Picture 3,000 new affordable housing units and renovated housing units in that area (not the suburban-inspired models that have been build around there so far) and add in a movie theater, grocery store, other retail, incubators for med-tech and other start-ups, new offices and small manufacturers - the Clinic is significant enough an economic engine to drive development of a new city within thie city... only thing missing is a big picture vision for their core neighborhood. That lack of vision for a big urban picture cannot be blamed on the Clinic leadership - they are busy figuring out how to be the dominant healthcare provider in the world - The Clinic leadership is focused on how to get patients and employees in and out of the hospital as fast as possible, so other planners need to step up with vision like you express above - that is what the next $3 million from FFOEF should go toward, and not to pay for the same poor planning from the usual suspects (like was highlighted by Roldo in his posting about abatements that you mentioned on realneo a few days ago). If presented with a good plan, that enhanced the experiences of patients and their families and visitors, while improving the quality of life of employees, and made for a better community around all that, I'm sure they would love it.

Disrupt IT

C. CLINIC NOT JUST DOCS – THEY THINK THEY HAVE STREET SMARTS TOO

The Cleveland Clinic’s development goals are a text book example of corporate hypocrisy.   On the one hand the Clinic lobbies to resurrect  the poor-man’s-half of the old Clark Freeway –  not the half in the Heights but the half between the Clinic and the terminus of 490 at E55th.  Consider that  UCI and CC  have concocted dishonest spin captions - “Opportunity Corridor”, and “Opportunity Boulevard” - for their desired freeway and they arrogantly dismiss the community  their hoped for freeway will sever and blight  as “The Forgotten Triangle”.   

Meanwhile, on the other hand, The Cleveland Clinic has paid it’s consultant architect Peter Walker to test float to the public last summer a plan to PRIVATIZE AND SHUT EUCLID AVENUE to car traffic between  E 84th and E 107th .  Here’s a blurry copy of the plan from the PD which I screen grabbed from The Design Rag website.  (N.B. It appears the Rag’s link to the PD graphic and article is dead.  I have found that many news web sites go dead in a week or two as the news item is transitioned into the paper’s pay-to-view archive – if you really want to have the link material permanently, a download or screen grab is best.   Fortunately, the Rag grabbed and posted a copy of the plan – so it is still publicly available.  Thanks Rag.)  HoweverI disagree with the conclusion in The Design Rag that: 

  It seems the Clinic has backed off of the closure of Euclid – now the Clinic is proposing narrowing the roadway with the new Silver Line RTA buses down the middle.

It isn't that funny though, that the Clinic wants to close or narrow 23 blocks of public roadway, make traffic inconveniently divert around the Clinic, create a private green space from public land so the Clinic doesn’t have  traffic outside their front door, BUT AT THE SAME TIME the Clinic is telling the Disadvantaged Triangle Community that MORE traffic through their neighborhoods will create an “OPPORTUNITY”.   Yeah, an opportunity for more global warming toxic fumes, noise, visual blight and neighborhood sterilization.

WE DON’T NEED CORPORATE HYPOCRISY, AND WE DON’T NEED MORE ROADS THROUGH OUR COMMUNITIES.

You are right on all counts, but I think the Rag conclusion is right: "the failure to cooperate and create timely urban development policy to support and capitalize on big, once-in-a-generation investments by these new Cleveland industrialists is keeping the small resurgences of these neighborhoods from turning into a dramatic rebirth". Our planning here has been pathetic. I'll take the challenge further down Euclid into East Cleveland, where the changing traffic flows are already moving more cars THROUGH the city, but off Euclid into the neighborhoods, making side streets freeways for suburbanites trying to get home ASAP. I understand Mayor Brewer is seeking help with traffic analysis to determine how to keep this "opportunity" corridor and Silver Line from killing his city, already so blighted from afar. I can tell you the "urban planners" of the region do not care about East Cleveland, so I know they don't care about Central. But, good planning can change that. Good planning can be found through Kent CUDC, which is what we are using in East Cleveland. This will be a long road in Cleveland - I'm still fighting the ODOT Bridge to anywhere but Cleveland, and I am still waiting for any planners here to stand up to "create timely urban development policy" around that (and they will be very embarrassed for that very soon).

In the mean time, let's put a green of highly fertilized bent-grass in the center of the Clinic Campus so the docs and all can sip Starbucks in nature... perhaps a putting green, so it feels like home? Couldn't they fit a 9 hole golf course, like was planned for Burke?

Jeff, how many trees do you think there are on the entire Cleveland Clinic property, today? What do you think is the carbon footprint of the Clinic. How much do they profit from the harm the pollution causes humans? Perhaps there is a very sophisticated plan to all this afterall.

Disrupt IT

I like your suggestion.  As someone who grew up close to the Clinic (I spent most of my youth in the Fairfax area and I am a graduate of John Hay High, right down the street...hell, my first part time job was a summer job at the Clinic), it is disappointing to see their growth that manages to not bring the neighborhoods surrounding it up with it.  This needs to change and your suggestion champions this. 

But, please, don't use the term trickle down. One, what you are talking about is more of a healthy circulation of money than trickle down and two, I am a child of the 80's...it gives me nightmares (think: Reaganomics).

Thank you for bringin this to light, Jeff!

Derek Arnold - http://subsetofderek.blogspot.com

It is unfortunately not unusual that institutions with big plans and private dollars don't consider the "little guys". They may think of the transit this way...

This is an ad for GM Canada. It was later pulled due to its insulting message. Unfortunately for those who escape to the safe cocoon of their cars as easily as they pull on the pjs, the thought of riding transit is just unsettling. As Ryan McKenzie said to me one evening not too long ago, the car has become a personal accessory. Our culture and our geoography insist on it as a must have. For so many people today, not having a car payment and the accompanying insurance and maintenance costs would make saving for education and healthcare possible.

In some cities, transit is so big that an institution doesn't even need to think about transit accessibility, but in Cleveland, RTA may simply not occur even as an afterthought for those who drive expensive cars from their luxury homes in the exurbs. Here though, where the RTA's cool new project passes right through the heart of their campus, it is a really big oversight for someone there to not be thinking about TOD. Carsharing, too, would make sense for the Clinic, but they don't seem to get that yet. (I wonder if or how many car rentals are arranged for visiting docs?)

Jeff's idea of homes instead of parking lots is a good one, but it might meet with resistance like the city workers forced to live in Cleveland issue. However, I think it would be an interesting idea to suggest that Fairfax, Hough and maybe even Central with the Clinic consider this sort of housing situation. It could be a part of a long-term employment contract – housing as part of your payment package. This would be less like forcing and more like an option for another method of compensation, right?

New energy efficient homes could be built as infill in the surrounding neighborhoods for workers of all echelons of the organization, from the admisitrative support staff to shipping and receiving to physicians. Schools are the issue for certain of these populations -- people who don't trust the CMSD yet, but if the neighborhoods were reviving, empty nester docs might agree that a high end or even low end cool new house near work and transit makes sense. And the folks who can afford it could buy them; renovate old ones, build new ones – whatever.

If someone with large sums of cash wanted to build in a farm field, they could easily on a doctor’s salary afford to hire a world renowned architect to create a very cool place and buy enough land to surround it with an orchard or a forest in the Forgotten Triangle. Just please; let us not wind up with gated communities.

Residents would have easy access to the cultural amenities of UCI and they could skip the commute from Bratenahl, Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. This is one reason that the very well to do move into Judson Manor after all. It is a stunning place to live with more amenities than you could want and most of them are the museums and the orchestra -- institutions they have long supported.

I don't see the midtown area around the Clinic developing back into a residential area at all - that is one aspect of the city that is shrinking and should. I see the Clinic as the heart of a business park and I think we should empty out and clear as many acres around it as possible - put lots of Public Transportation and bike paths around and through it - surround it with parks and green space - forests and farms - some big box and upscale chain food - no residential, but what suburbanites want. Then redevelop the other residential areas all over the other of Cleveland's 77 acres that still have intact urban fabric. Have very direct public transportation links between them all.

Disrupt IT

These are beautiful neighborhoods. I can't wait to see what can happen there when all the old lead spewing wooden condemned and abandoned properties are removed and replaced with gardens and parks and yes, perhaps green homes like this one or this one or these award winners infilling in between all the beautiful brick and stone early 20th century homes still standing that need TLC (and insulation!). Imagine the school renovated to be green built and energy efficient! Wow!

I like the idea of bike paths and urban gardens and parks and also allocating some of the land to university research (that would be the brownfield land). I do think that Woodland Avenue is the opportunity corridor -- you just gotta give those folks from UCI a map. This is a lovely boulevard that could revive with some safe neighborhoods flanking it. What better ideas do we have to improve these areas than building highways and parking lots in them? We send the CUDC and Kent students to reconsider Youngstown as a shrinking city. What about having them take a look at the neighborhoods around CCF and UCI.

Norm, I know you (I should say you and Joe Stanley) have got UCI covered from the eastern aspect, but the folks in Hough and Fairfax need advocates, too. They have suffered enough with the CCF expansion over the years. While we protect East Cleveland from the claws of UCI and Case, let's think about the working class neighborhoods that flank CCF, too.

I see Cleveland becoming a Forest City of 77 square miles of small villages, each with neighborhood character and assets that retain neighbors. Map out the walkable villages and improve the density and fabric of each - link them together with rail, bus and trail. Where too much urban fabric is gone - there is nothing worth walking to - make farmland with the occasional farmhouse being what historic buildings are worth preserving - these are for the urban farmers. The city folk will have many choices of villages to live in. The suburbanites can move into gated communities between villages - like Shoreby Club, and Wolstein's East Bank Flats. Downtown and the University Circle neighborhoods will dramatically increase residential density, adding to livability and appeal. Can all of Cleveland return to the density of the past? No. Should it? No. Can parts regain sufficient density to be desirable neighborhoods? Absolutely. I see all that working together, and overall population of "Cleveland" rising, even as many square miles are returned to nature. Of course, only if we develop good schools for the villages, and I don't believe the school system is yet thinking along such geographic and demographic lines.

Disrupt IT

Norm,

I, too, see the village concept. I hope the planners see this vision. Dense communities surrounded by green space. Gated communities? Yes, for those who want and need them -- they have become part and parcel of the new urbanist idea. Schools you can walk or bike to, green connectors to knit together the fragments. And don't forget that these communities need to be awake more than 8 hours each day. We have ruled out the corner bar and the big box and clustered shopping have displaced the bodega; we have forgotten how important it is to have eyes and feet on the street more hours in the day.

Infill is more difficult for big developers, but for organizations like Habitat for Humanity it is the norm. When some of the old brick 4 and 6 suite apartment buildings are rehabilitated and renovated, we can really begin to see a nice mix of old and new.

When I first came to Cleveland I met a woman who grew up in a Croatian enclave in the Hough neighborhood. She told me that people kept livestock in the neighborhood. What a cool thing. Chickens and gardens and goats nearby...

Cleveland has been a mix of incomes, races, ethnicities and income levels -- it can be that again -- this time with some breathing room -- a green lacey interconnection to the emerald necklace -- a place for the wild things -- corridors for the animals to travel away from the highways.

A forest city indeed -- on the eve of arbor day, I still wish Sam Miller would throw down some cash to plant trees and zone as gardens some of the land we are clearing now...
I'll keep dreaming it. This greenspace plan is almost 7 years old and can grow now. I'm sure Paul Alsenas still dreams this vision -- that is in between his nightmares about ODOT, the port as a moving target and Steelyard Commons...

I don't know about all parts of Cleveland, but each morning here in Ohio City I hear a rooster - did when I lived in Detroit Shoreway as well. They are probably for cock-fighting, unfortunately, but Evelyn was reflecting the other day on how cool it would be to include with community gardens community chicken coops (well, free range fields, I suppose) where we could let animals live well, and provide education about nature, and get some really fresh eggs - and bring a different type of life to the city - anyone know if this is happening in other greening cities? How far can we go with local foods at the urban core?

Disrupt IT

Well, let's see... besides the chickens kept largely underwraps at the Kious's house in Cleveland Heights... shhhh...
there's
Seattle
Madison, WI
and ohmigod! Here's a BIG LIST from the City Chicken!

what say we add some clucking to the noise level around here!?!

Botanical Garden tried chickens for a while.  I am not sure how it will go this year.  Dunham Tavern is a great bicycle destination.  If you go on a Saturday, you can pick up lunch at Galluci's (across the street) and enjoy the gardens--there is no charge to wander, but it is nice to contribute the the historic preservation cause, if you can. (Finally, got this link thing down thanks to a teen library patron)

Very good suggestion. Galluci's is one of the really interesting food places in town... Cleveland+ for sure! I am going to take this suggestion... and visit Dunham Tavern (never been there).

Disrupt IT