Cleveland Real Estate News

There are buzz words for community involvement like engaging people in their communities as an example. Some of it is through an attempt by outside groups to get us all involved and some efforts come from within. What caused you to get involved? Back in the day, a church at the corner of my street sat on four acres of land, and the church took a plan to the city to build 188 senior housing units. The normal NIMBY (not in my back yard) did not really apply to those of us in the community… I mean, who doesn’t like senior citizens! What we worried about was the density as it affected everything from aesthetics to infrastructure to parking. I got involved even though I had only lived in this Maryland inner ring suburb for a few years. One thing lead to another and before you knew it, I was active in my civic association and even wound up serving on the board and as president of the group for a bit. It was a working class neighborhood and in it’s hey day the civic association had thousands of members. We’d have a yearly Summer picnic and the last one I helped organize had over 1200 people in attendance.

In a continuing quest on my part to figure out what gets people involved in their communities in the 21st Century, I’m reading the Randy Cunningham book called Democratizing Cleveland: The Rise and Fall of Community Organizing in Cleveland Ohio, 1975-1985. It shows how neighborhoods all over Cleveland came together, with and without outside help, to try to solve housing issues, school issues, arson issues, etc. I’ll do a full review of it (almost finished reading the book), but for now am impressed how neighbors came together on both sides of the River to tackle some of these issues, and did so successfully in many cases.

I’ve long felt that the less I participate the less invested I am. There are those who feel that renters don’t have as much invested in their community as home owners, which is why many towns have percentage requirements for rental property (i.e., no more than 25% of a community can be rental housing, etc).  I don’t share this view because some of the most committed, invested community people I know rent their homes. But I do believe there are things that keep us from feeling invested.

The Cunningham book talks about how CDC’s developed and that while they were once the trail blazers, now they are part of the establishment. There is an inference that among some of the CDCs public involvement isn’t sought out as much or even welcomed. I read a book a few years back called Is There A Public For Public Schools?.  It discussed the disconnect in parental involvement in our schools and how school administrations moving to corporate management systems of operation wound up discouraging or just putting up with parental involvement. Anyone ever taught in a school where people (teachers and admn) kvetched about not being able to wait until parent/teacher day is over? Sometimes this is the only real involvement parents have or are encouraged to have.  Not always, but sometimes.

Jennifer Gonzalez wrote in yesterday’s PD about a new bill before the Ohio leglislature that would mandate all parents do 13 hours or more of volunteer work at their children’s school or face a $100 fine for not doing it. I understand the sentiment, I guess my question is, can you mandate involvement or interest? Maybe so, maybe not.

What are other issues that get people involved? How do we (wait for the buzzwords) take back our neighborhoods? I’m not going to blame the powers that be or the residents – just looking at our current status. Some communities are still very well organized with block clubs and probably strive to be as inclusive and transparent as possible. Some communities have no block clubs and not much involvement by residents.  

There are also issues about master planning of neighborhoods which (after about what, 7,000 words!) got me thinking about this topic in the first place. We know in Cleveland proper we have many fewer residents than we did when the master plans, mandated or ‘laissez faire’ generated, went into existence.  Now our Planners recognize that business districts are not as sustainable if they are as long and wide as they used to be, they should probably be grouped. We have too few residents for all the aging housing stock around Cleveland, what do we do about that? And regardless of how we got to the point of not being as in charge or involved in what happens in our own communities, how do we change that?

Thoughtful article on CDC’s and non profit issues from NeighborWorks® in Lawrence Massachusetts. Part of it:

form needs to follow function – that all the power structures (committees, working groups, and so on) have to be seen as “provisional” – useful only in that they get residents to where they need to go. LCW believes that in community organizing and community building, practitioners suffer greatly from dysfunctional or old organizational structures that persist long after their usefulness and have no real connection to action or accountability. LCW believes, instead, that creating an environment where no one gets too comfortable in positions of power is an important precondition to creating accessible and accountable groups.

My next post deals with two more ideas, stay tuned.  Peace Out – 3C