise, set to start play in 2028.
Similar goals, different approaches
Representatives of Gilbert and the Haslams say their respective projects will grow the region’s economy and help Greater Cleveland retain young people who might otherwise be lured to other cities. Taxpayer dollars play a big role in their plans.
That’s where the similarities end.
The two projects differ in their funding mechanisms and their perspectives on investing in downtown versus the suburbs.
The Haslam plan envisions a self-contained development on the site of a former Ford engine-casting plant in Brook Park, a blue-collar suburb about 10 miles southwest of Downtown Cleveland. The 176-acre property, just east of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, is edged by highways, rail lines and would have a ring road. It’s not directly attached to nearby residential and retail areas with a street grid and multiple access points.
The Gilbert project, in contrast, will be connected to riverfront parks, regional trails, Cleveland’s main transit hub at Tower City and possibly the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad, with connections to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
The project harmonizes with decades of planning envisioned for the riverfront site, including the city’s 1989 Civic Vision 2000 Downtown Plan and its Vision for the Valley plan, completed in 2021.
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb sees the riverfront project as integral to his “shore-to-core-to-shore’’ strategy to leverage Cleveland’s status as a two-waterfront city – lakefront and riverfront.
The Haslam plan for Brook Park, in contrast, may complicate the city’s plans to partner with developers on a $447 million transformation of the downtown lakefront.
Scott Skinner, executive director of the new nonprofit Cleveland North Coast Waterfront Development Corp., said that early conversations with potential developers have shown that few are jazzed about investing next to a stadium that could be empty by 2029 and may need to be demolished to make way for something else.
New construction next to an active stadium could happen much more quickly, he said. Replacing the stadium with a new lakefront anchor could take five years or more. And, he said, “time kills deals.”
A regional pattern
In style, the Brook Park project is designed to cater mainly to cars and features vast expanses of parking. It also recalls the region’s long history of widening interstate highways and adding new interchanges that help shift investment from Cleveland to its suburbs. In a region with an expanding footprint but nearly zero population growth, it has been a zero-sum game.
The Vibrant NEO 2040 plan for 12 counties in Northeast Ohio, completed in 2014, called for redeveloping urban areas and curtailing outward expansion to preserve land for agriculture and parks. It was the biggest regional planning effort in 50 years.
Vibrant NEO concepts strongly influence policy at NOACA, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, which oversees transportation planning for Cuyahoga, Lorain, Lake, Geauga and Medina counties and helped lead Vision 2040.
On June 13, the NOACA board, whose members represent all five counties, voted against approving a request from Brook Park for $70.3 million in state funding for road and highway modifications to improve access to the proposed Browns stadium site.
NOACA Executive Director Grace Gallucci said the agency needs to know more about how the changes might impact the region, not just one location.
Her comments are especially pertinent because the city recently unveiled plans for a $1.6 billion makeover at the airport.
“It is important that we look at things holistically and for regional benefit,’’ Gallucci said. “It is not a good practice to look at things from just one community’s or one developer’s perspective.’’
Ultimately, she said, the state’s Transportation Review Advisory Council, TRAC, could decide whether the state should provide funding. Such a decision could come early next year, said a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Transportation.
A big switch
As recently as 2021, the Haslams were planning to stay downtown. That year, they unveiled a $1 million proposal showing how revamping the downtown lakefront could dovetail with a renovation of the city’s stadium, built in 1999.
Their proposal stirred the city to action. As of early this year, the city landed $150 million in federal and state grants to help slim down the Ohio 2 Shoreway and build a land bridge connecting downtown to the lakefront, both ideas the Haslams suggested in 2021.
But even as the money was coming in, the Haslams changed course. In October 2024, they announced they had decided to move the Browns to Brook Park.
The team owners rejected a city proposal to commit $461 million to a renovation of the lakefront stadium.
“It doesn't make sense to put millions of dollars in a stadium project that doesn't solve all the issues that we're trying to solve,’’ said Browns spokesman Peter John-Baptiste.
He said the Haslams concluded it would be impossible to add a dome to the lakefront stadium, and they didn’t want to wait for the city to close Burke Lakefront Airport and create a possible stadium site there.
Last December, the Haslams said they were partnering on the Brook Park project with Lincoln Property Company, a global development firm founded in Dallas. The team also unveiled new plans for a Browns-themed development around the new stadium, with 300,000 square feet of retail, two hotels, 1,100 apartments and 500,000 square feet of office space.
The additional developments could cost $800 million to $1 billion beyond the $2.4 billion stadium. Some 12,000 to 14,000 parking spaces, mostly on surface lots, would also be built.
Comparing projects
So, whose ideas are better? Could the Haslams and Gilbert both succeed? Is it fair to compare their projects?
Economist Edward “Ned” Hill thinks it is fair. Hill is an Ohio State University professor emeritus of economic development who once served as dean of Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs.
The team owners are “both in the same industry,’’ he said. “Second, they're both at the public trough. Third, they have different ways, fundamentally different ways, of approaching the value proposition that they're bringing forward to the public.”
John-Baptiste, however, disagreed with the idea of a comparison.
The question should be, “How can we ensure both of these projects are successful? Because they're going to change Northeast Ohio for the better,” he said.
Experience and scale
An obvious difference between Gilbert and the Haslams is that for Gilbert, the founder and chairman of mortgage lender Quicken Loans, Inc., real estate is a core business.
Gilbert has earned acclaim over the past 15 years by scooping up and restoring vacant Art Deco office towers in Downtown Detroit and moving more than 17,000 employees downtown from suburban locations.
Since 2011, his companies have spent or committed more than $7.5 billion to buy, build, restore and manage more than 140 properties totaling 21 million square feet in Detroit and Cleveland, according to Bedrock and Detroit PBS.
For the Haslams, real estate development is not primary. They work with developers and rely on their expertise, John-Baptiste said.
The Haslam Family and Haslam Sports Group, formed in 2020, have spent $850 million on development projects in Ohio over the past decade, according to a tally John-Baptiste provided.
Those projects include earlier renovations of Huntington Bank Field on the Cleveland lakefront, the $395 million construction of Lower.com Field, home of the Haslams’ Columbus Crew MLS soccer team, and the adjacent $175 million Astor Park development, scheduled for completion next year, which includes 144,000 square feet of office space, and 440 multi-family apartments.
Investment philosophy
Critics, including Ronayne, say the Brook Park proposal is based on maximizing profits on property the Haslams own. He said Gilbert’s investments in Detroit and Cleveland are more about growing local economies while also generating profits.
“In Dan Gilbert and the Bedrock Companies and the Cleveland Cavaliers, you have a case of, ‘I'm here to be a part of something bigger,'” Ronayne said. “In the case of the Haslams, it’s more of an extraction.’’
John-Baptiste said that the Brook Park project will generate spending by visitors from outside Northeast Ohio, benefiting the entire region, including downtown.
“There'll be a spillover impact in Downtown Cleveland," John-Baptiste said.
Research conducted for the Browns by RCLCO Real Estate Consulting states that the 67,000-seat covered stadium in Brook Park would create $1.2 billion a year in direct economic output and nearly 5,400 permanent jobs across Cuyahoga County. Concerts, special events and other activities would boost the economic impact beyond that of a dozen or so football games a year.
Not so fast, says the state’s Office of Budget and Management. A memo released by the office in May found the Brook Park proposal highly questionable and financially risky.
The Browns objected strongly to the state’s analysis. Hill called the state memo “spot on.’’ He said the Brook Park project is most likely to attract local entertainment dollars that otherwise would have been spent elsewhere in the region.
The same principle holds true for local spending generated by the Cavaliers and the MLB Guardians. But because the basketball and baseball teams “have far more game dates, they serve as traffic generators’’ for downtown businesses, Hill said.
Also, the baseball and basketball teams “aren’t internalizing every single freaking dollar," as he said is likely in Brook Park, where the Haslams would generate revenues from parking, restaurants and other businesses on land they own.
The entities most likely to be hurt if Brook Park moves ahead will be existing suburban “lifestyle’’ centers with similar mixes of retail and/or offices and housing, such as Crocker Park in Westlake, Legacy Village in Lyndhurst and Pinecrest in Orange, Hill said.
The risk pointed out by Hill is one reason Ronayne opposes spending public money to help the Browns. He thinks it will undermine existing businesses and threaten downtown revitalization.
Consequences
Bonner declined to speculate on whether the Brook Park project would pose direct harm to Bedrock’s riverfront project.
“There's always some competitiveness within a region,’’ he said. “I truly believe that we will attain the goals that we've established through our master plan.’’
Over on the lakefront, the city will proceed with work on the Shoreway and the land bridge, whether the Browns stay or go.
But Skinner pointed out that, in addition to raising obstacles for future lakefront development, conflict over Brook Park has opened a rift. On one side, the City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, which oppose the Browns move, and on the other, the Greater Cleveland Partnership, Northeast Ohio’s chamber of commerce, which supports it.
From Ronayne’s perspective, “Haslam Sports Group has created this civil war in our town.’’
Such tensions may fade, but for now, regional turmoil is a clear early outcome of the Brook Park proposal.
Meanwhile, on the Downtown Cleveland riverfront, steel is rising on the first phase of Bedrock’s big project.
