Pass by South Moreland Boulevard near Ludlow Road in the Shaker Square apartment corridor and two buildings are bound to catch your eye.
Drexmore Mansion is a handsome brick edifice with a hipped slate roof, decorative trim and accents such as leaded glass. Ludlow Castle is a striking brick and stucco building. One section of the building has a conical roof reminiscent of a castle tower. (Despite their names, both of the nearly century-old buildings have always been apartments.)
Come closer and you’ll see the deterioration caused by nearly a decade of deferred maintenance. At Ludlow Castle, for example, chunks of stucco have fallen from the exterior of the building, exposing the brick. As Jay Westbrook walks around Drexmore Mansion, he points out the results of years of neglect. They include roof problems, exterior water damage and faulty gutters and downspouts.
Westbrook is code compliance committee chair for the Morelands Group, a tenant-focused organization that advocates for the apartment corridor, including trying to reverse the damage that members say out-of-town investors have caused by allowing their buildings to deteriorate. The apartment corridor, centered on North Moreland and South Moreland boulevards, includes 80-plus structures with about 2,000 units. The corridor also includes Van Aken and Shaker boulevards..
Those out-of-town investors are like, ‘Oh, look at that pretty penny I can make with that fatted calf. Then they’ll milk it dry and put the cow out to pasture until it drops dead.”
Jay Westbrook of the Morelands Group, which advocates for the Shaker Square apartment corridor, on how some owners are allowing their buildings to deteriorate.
The historic Drexmore Mansion and Ludlow Castle are among 15 in the corridor once owned by Brooklyn, N.Y.-based investment companies. Now they are in the hands of Fannie Mae, the quasi-governmental entity whose mission includes fostering affordable rental housing and homeownership through lending. Fannie Mae foreclosed on the $22.6 million mortgage about 18 months ago. The lender is planning to auction the buildings in the spring. Cleveland is trying to put a stop to that. It wants Fannie Mae to call off the auction and enter into a deal with the city that would see the buildings sold to responsible local owners.
In recent years, more out-of-town investors have bought buildings in the apartment corridor, often looking to make fast money, Westbrook and others told Signal Cleveland. The out-of-towners have delighted in the high occupancy rates and long-term tenants. They often drooled at market-rate rents that seem lucrative given the cost of buildings. (The last characteristic is an idiosyncrasy of Cleveland’s housing market and those in many Midwest cities.) But too many of these out-of-towners have disregarded the underpinnings of what made the area popular among middle-class and working-class renters for decades: well-maintained buildings.
“Those out-of-town investors are like, ‘Oh, look at that pretty penny I can make with that fatted calf,’” said Westbrook, who was City Council president in the 1990s. “Then they’ll milk it dry and put the cow out to pasture until it drops dead.”
Drexmore Mansion and Ludlow Castle are among what are known as the Steiner properties. These are 308 apartment units spread across 14 deteriorating buildings in the corridor and one in Shaker Heights. Only two buildings – one in each city – are currently occupied.
The city and Shaker Square-area stakeholders vehemently oppose Fannie Mae auctioning the Steiner properties. They say an auction is almost certainly guaranteed to attract another deadbeat investor chasing fast money. The city is trying to get Fannie Mae to call off the auction and allow the city to lead the effort to find new owners. So far, Fannie Mae hasn’t responded, said Director of Building and Housing Sally Martin O’Toole.
“We believe the best approach is to keep the property in local hands, to find local actors who are going to do the right thing,” she said, adding that the city has had recent success in finding responsible owners for delinquent apartment buildings in the corridor.
Fannie Mae often partners with cities on affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization efforts, including through its multifamily housing financing programs.
“We found it very shocking that Fannie Mae won’t work with the city, given their mission of perpetuating affordable housing and stabilizing neighborhoods,” said Martin O’Toole.
Signal Cleveland has contacted Fannie Mae and will update this article when the lender responds.
Jay Westbrook, a volunteer with the Morelands Group, looks up at Drexmore Mansion, a vacant apartment building near Shaker Square, on Friday, January 9, 2026. Credit: Michael Indriolo/Signal Cleveland/CatchLight Local
Mass apartment vacancies could harm Shaker Square area
Westbrook explained what has happened as toxic investors have bought buildings in the corridor. Maintenance became lax. Buildings deteriorated. And vacancies soared – sometimes by the hundreds – as tenants fled the decay. Attracting new renters often proved futile because of the poor condition of the buildings. For decades, nearly all of the buildings in the corridor were owned by local owners, who tended to keep them in good shape, Westbrook said.
Vacant, underoccupied buildings, whose owners are allowing them to rot, have accelerated blight in the neighborhood, say community organizations and the city. They fear that prolonged mass vacancies are undermining the stability of the Shaker Square retail district, which historically has been frequented by many of the nearby apartment dwellers. They fear that the longer buildings are left to rot, potentially hundreds of units of affordable housing will be permanently lost. You can still find a one-bedroom in the corridor for about $1,000 a month. The average for Cleveland is more than $1,400, according to a market analysis by RentCafe.com
Companies controlled by Mendel Steiner, the late Brooklyn, N.Y., real estate investor, bought the buildings in 2018. Fannie Mae foreclosed on the mortgage in 2024. Steiner, 33, died last year.
Earlier this month, the city filed an injunction to stop the auction. The Steiner properties were first scheduled to go to auction in December and then January before being postponed again to late March.
Generally, Fannie Mae auctions properties in an effort to recoup some of the money from the defaulted mortgage. With an auction, the city doesn’t have any say in who buys the Steiner properties because they generally go to the highest bidder. The starting bid is $1.5 million.
The Morelands Group is committed to working with the city on finding ways to get through to Fannie Mae officials, Westbrook said.
“Fannie Mae owns a share of responsibility for what has happened in the Shaker Square apartment corridor,” Westbrook said, adding that the entity should have better screened Steiner and his companies before granting the huge mortgage. “It was reckless conduct. So, they should be willing to work with the city.”
The pain of watching iconic Shaker Square apartment buildings deteriorate
At Drexmore Mansion, Westbrook stands outside peering through an exterior glass door and pointing to a vestibule wall with crumbling plaster. Water damage could be the culprit. The area smells moldy.
He later reveals photos taken inside the vacant Ludlow Castle before it was secured last fall. Some of the photos show water damaged ceilings with crumbling plaster.
Steiner’s companies progressively ignored maintenance to the point that barely anything was being done, former tenants told Signal Cleveland. This is similar to what happened at other Steiner properties, including those in Baltimore and South Florida, according to media accounts.
“This is like your car going into the ditch,” Westbrook said of the years of deferred maintenance. “Now you’ve got to pull it out. You’ve got to rebuild the transmission and anything else that needs to be repaired.”
It’s all familiar to Merle Gordon, who lived at Ludlow Castle for 18 years. The former Cleveland council member can rattle off a host of unattended issues during Steiner’s ownership, ranging from a roof that most likely needed to be replaced to no heat in the dead of winter to the owners not paying the water bills for which they were responsible. Gordon’s glad she got away from the derelict property drama, but she still pines for her old apartment.
“It was beautiful,” said Gordon, also a former Cleveland director of public health. “Wood-burning fireplace. Cathedral ceilings. Wood floors.”
Joanne Blanchard had lived nearby at Hampton Court, twin Tudor-style buildings, for nearly four decades. While there, the building changed hands, but each owner had the same philosophy about caring for the building.
“One of them, who was a lovely man, told me this, ‘I love these buildings. I want to restore them to their grandeur,” said Blanchard, whose jobs include working as head usher at an area entertainment venue.
Her building was in “great condition,” she said. And then it became a Steiner property. Members of a highly skilled maintenance team began being replaced by people far less knowledgeable. Makeshift repairs became the norm.
“You could see the new owner wouldn’t put money back into the building,” she said.
Cleveland’s civil nuisance initiative deals with negligent landlords
A few years ago, Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration started an initiative to deal with negligent landlords. Though finding a way to deal with irresponsible out-of-town investors sparked the policy, it can be used on any negligent property owner, Martin O’Toole said.
The strategy can include targeted code enforcement and also receivership, in which the city, a community-based nonprofit or another organization petition the court to declare a property a public nuisance. The court then appoints a receiver to oversee repairs, and the owner is responsible for paying. A civil nuisance action can also involve Cleveland helping to negotiate a deal for the foreclosed property with the lender. The city does this in conjunction with working with community development groups to find potential buyers they and city officials deem will be responsible property owners.
“The city is not shying away from doing civil nuisance actions,” she said. “We’re not going to allow the neighborhood to be destabilized by owners who don’t invest and just let the properties deteriorate.”
A civil nuisance action that results in a new owner taking over a building can take a few years. During the process, high vacancy rates can remain, and tenants can continue to live in challenging conditions as things gradually turn around.
Perhaps the city’s most high-profile example of the initiative took about three years to coalesce. It involves three apartment buildings on Shaker Boulevard in the corridor. Altogether they have about 250 units and had been owned by a New York-based LLC. The buildings had been so poorly maintained that the owners racked up a plethora of code violations.
Last fall, the city got the company to pay more than $2.1 million in Cleveland Housing Court fines, fees and back taxes. The city has also signed off on the buildings’ owners selling them to a company that agreed to put an initial $5.1 million into the properties as part of a multi-phase investment plan. The new owner is an LLC led by Martin N. Shkreli, founder of the New York-based Alba Construction. Cleveland-based Progressive Urban Property Management is managing the apartments.
“It was a big win for the city,” said Martin O’Toole.
The city is close to announcing that it helped to strike a deal in the same vein for a 12-unit apartment building on South Moreland Boulevard, she said.
The Morelands Group lobbied for both to be returned to quality housing, and Westbrook said the organization will continue to push for the same to happen with the Steiner properties. Neither of the deals reached for the three buildings or the one building in the corridor involved Fannie Mae mortgages.
The city’s plan for the Steiner properties includes reaching an agreement with Fannie Mae for the buildings, which would be turned over to the Cuyahoga Land Bank. Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, a nonprofit focused on community revitalization, is working on lining up local buyers for the properties.
There are several good candidates who understand the apartment corridor and have viable plans for making money while providing quality housing, said Tania Menesse, CNP’s chief executive officer and president. Based on conversations with potential owners, it is unlikely that one entity will own all 15 properties, she said.
In order for the city’s plan to work, there is no way Fannie Mae can offer the Steiner properties to Cleveland for anywhere near $22.6 million, say many of those advocating for a deal instead of an auction. They say it is improbable that the buildings were ever worth that much. After years of deterioration, the buildings are now worth only a fraction of what they were worth in 2018, they say.
Westbrook refers to how Fannie Mae’s foreclosure complaint against Steiner and his LLCs, made before the real estate investor’s death, raises the possibility of exploring whether fraud occurred in connection with the mortgage loan.
What they perceive as an inflated value plays into their concerns about what would happen if the properties are auctioned. So does the way they say the buildings are being marketed, including photos depicting the properties in far better shape than they actually are.
“The implication was the owner died, and since he died, the properties have gone into disrepair,” Martin O’Toole said. “That really isn’t true. These never were maintained by that owner during his tenure.”
The city provided Fannie Mae with the information about the Steiner properties being the subject of a civil nuisance action, but it took a month for the disclosure to appear on the auction website and materials, she said. But even with the disclosure, what Martin O’Toole and others have labeled as misleading depictions of the buildings’ true value may be enough for out-of-town investors to think they can turn a quick profit.
“Suddenly they realize, we’re upside down [with the mortgage],’” Menesse said.
“There’s really no downside to them for walking away. The company files bankruptcy and they’re on to their next deal.”
Then the city and neighborhood stakeholders have to find a way to clean up the mess.
Walkable neighborhoods like Shaker Square are seeing a resurgence nationally
The city and corridor stakeholders are fighting to stabilize the Shaker Square area for its legacy and because of its promise.
Shaker Square has existed as a retail district for nearly a century, and many of the buildings in the apartment corridor are just as old. Both were developed by Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen, who built Shaker Heights as a planned suburban community. They also built Shaker Heights Rapid Transit, now part of RTA, to get people downtown. The housing, including the corridor, was built around a central shopping/transit hub. It was intended to be a walkable community.
Today this is known as Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), and it is popular among urban planners. TOD is considered to be environmentally friendly because it reduces urban sprawl and often focuses on rebuilding city and inner-ring neighborhoods. Creating mixed-use neighborhoods, those with businesses and housing, is key. High-density housing, such as the apartment corridor, is often considered ideal.
“Other places across the country are trying to build what we already have,” Westbrook said.
Mixed-income housing is also a popular goal in development. This has been a hallmark of the corridor for years.
“This is naturally occurring affordable housing in Cleveland that is still a thriving mixed-income neighborhood, but it is missing 300-plus of those residents, ” Menesse said.
When properties undergo major improvements, rents often rise. The threat of displacements rises, especially for lower-income renters. Some potential owners have included options for lower-income renters, she said.
Menesse doesn’t shy away from saying that her organization has a vested interest in making sure buildings in the corridor are brought back online. CNP and the nonprofit Burten, Bell, Carr Development Inc. bought Shaker Square out of foreclosure for $11 million in 2023, with the help of the city. The bank had foreclosed on the mortgage and was planning to take the shopping center to auction, before the nonprofits and the city persuaded them to strike a deal.
“With the support of the county and the foundations, almost $6 million has been invested in the Square, and that investment is at significant risk if these apartment buildings are allowed to continue to deteriorate,” Menesse said.
The Van Sweringens had intended for Shaker Square to primarily be supported by shoppers from the apartment corridor and nearby areas. Nearly a century later, that really hasn’t changed. About 60% of shoppers walk to the retail district, according to the Shaker Square Vision Plan.
Melissa Garrett-Hirsch opened Café Indigo last February on Shaker Square. As board president of the Shaker Square Area Development Corp., she knew the shopping center was rebuilding with new owners and she wanted to play a role in making it successful. Success will be difficult if mass vacancies aren’t addressed, she said.
Before opening, Garrett-Hirsch said she did research, including analyzing census data and using AI tools, to determine the potential customer base that would come from nearby homes, apartments and condos.
“I know the neighborhood,” she said. “I know the potential. I did my homework, and these apartment buildings are just not yielding the foot traffic that they could well bring.”
Garrett-Hirsch knows that building a business based on customers in the neighborhood can work. She opened the UnBar Cafe on nearby Larchmere Boulevard six years ago. Most of the customers walk to her business.
“I’m used to being completely enveloped by my neighborhood,” she said. “ I want these vacant apartments to be filled with people who want to invest in their community, which includes patronizing the local businesses.”
Many who have been in the struggle to save the Steiner properties from continued deterioration say it caused residents, community organizations, the city and others to collectively think about ways to strengthen the apartment corridor.
Blanchard, the nearly four-decade resident, believes there should be a permanent coalition, which would also include academic experts, focused on long-term planning and solutions. For example, she believes that converting some of the buildings into affordable co-ops would help with neighborhood stability.
Why these women were the last holdouts in their beloved Shaker Square apartments
And then there was one.
Gordon was the last tenant to leave Ludlow Castle. Blanchard was the last to leave Hampton Court.
“It was kind of like being a shipwreck survivor or the last one on the island,” Blanchard said. “It was wrenching.”
Staying for both women had a bit to do with holding on to the past. Gordon remembers the eclectic mix of tenants, who included professors, administrators at University Circle cultural institutions and a yogi with a large following.
Blanchard remembers her building as the place where she raised her daughter. She remembers the friendships they formed with the many international families who lived in the building and whose children often attended school with her daughter in Shaker Heights. (The corridor is zoned for Shaker Heights schools.) She liked volunteering to prune the roses outside of her building. She valued living in a racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood.
With both, there was still disbelief – and perhaps even some anger – that tenants’ lives had been upended because Steiner and his companies appeared to have chosen to place profits over people.
Blanchard moved recently. The court-appointed company managing the properties has only left two buildings occupied: the Larchmere on North Moreland Boulevard in Cleveland and Woodland Park on South Woodland Road in Shaker Heights. She’s found a new apartment in the corridor, which she loves.
“I grieved even though I was moving onward and upward,” she said. “I still miss the old place, and I hope it receives the care and renovation it needs.”
No heat, which also burst the kitchen pipes, was the final trigger for Gordon to move more than a year ago. She ended up in Lakewood to be closer to an elderly parent for whom she’s caring.
Gordon viewed staying in her apartment as a way to fight back – even if symbolically – against the viable Shaker Square apartment corridor slipping away. She knew that, in Cleveland, vacant buildings often turn into abandoned buildings that are then demolished.
“I thought that things could turn around if people continue living here,” she said. “Somebody has to keep a stake in the ground.”
