Cleveland’s Near West Side will pick a new council member in November. Block club by block club, voters are sizing up their choices.
The new Ward 7 spans from Detroit-Shoreway and Ohio City to Tremont and part of downtown. Mohammad Faraj and Austin Davis, both attorneys in their 30s, are competing for the seat in the Nov. 4 election.
Davis finished first in the primary with almost 56% of the vote. Faraj won 33%. A third candidate, Mike Rogalski, did not make it out of the primary.
Signal Cleveland caught up with the two candidates in Tremont as they faced the voters.
Mohammad Faraj visits West Side seniors
Faraj dropped in this month at Zion United Church of Christ for a meeting of OWLS, which stands for Older, Wiser, Livelier Seniors. He came bearing nut and poppyseed rolls for the 20 or so people preparing to eat lunch inside.
The church itself is a sign of a changing Tremont. A developer has turned the main building into luxury apartments. The congregation now worships in the former church school next door.
Seniors questioned Faraj about housing. Can vacant businesses be turned into senior apartments? How can people afford rents of $1,500 to $1,600 per month?
“I’ve been very troubled with how local government are responding to the needs of our seniors,” the candidate replied. “Especially when we talk about housing, we need to make sure that the developers are meeting the needs of our seniors.”
Housing costs are a source of worry, especially after the latest property tax reappraisals. Lionel Crell, who attended the OWLS meeting, told Signal Cleveland that it’s the talk of his church.
“We’ve had some folks in my church that have been saying, ‘I’ve lived in that house 40 years and my taxes have tripled,’” he said.
Faraj calls his housing campaign plank “flexible development.” To him, that means keeping closer watch on such building incentives as tax-increment financing and helping working-class families buy homes.
“My impression has been that residents are not anti-development,” he said in an interview. “They just fear being left behind or being ignored in the planning.”
Faraj grew up in North Olmsted, the son of Palestinian immigrants from a town south of Jerusalem. He said he was disappointed by the way local leaders responded to the calls for a Gaza ceasefire resolution in Cleveland City Council and for Cuyahoga County to divest from Israel bonds.
“It made me sort of come to this realization that folks in our community aren’t, they’re not represented at all in some of these spaces, to where there’s a lot of misperception, there’s a lot of misconceptions,” he said.
One issue that has caught the attention of the Near West Side was a recent string of car break-ins. Police recently arrested a group of teens in an investigation of break-ins downtown and on the East Side.
Faraj said the city should offer more activities for young people. He has heard from residents who want police to be more visible, too. He doesn’t like the idea of installing more security cameras, though.
“I think mass surveillance makes people feel less safe in my opinion,” he said.
Faraj is a Democrat, but Davis won the party’s endorsement. Faraj said he feels that the party has treated him like an outsider.
At a local party candidate forum this summer, organizers called attention to the fact that Faraj hadn’t voted in every election. He was also questioned about his prior job as a risk management and compliance attorney for a cryptocurrency company.
There are times when Faraj has felt that his vote didn’t matter, he said. The party ought to understand that perspective, he said.
Faraj said he wants to connect with residents who feel disenfranchised. That’s why he has spent time campaigning with the ward’s public housing residents, he said.
“We have to understand how the landscape is changing and find ways to bring people in,” he said.
Austin Davis rallies his block club
Last week Davis campaigned on his home turf: his own block club.
The South of Jefferson Block Club met in the Polish Veterans Alliance Post 1. The bar was decorated for Halloween. Cobwebs draped from the ceiling and skeletons populated the edges of the bar.
A police officer gave the block club an update on the investigation into a rash of car break-ins on the Near West Side. Developers presented plans to build apartments on a vacant lot.
When it was his turn to speak, Davis said that it should be easier to live in Cleveland — to obtain permits and to know when pools are open.
“It drives me crazy when the city doesn’t work,” he told his neighbors. “It adds friction to everyday activities, and you got to go explore the suburbs for pools that are open when they say they’re open.”
Davis grew up in Little Italy and a Gates Mills farmhouse. He isn’t new to City Hall. Until earlier this year, he worked as a senior policy advisor to Mayor Justin Bibb. He represented the administration at City Council hearings on such projects as the $20 million DigitalC broadband contract and the overhaul of housing laws. Bibb has endorsed him.
He has also criticized what he saw inside City Hall. He wrote in one candidate questionnaire that he was “frustrated at how hard it was” to make city government “do the right thing.” The mayor’s office should do better, and City Council needs more urgency, he wrote.
In an interview, Davis didn’t point fingers. Change takes time, he said.
“It’s an old building with an old institution,” he said. “It’s a bureaucracy of close to 8,000 people. It’s just, it’s no one person’s fault.”
On housing, Davis said he would push for regulations on short-term rentals offered by such companies as Airbnb. The properties have hosted disruptive parties and take housing out of the market for long-term residents, he said.
He also wants to see more three- and four-unit buildings, a middle ground between single-family homes and large apartment complexes.
As for car break-ins, Davis suggested after-school programs and high school job pipelines to keep young people active. Though he knows there are tradeoffs with adding more surveillance cameras, he isn’t opposed to them and wants to hear from police on the topic, he said.
He said efforts to slow down traffic from the highway could help, too.
“It’s really easy to speed into our community, cause some trouble and speed away,” he said. “This is true for street takeovers, this is true for drag racing.”
At the block club, 25-year Tremont resident Valorie Hempstead asked about getting a speed table installed on her street. Motorists have hit her car’s side mirror three times, she said.
Davis said the same has happened to him. He wants to see more speed tables in the ward.
“That’s the bell I’m going to, I really want to be ringing on City Council,” he said. “I’m with you.”
Afterward, Hempstead said that she hadn’t picked a candidate yet. She had just heard from Davis. Faraj called her recently, she said. Hempstead wants someone who is visible in the neighborhood, like prior Council Member Joe Cimperman was.
“I’m kind of debating,” she said. “I guess it’s whoever I see the most.”
