Clean Water Works
CLEVELAND, OHIO: From the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, an in-depth and fun conversation led by Donna Friedman and Mike Uva on any and all topics related to clean water, wastewater treatment, stormwater management, and the people, projects, and programs serving Lake Erie and our local waterways and communities.
Clean Water Works
Bridging the Gap: Downtown Cleveland and Waterfront Access
Imagine standing in downtown Cleveland and gazing at Lake Erie just blocks away, yet feeling disconnected by an intimidating landscape of highways and parking lots. This frustrating paradox has defined Cleveland's relationship with its waterfront for decades.
The Shore to Core to Shore Initiative is an ambitious and promising effort to reconnect Cleveland's downtown with Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River. Jessica Trivisonno, Senior Advisor for Major Projects for Mayor Bibb, and Drew Crawford, Senior Director of Planning for Downtown Cleveland, give us an update on the transformative plans that will finally bridge these divides.
Ready to imagine a Cleveland where you can seamlessly walk from Tower City to the riverfront, or from Public Square to the lake? Construction begins in 2027, but the vision is taking shape now. Listen in to understand how Cleveland is finally poised to embrace its greatest natural assets.
Every time I'm in the lake or on the river I'm like, oh, our city was built for this. Our city was built to be seen from the water and it's so nice to be on the water and to see it from there Because you're like, oh, this is a totally different skyline than what you see anywhere else.
Speaker 4:This is Clean Water Works a podcast.
Speaker 2:About clean water.
Speaker 4:I'm Donna Friedman, one of your hosts, and we're here with Mike Uva, your other host.
Speaker 2:Here I am.
Speaker 4:Today we have Jessica Trevisano and Drew Crawford on with us. Would you like to tell us a little bit about your jobs, what you're here today to talk?
Speaker 1:about Sure. So this is Jessica Trevisano. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm the senior advisor for major projects working for Mayor Bibb in the City of Cleveland, and so I cover all sorts of different things, but I think what I'm going to talk most about today, and what I spend a lot of my time on, is the Mayor's Shore to Core to Shore Initiative.
Speaker 1:So that is a series of major economic development and infrastructure projects on the lakefront and on a portion of the Cuyahoga River and ways that we can connect those projects through downtown to revitalize Cleveland.
Speaker 3:And hi, I'm Drew Crawford, senior Director of Planning for Downtown Cleveland Incorporated. Thanks so much for having me. Downtown Cleveland Incorporated. We're both a place management organization and a special improvement district. There are 60 to 70 ambassadors that work for our organization at any given time cleaning, sweeping and washing the sidewalk, providing safety services, those types of things and then there's about 22 of us in the office at 668 Euclid Avenue. So we work on things like safety advocacy, events, economic development and planning, which is what I do. So I specifically work to help advocate for physical changes that make downtown safer, more enjoyable for residents and visitors, whether it's helping to plant more trees, improve and make the sidewalks larger, and we're working on building a playground and a play space downtown.
Speaker 4:So a variety of things, okay, shore to core to shore You're talking about, from the Cuyahoga River to downtown Cleveland, to Lake Erie.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the couple of initiatives that we're really highlighting as part of that initiative. The lakefront so thinking about how we're connecting our lakefront to downtown, specifically between East 9th and West 3rd is the big focus, kind of where the Great Lake Science Center, where the Rock Hall, where the Brown Stadium currently is located. If anybody's ever been downtown and tried to go to any of those amenities by foot, they have likely experienced a harrowing scary near miss journey down to those spaces, which is really a shame, because when you stand on Mall C, the lake is right there.
Speaker 1:It's so close. We have so many visitors come through our convention center and into our downtown who want to go to the lake and we basically have to tell them to drive there, which is such a shame and not the way that our city should be presenting itself to residents and to visitors, or should be the way that our city works. And then, on the flip side, when we have visitors come from cruise ships, they port and they also often have to take a car to some of those amenities, some of those visitor spaces, because it's just like a long slog through surface parking.
Speaker 2:I worked downtown for a number of years. I would take the bus downtown, I'd see the lake and then I'd get downtown and I loved being downtown, but I never put the two together, really, because it's not like I could walk down to the lake from West 6th Street.
Speaker 1:When we talk about the lakefront project, a lot of what we're talking about is a $447 million project to turn the shoreway into a boulevard, so slowing down the shoreway, making it possible for it to have traffic signals and comfortable crossings.
Speaker 1:So that would go from West 3rd all the way to East 18th. And then we are also talking about building a pedestrian land bridge over top of that roadway so that folks could walk uninterrupted from where you kind of leave the convention center all the way down to the lakefront. So that's the lakefront portion of the project. And then on the Cuyahoga River we are working really closely with Bedrock, which is a developer based out of primarily Detroit that is owned by Dan Gilbert, the same owner of the Cavaliers, and he's been doing a lot of revitalization projects in Detroit and has taken a strong interest in Cleveland. And so there's about 38 acres of property right kind of behind Tower City along the Cuyahoga Riverfront that we just adopted a 30-year master plan for that will include 2,000 residential units and 16 acres of park and a kayak launch and a river walk and all of this incredible public space to increase access to the Cuyahoga River.
Speaker 2:So is this boulevard project? Is it similar to what happened with the shoreway, where you'd be slowing down the traffic?
Speaker 1:It is similar to the boulevard where it's slowing down traffic. We will be taking out Main Avenue Bridge and physically like lowering the road in parts. Oh, okay taking out main avenue bridge and physically like lowering the road in parts. Uh, and unlike the shoreway, there will be traffic signalization and so there will be some traffic signals to encourage people to cross and hopefully make it a little bit safer than I think what the short way feels as a person who uses it a lot.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, I feel that way. I drive from the near west side along the shoreway pretty much every day. There's a lot of peer pressure on the shoreway. I'll be driving like 40 and there's like people riding me and I'm like it's 35 technically and I'm already speeding and you're on my bumper.
Speaker 3:I hear you on that. I could relate to that too, and I think what's nice about the plans that I've seen about the boulevard is that learning some lessons from that. Of course it's a slightly different area, but a lot of those lessons were learned and make it very, very accessible and hopefully, safer for pedestrians. I wanted to play a game. Can we play a game? Oh yeah.
Speaker 4:We don't always do this, but we're going to see how it goes. So three of the four of us are near West Siders, but I think we're all technically in Cleveland.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 4:Okay, I wanted you guys. We're going to do it Cranium style. So write down five words of what you think about when you think about Cleveland and the lakefront, and don't use the word lakefront or Cleveland. And we're going to see what matches. Okay, okay, my words are all feelings.
Speaker 3:Start off literal Blue, great Opportunity. Love it, optimistic. Okay, summer oh.
Speaker 4:And inaccessible. Ooh you had opportunity. That's like the really nice way of putting it. I put work. Work I like to do a lot of work.
Speaker 2:It's going to be a realist.
Speaker 4:But I had something similar. Okay, what about you? What did you have? But I had something similar. Okay, what about you?
Speaker 2:What did you have? Anything similar to his? I had Access which is similar to the ones that you had, safety Connectivity, burke and Bike Path.
Speaker 4:Bike Path. Okay, yeah, that's good, but I had Fishing, which I think is similar vibes to Bike Path, like how we use it and how we're actually on the lake. I also had Sunset and Edgewater, because that's the best and I am at edgewater all the time. And then I had commerce, because it just felt like I had to include that part of the importance of the Cuyahoga River and our lake port too. So what?
Speaker 1:did you have, Jess? I had home, because that's you know, whenever I see the lake, I'm like oh, I'm home, like I made a home um underrated, impressive I guess, which is kind of part of underrated. I also had opportunity and fun similarly thinking about like edgewater yeah, you know I moved into ohio city almost 10 years ago. I've had only increased access to water, oh yeah. Like having Wendy Park and the bridge. Since that's opened, I now feel like, I have a whole different way to get to the water that feels more effective.
Speaker 1:And then Irish Town Bend is on its way. It's sort of right in my backyard it feels like and I'm going to have another way to get to the water, like I, it is so fun to live in a place where my access continues to increase and it feels like I have new ways to explore this like resource that I love in this place that I love.
Speaker 2:You're experiencing more access to some of these amenities that the city offers, but it seems like downtown that is still something that's been lacking. So how far along in these plans are we? How close are we to realizing this wonderful land bridge project?
Speaker 1:We are well on our way. This is the 17th iteration of a lakefront plan since Cleveland's history history and so you know, as we did, about two years of community engagement and planning. A lot of what we heard from folks was like is this one real? We've been hearing about ways to connect downtown to the lakefront since the early 1900s. What?
Speaker 2:have the obstacles been?
Speaker 1:The obstacles have, in part they have been funding. Of course it's never an inexpensive thing to kind of redo Getting stakeholders aligned on kind of the how of how we're going to do it. And then I think the other challenge has been really having these plans continue on with changes of political administrations, and so a couple of the things that we did different this time around is we created a new nonprofit called the North Coast Waterfront Development Corporation, separate from the city, whose mission is to see this vision forward, and so that's what's been successful. In a lot of peer cities like Seattle and Chicago, there's a nonprofit that part of their mission is to keep it going.
Speaker 4:Yeah, keep, they're like the project manager then.
Speaker 1:That's right, and they do a lot of our stakeholder engagement and generally, I are intended to just hold government accountable over time. Um, so that's one thing that we did. That's different. We just created a new community authority, which is an economic development tool that allows us to have some user-based charges that can then be used to generate additional funds for a project. We also created a tax increment financing district in our downtown.
Speaker 3:That's a TIF.
Speaker 1:Yeah a.
Speaker 1:TIF. So a TIF or tax increment financing is a economic development tool that is established by state law. There are a couple different types of TIFs. The one that is really common in the city of Cleveland is usually a project TIF. So let's say that you have a vacant building that's currently valued at $100,000. And a developer comes in, invests a bunch of money into it and at the end of that investment it's worth a million dollars. What a TIF does is it allows that investor to take that anticipated value increase, that $900,000, and use that in part to finance the project. So they can go out and take debt on what that increase is going to be and then they can use that as kind of working capital to make all of those improvements for their project. And that's what we see lots and lots of Cleveland projects do. That's what Sherwin-Williams did. That's what name a Cleveland project. It probably has a TIF on it.
Speaker 1:What is a little bit different about our Shorter Court of Shore TIF is, as opposed to being an individual project.
Speaker 1:It is a district that encompasses a lot of our downtown area and so as properties increase in value in our downtown area, as those properties incrementally increase in property taxes, that increment goes into sort of a special account that the city can then use exclusively on public improvements. So we can't use it on individual building financing but we can use it to build parks and roadways and a land bridge and other things that will then ultimately help those properties continue to hold their value over time. Cincinnati has a lot of TIF districts, a lot of little pockets of areas where they capture that growth and use it to reinvest in that portion of the area goes on for 42 years. That allows us to kind of capture the planned growth from the future, use that to make investments today and to really perpetuate this development in downtown. And then we also have been able to secure $150 million between federal and state grant sources and that, you know, is really how we're going to start the project we're scheduled to start construction on the connector in 2027.
Speaker 3:Oh wow, and I'm just so excited as a resident, but, of course, someone who works for the downtown Special Improvement District downtown Cleveland, inc. This administration has seen what works in other parts of the country and not copied them. I mean, of course, cleveland has our own unique issues, but it's very refreshing just to see, like thinking, how this has been done. We can emulate this. This is what works a waterfront development authority. So it's been exciting to see that because you're creating, you know, an agency that can be nimble and do these types of things.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I mean the mayor is really focused on seeing this vision through and having that political and just sort of leadership vision has been really really important to you know check off all of these boxes and for us to really continue moving on a project so that we didn't just create a plan and have it sit on a shelf for you know however many years until somebody else has to create a new plan.
Speaker 4:I went to your guys' talk at Happy Dog and that was awesome. I also went to another one that had a similar vibe and it just feels like the momentum is actually in the same general direction for this plan, yes, which is great, because I don't know if I've felt that way before about the direction of Cleveland. I feel like sometimes we're a little scattered, but it does seem like, for the most part, all the players are on the same page right now with these developments moving forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean they're really complementary projects and I think that's why we're talking about them as an overall initiative, because they don't compete with each other, they complement and I think that they will really add to the vibrancy of Cleveland.
Speaker 1:Really thinking about how to connect from Tower City to the Cuyahoga River, I mean similar to the lakefront, where you can kind of stand in a place and look at it but not get there. You know, you can stand in what's the food court of Tower City or kind of that walkway between Tower City and Rocket Arena and see the river but have no real sense of how do you get there. And that's a really interesting site and one that I applaud the engineers and architects and project managers at Bedrock for managing, because there's, you know, 100 feet Topographic change is huge, huge topographic change between Prospect Avenue down to the Cuyahoga River, and they're being really intentional about thinking about how to build buildings and create public space and make them all feel integrated and create this real new neighborhood as part of our downtown district, and I think it's a really exciting way to rethink the Cuyahoga River. Right now it's almost 5,000 linear feet of surface parking.
Speaker 1:And so thinking about replacing that surface parking with people and activity and industry and, like commerce and I don't know, people hanging out drinking beers by the river is such a interesting transformation. And then when we think about downtown, we think about ways to connect those two sites. And so that's on West 3rd, east, 9th and through our really great malls in Public Square and malls A, b and C. So I think it'll really change how our city feels.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think it's really the next iteration of everything that we'd like to think has been good about downtown and getting to that next step where downtown expands a little bit, we finally connect to the waterfronts, as you said, jess.
Speaker 3:But there have been a lot of office conversions over the past decade, even before the pandemic, and we're a national leader in the city of Cleveland, only behind Manhattan and the city of Boston for that, using historic tax credits, using a bunch of tools that the state and the federal government allows and local government allows, like tax abatement, to take old office buildings and turn them into residential units. So really there had been a very big need, a pent-up demand for residential units in the city of Cleveland, particularly downtown. I think of the Rose Building, which used to be home to Medical Mutual's headquarters at the corner of East 9th and Prospect Avenues. That's being converted into more apartments, a boutique hotel and some retail outlets. And I think, knowing that on the other end of let's call it a block, but it's called a super block, is the work being done by Bedrock and more connections. I think that was a part of really sealing the deal for that organization, for that company, to start the renovation process.
Speaker 4:Going back to what I was saying before about feeling like we weren't necessarily all on the same page, I think a big part of that probably was the water quality in the Cuyahoga River. The Cuyahoga River water quality was so bad. It was so bad before there were real regulations from EPA, from the Clean Water Act. So I think now you know, with the Cuyahoga River being much, much cleaner thanks to the Clean Water Act, thanks to the sewer district being proactive and following our consent decree for mines, for overflow control, Now we have a river that's healthy again and has fish in it again, and 25 years ago people definitely would not have wanted to get closer to the river.
Speaker 4:And that step really did need to happen first before we could have this development.
Speaker 1:I mean, we still see it a little bit and it's something that we're kind of overcoming in some of our community engagement is like we have to sort of sell people.
Speaker 1:I'm like, no, this is a fun and safe place to be, and I think you're right because there are concerns about the quality of water. Giving people opportunities to go to the water and to be near it and to feel all the psychological effects that you get from just being near and on water, I think helps people understand why clean water is important. And so it's this virtuous cycle of we have to make it possible for people to be near these natural resources and then, when we do that, they want to be near the natural resources and then they value those resources more and take better care of them.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and it is like the view you were talking about from Tower City down to the river and like the view from those places. But I think I was when you were talking about that location, I was thinking about like when I'm in a kayak and I'm actually at that part of the river looking up at Tower City and how crazy it looks, it's huge.
Speaker 4:It looks so giant from a kayak because you're so much further down and it's just a view that you really don't get unless you are actually physically on the river. Not only does it make you appreciate your resources and maybe your lake or your rivers more, but it also makes you see your city in a different way, in a different light. Can you talk about how these developments are taking into consideration building public space within them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so both the lakefront and riverfront are, at their core, public infrastructure projects that will then enable private investment. So our lakefront master plan includes over 12 acres of public space as part of the redevelopment of the area, intending for all of that to be very, you know, community oriented and a way for people to come and experience the lakefront.
Speaker 1:We really took an approach with the lakefront plan to listen to what the community wanted from the lakefront and so you know, kind of did that like inside out approach where we wanted to say like, okay, what are all of the community resources that we could include here, and then how do we put private development around those resources, as opposed to what you often see in projects which is like, okay, here's a skyscraper, how do you integrate some public art into the skyscraper, like a public space? So we were really intentional about that with the lakefront plan and similar with the riverfront. I mean it is a 16-acre walking path park, all integrated with new construction, with a community benefits agreement attached. That is the most ambitious community benefit agreement that the city has entered into so far. And so not only higher than required thresholds for women owned, minority owned and Cleveland small business participation, but requirements for affordable housing and small business space that's affordable and public space and small business space that's affordable and public space, like all of these kind of elements that will make it a neighborhood that we hope is a neighborhood that everyone feels welcome to and part of.
Speaker 1:But then the other sort of key component of the project and you know, something that we really think about is like how do we have an economically healthy core and a place that people from other cities or developers want to invest in, because when we have an economically healthy core, it helps us pay for all of the services, libraries and schools and all of the things that we need tax dollars to support. People want to move to places with things like vibrant lakefronts and riverfronts and interesting places to visit and go, and so when we think about the health of Cleveland, we have to think about what are the things that we can do to attract people and businesses to move here, and one of that is to really be able to point to something like the lakefront or the riverfront and say we have this amazing thing here. Come to Cleveland uniquely right, we have this access. Move your business here.
Speaker 3:It's like, oh, this place is so cool, there's great things going on, but of course it's a unique place and so finding that thing that makes our city and region unique and it's like the waterfronts and having that access to nature. And about a year or two I went to Milwaukee very briefly and you know they've done a really great job there. Just, it's accessible, it's public access. There's miles upon miles of trails and beaches and areas, miles upon miles of trails and beaches and areas. That's always an example I think of, just because of the similarities in size to Cleveland and weather, and they have a huge music fest every summer. So just kind of thinking about how they've made it accessible. And I dare say they look to some things at Cleveland with a little bit of jealousy too, but they've done a really good job there. There's things that Cincinnati and Columbus have done from an economic development standpoint, such as the tax increment, financing district TIF and other things that they've been doing for a really long time, maybe more than decades.
Speaker 3:And it's like, oh man. So we see like downtown Cincinnati has great things going on.
Speaker 2:So it works.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm just glad that those things are going to be emulated.
Speaker 4:to say yeah we should probably take a look at this and do. This impoverished area pays into that regional program and many of those properties are tributary to, you know, eventually to the Cuyahoga River and they're all tributary to Lake Erie, so everyone's really contributing to keeping that water quality clean. For example, 25% of all the funds that are collected in the city of Cleveland for the regional stormwater management program go back to the city. So that is how you know, the city pays for most of their street sweepers. It's how they pay for most of their sewer cleaning equipment. So all of those funds that we collect eventually do impact Lake Erie and help keep like this resource really much cleaner than before we had the program. I'm excited, as we move forward with your planning and all the work you guys are doing with the city and development, that the stormwater program will keep developing and keep building and the water will only get better, the lake will get cleaner and the river will get cleaner too.
Speaker 1:As even part of the lakefront project, and the same with the riverfront project. We are removing impervious surface to replace with trees. Exactly All of this is currently surface parking lot, and so even the projects themselves we are very much thinking about. How do we make sure that these projects contribute to the quality of our water?
Speaker 3:I'm happy to report. There's this nonprofit, the Parking Reform Network, that keeps track of surface parking for downtown urban areas. Ours is well, I don't want to say at 25%, but that's before the New Sherwin-Williams headquarters. So we're definitely going to decrease by a few percentage points, which is really nice, but you can see we have a long way to go. Some other cities are worse, but it is Wait 25%.
Speaker 4:Break that down for me, please.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 25% of downtown Cleveland is surface parking lot.
Speaker 4:No stop Wow. Oh yeah, get out.
Speaker 3:It's about 90,000 parking spaces in downtown Cleveland, not including street parking spaces. So that's just either privately owned or city owned or county owned, but of course the city has a couple garages. I mean. So that's just either privately owned or city owned or county owned, but of course the city has a couple garages. I mean that's a better way to park cars than just a lot.
Speaker 2:So 25% of downtown Cleveland is parking lots.
Speaker 3:It's around 25%.
Speaker 2:Isn't that crazy.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're trying to move the needles as fast as we can, which is often slow.
Speaker 4:So when people come to visit you guys now in the city, what are your top three things that you tell them to do? And then, what do you hope you might add in the future to that list?
Speaker 1:I always tell people to go to West Side Market Classic. I tell them to go to Wait O'Fall and do.
Speaker 1:Art Museum and then I tell them to go to Edgewater. Whenever people go Art Museum, and then I told them to go to Edgewater, whenever people go to Edgewater, they're always like this is Cleveland. Yeah, it is in the future. I hope that I will be able to have them, you know, go downtown and walk across the land bridge and watch a sunset from you know our new lakefront park, and I also hope that they can if they visit me, like we can just walk to Irish Town Bend as part of their West.
Speaker 4:Side Market trip. Oh, that should be so nice. I'll walk with you to Irish Town Bend. Yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 3:I will try to get people to bike through the cultural gardens on the east side. Yeah, that's a little tough because not everyone visiting brings a bike, but at the very worst we'll take a car ride. We'll get out and go to some of the cultural gardens. I just think that is so, so cool. The future of just having so many choices of how to access the water, those social infrastructure things that we are building up in the city and we have some great ones, we do have great parks and wonderful metro parks, but just more and more of those types of things is what's really exciting, and I hope we have more of that in the future.
Speaker 2:And downtown Cleveland. You do a lot of programming too throughout the year, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 180 days of programming last year, and especially on the good weather days in the spring, summer and fall it's programming concerts and events and all sorts of things to just really activate downtown Food trucks too. We have food trucks Monday through Friday in different locations downtown.
Speaker 4:Oh nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and when I think about the lakefront in my mind, I think about like, okay, you have Lakewood Park, and then you have Edgewater, and then you have Wendy Park, and then you have this sort of gap in downtown and then you have Burke, which is this incredible opportunity, and then you keep going into Euclid and all of the great work that they've done in their lakefront access and so just having all of that feel somewhat cohesive and like an uninterrupted lakefront where there's just all of these unique you know, unique spaces for people to go to enjoy the lake is, I think, really exciting.
Speaker 2:Jessica Trevisano is Senior Advisor for Major Projects with the City of Cleveland and Drew Crawford is Senior Director of Planning with Downtown Cleveland Inc. Thank you both for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks so much, this was fun.
