EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio — Broken, vacant and forgotten: that's how neighbors near this block of Northfield Ave in East Cleveland feel about these abandoned homes. A drain on area property values and a safety problem. A story too often repeated in Cuyahoga County.
"That's what vacant properties cause; they make people feel like nobody cares about their community," said Adam Stalder, the director of community stabilization for the Cuyahoga Land Bank.
That's where the Cuyahoga Land Bank steps in, acquiring vacant properties and bringing them back to productive reuse to improve the quality of life for residents. It's their mission today, as it was 15 years ago when this work began.
"They understood that vacancy and abandonment and blight was an issue that our community was going to be dealing with for the long term. And we needed a vehicle to be able to help assess that problem and remediate that problem," said Cuyahoga Land Bank Interim President, Ricardo León.
The Land Bank just completed their 10,000th demolition and has redeveloped 3,000 properties. Now, a recent $23 million state grant will allow them to improve even more neighborhoods.
"We will be knocking down over 1,100 properties of a mix of single-family to three-family residential, all the way up to commercial industrial blight," León said.
Including abandoned homes on Northfield Ave, and the largest project on the list, the former Huron Place Apartments on Terrace Road, a 13-story building that's been empty and rundown for over ten years.
"It's just a big building that overlooks the entire community,” said Stalder. “And it acts as a billboard for blight in East Cleveland."
Another $45 million state grant allows the Land Bank to decontaminate and clear seven commercial industrial sites in Cleveland, Middleburg Heights and cities to attract jobs.
"The reality is that now business can start coming back into the county,” said León. “We can start making the county more attractive for long term economic development and start reversing some of that trend of seeing our jobs, leaving the county."
The millions in funding come at a bittersweet time. Founder, President and visionary Gus Frangos passed away unexpectedly in August. But his mission carries on.
"In my neighborhood, I live next to an abandoned house, and I know how that feels,” said Stalder. “So, I'm happy to do this work."
"Anytime we see some of these buildings come down, particularly big ones, it's just a win for the neighbors. We see parties, we see folks celebrating on social media," said León. "That's a win for the residents of our county, and that's a win for our mission."
You can see the entire list of properties slated for demolition and revitalization below: