Cleveland City Council caucus meeting

This was a caucus meeting for Cleveland City Council. 

Council member attendees:

• Joe Jones, Ward 1
• Deborah Gray, Ward 3
• Kris Harsh, Ward 4
• Richard Starr, Ward 5
• Blaine Griffin, president of council, Ward 6
• Austin Davis, Ward 7
• Stephanie Howse-Jones, Ward 8
• Kevin Conwell, Ward 9
• Michael Polensek, Ward 10
• Nikki Hudson, Ward 11
• Tanmay Shah, Ward 12
• Brian Kazy, Ward 13
• Jasmin Santana, Ward 14
• Charles Slife, Ward 15

Absent:

• Kevin Bishop, Ward 2

Other attendees:

• Frank Ford, VAPAC chair
• Heather Lazar, VAPAC program manager
• Tim Kobie, business process analyst, Department of Building & Housing, City of Cleveland
• Lindsey Zsebedics, housing development associate, Slavic Village Development
• Michael Schramm, senior director of systems integration, Cuyahoga Land Bank
• Jennifer Heinert O’Leary, special counsel, Cleveland City Council
• Nick Castele, Signal Cleveland
• Sean McDonnell, The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com
• Nora McKeown, Spectrum News Cleveland
• Abbey Marshall, Ideastream
• Ron O’Leary, administrator, Cuyahoga County Board of Revision
• Niko Johnson-Fuller, executive assistant to Tanmay Shah
• Steven Rys, special assistant, Cleveland City Council

Sally Martin O’Toole, director of Building & Housing, City of Cleveland
Caucus called to order at 11:05 a.m. [Editor’s note: The scheduled start time was 10 a.m.].

Tackling Cleveland housing without the ‘silo effect’

Presentation from Vacant and Abandoned Properties Action Council (VAPAC):

Kris Harsh, vice chair of City Council’s Development, Planning & Sustainability Committee, introduced VAPAC.

Frank Ford, VAPAC chair, presented. Ford reviewed the history, operations and achievements of the group. VAPAC was created in 2005 in response to the growing crisis of vacant and abandoned properties following mortgage foreclosures. The group was explicitly designed to address the “silo effect,” where city, county, state and federal actors work on housing issues in isolation. Today, VAPAC includes 40+ leaders across nonprofit, civic and government sectors working together. The organization meets monthly, with issue-specific working groups doing the bulk of the work between meetings. Currently, there are four working groups ranging from 10 to 20 people:

• Delinquent Tax, Tax Lien Sales & State Forfeiture Sales
• Investor
• Housing Affordability & Stability
• Squatters

A new white paper is expected within the next couple of months, continuing a pattern of rigorous, long-form policy research. One white paper on tax lien sales and tax delinquency was published in 2015, and Ford said Cuyahoga County has enacted almost every one of the paper’s 30 recommendations.

Council members sound off on Cleveland housing

The latter half of the presentation used NEOCANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing) and other regional data sets to illustrate structural housing problems. NEOCANDO is a data platform that integrates information from multiple sources into one place and is housed at Case Western Reserve University within the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

The East Side of Cleveland has still not recovered from the foreclosure crisis of the 2000s, Harsh said. Slide 15 in the presentation reads, “…low sale prices in many majority Black East Side neighborhoods are troubling for 3 reasons: they represent lost wealth for homeowners, they attract cash-paying out-of-state investors, and they have prompted some lenders to say ‘we don’t make loans under $100,000.’”

Regarding home prices, Ford said, “They’re on their way up, but they’re not yet back to where they were even 20 years ago.”

“It represents, I think, the largest theft of wealth from the Black community in the history of America from Wall Street. These were banks that revalued the houses. The money didn’t disappear; it went into the banks,” Harsh said.

Another finding is that the condition of investment property is more likely to be in disrepair versus property owned by individuals, non-profits and government organizations (slide 20 of presentation). 

Lastly, another takeaway is that homeownership in Cuyahoga County is declining, with “the greatest decline being in the majority Black East Side of Cleveland,” (slide 22).  Attributed factors include, “demolition, lack of access to home purchase loans and investors buying homes for rental.”

Several City Council members gave testimonials of the housing issues they face in their wards, including blight, absentee owners, zombie houses, gentrification and rejection from banks for home improvement and mortgage loans, even from council members themselves.

There was a discussion of the impact of community development corporations (CDCs) on housing issues in Cleveland. Council President Blaine Griffin, Ward 6, said, “When developers come to us, they very rarely want to say, ‘We want to build 50 homes in Fairfax.” They usually want to build massive apartment buildings, he said. CDCs seem to be focused on home ownership, he said, and he wants the city to get back to more home ownership and focus on wealth creation.

“How can we redirect our policies and strategies to push more home ownership and less massive apartment buildings where people are paying $2,000 [for rent]?”

“I don’t really see a game plan for the East Side of the city,” Ward 10 Council Member Michael Polensek said. “The number one complaint in my office is lack of code enforcement,” he said, saying the “slum landlords” don’t improve it, and cases don’t wind up in Housing Court.

“I’m very disappointed with the previous administration of Housing Court, who blew me off on numerous occasions when I had issues with slum landlords,” he said, adding that, “We need significant home repair programs [on the East Side].” He also said people there can’t get mortgages.

“We have got to come up with a game plan for the East Side, an aggressive plan of action,” Polensek said. “The LLCs have descended on the neighborhoods, and they’re comin’ in with cash. I’m dealing with landlords that own 14, 15, 20 properties … my diplomacy is gone, my political correctness is gone.”

Polensek also questioned whether or not the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is being enforced. 

Ward 8 Council Member Stephanie Howse-Jones agreed on the need for action.

“I am putting it out here, stating it out loud, we have all this data and do all these presentations, but clearly we’re not utilizing the data to actually come up with equitable policies when we know these are systems that have been put in place,” Howse-Jones said. “People don’t want to talk about the East and West divide, but it is a real thing, and historically — historically — [what] has caused these conditions was Black and white.” 

Ron O’Leary, administrator for the Cuyahoga County Board of Revision, former Housing Court judge and former director of Cleveland Building & Housing, spoke to code enforcement.

“Code enforcement is a three-legged tool, and those three legs are Law Department, the Housing Court, and Building and Housing, and if any one of those is weak, then code enforcement’s not going to get done well.”

O’Leary highlighted opportunities for budget funds to be reallocated. “One of the things that VAPAC has been doing the last few years is looking at those three departments’ budgets, or entities’ budgets. And I can tell you that …,) [when] you had asked me if I had enough money for Building & Housing and I said yes, I had lied to you,” O’Leary said.

“Of course you did,” laughed Polensek. “They always lie at the table.” Many in the room laughed, as O’Leary brought the dynamic behind city budget hearings to light.

O’Leary continued: “Look at the Building & Housing budget; it consistently brings in millions of dollars more in revenue than it expends … with looking at the Law department and others, [the money] can probably be spread out a little bit to the Law Department to make sure that they’re staffed, and to the Housing Court to make sure that they’re staffed.”

O’Leary added that the money is there for code enforcement. “The only way to get code enforcement done right is to give them the money. … Since 1999, the city has been starving them. If you give them the money to do their jobs, they’ll do it.”

Jasmin Santana, council member for Ward 14, said new development in her ward is not helping existing residents, but conversely bringing people in from the suburbs. “The market is growing, but I’m vulnerable for gentrification and displacement in my neighborhood.”

Richard Starr, council member for Ward 5, looked toward the banks’ responsibility for some of the city’s current state. “This is something I’ve been dealing with and studying since 2024 when I called out KeyBank for their practice, … and they still are not complying with CRA, but we always turn to them and give them money to do things in our city, which is just a direct impact on the decisions that we make. These problems that exist is not something that was done overnight.”

Joe Jones, council member for Ward 1, added, “We have a group that has come in and taken over, a property management group, 60 units. These people were paying $850 to $900 rent. These people come in and say, ‘You’re gonna have to pay double that, or you’re gonna be out by Feb. 1.’”

The remarks by council members were marked by visible urgency and frustration, reflecting a shared outlook that longstanding housing problems now require decisive policy action.

Caucus adjourned at 1:11 p.m.       

These notes are by Documenter Maria Shuckahosee.

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If you believe anything in these notes is inaccurate, please email us at documenters@signalcleveland.org  with “Correction Request” in the subject line.