Cleveland Nonprofits Unveil Platform For Housing, Neighborhoods

Cleveland’s neighborhoods are home to a patchwork of nonprofits known as community development corporations, or CDCs. They work on housing issues, assemble properties for new projects and help the city spend federal money.

CDCs can’t get involved in politics by endorsing candidates. But this year, as voters pick a new mayor and several new council members, the nonprofits have written a platform that they say should be important to whoever takes office.  

The CDCs say the future of Cleveland is on the line, and the city’s next leaders need to challenge the way City Hall spends money and delivers services.

“We want to be able to help a new administration and a new city council bring forth their vision into the neighborhoods, but be able to provide real talk and real feedback back to them,” Tania Menesse, the director of Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, told Ideastream Public Media. “And that’s really what this platform will do.”

Before joining CNP, Menesse worked in City Hall running the community development department.

Many dwellings that otherwise might be affordable – like apartments in small buildings or duplexes known as Cleveland doubles – are in bad shape today, she said.

“It is frightening how much people are overpaying to live in unsafe housing in the city of Cleveland today,” she said.

Overpaying as in spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. And doing so to live in homes with lead paint. Or asthma-causing mold. Or signs of deferred maintenance because repairs are financially out of reach for many property owners.

“Gutters falling, leaking, porches falling down,” Menesse said. “The Cleveland doubles are really awesome in many ways, but that second-floor porch is really problematic if it’s not maintained. So literally, a lot of our rental housing in the city, it’s not housing that we want residents living in.”

And that’s why the neighborhood platform calls on Cleveland to make home repair money easier to get by clearing bureaucratic roadblocks and encouraging banks to lend.

Menesse said it’s tough in Cleveland to get a loan for $25,000 to $30,000 to make significant repairs. In part, that’s because homes don’t have the equity – they’re just not worth enough. It’s also because the neighborhoods have traditionally been redlined and perceived as risky for investment.

That puts homeowners in a squeeze. Jamar Doyle, who leads the Greater Collinwood Development Corporation on the far northeast side of the city, described the problem this way:

“I want to live here, I want to stay, but the bank won't lend to me,” he said. “I don't qualify for the city program and, paycheck to paycheck, I can't afford it. But yet then, because people know I'm the homeowner, the city is sending me nastygrams saying, ‘Fix your roof and fix your gutter, fix your—’ I don't have the resources to do this. And we face those residents every day.”

Unaffordable deferred maintenance can end up costing taxpayers, too. Peggy Kearsey, the housing manager at Greater Collinwood, offered this example: A family inherits an aging Cleveland home from an older relative but chooses to walk away instead of spending on rehab.

“This is their generational wealth they want to pass down to their kids,” she said. “If something happens to Mrs. Smith, the kids are going to come in and say, ‘We don't want this,’ and now it becomes a demolition. So a $10,000 roof now becomes a $20,000 demolition on the county part or the city part.”

The platform also calls for property tax relief for lower income homeowners who are seeing their property values go up.

The platform isn’t focused entirely on homeowners. It includes rental protections, calling for a ban on discrimination against tenants who use federally funded housing vouchers.

The CDCs also want more building inspectors, and laws on the books requiring out-of-town property owners to show up in person when they’re taken to court for housing violations.

Unscrupulous investing in Cleveland’s cheap property is a persistent problem, said Jeff Verespej, executive director of the Old Brooklyn Community Development Corporation on the West Side.

“We started seeing this probably six years ago, when we started ringing the alarm bell to our civic and philanthropic partners across town,” he said. “We have a lot of investors who are coming in to buy up homes in a really irresponsible way.”

Verespej offered his own example of a family trying to figure out what to do with an older relative’s home. Perhaps it hasn’t been updated in 35 years. They decide to sell. The house may be cheap, but the rehab costs dissuade potential buyers. That opens the door to investors who buy in volume.

“So what we then see is that I Buy Houses LLC will come in and offer $29,000 or $34,000 or $54,000 in cash to Granny Smith, no inspection, and the transaction’s done,” Verespej said. “They’ll then rent it out as aggressively as they can with, usually, again, without making the updates that are needed to be made.”

The nonprofits are asking the city and Cuyahoga County to develop a housing trust fund to preserve and build affordable dwellings in the area. They’d like to see more investment in infrastructure – everything from broadband Internet to parks. And the CDCs want to restore main streets and storefronts so neighborhood businesses have a place to thrive.

Tania Menesse of Cleveland Neighborhood Progress said different places in the city have different needs.

“We've got neighborhoods where they really need a significant focus on the health of housing, others where the commercial districts need more attention, areas where we need more support from a park and green space standpoint,” she said.

Despite those different needs, the platform is a way for the nonprofits that work in those different neighborhoods to speak with one voice.

An earlier version of this story referred to Cleveland doubles as "split-level" homes. In fact, they are duplexes; "split-level" refers to homes in which the floors are staggered.