Cleveland’s Upper East Side neighborhoods were long overlooked and undervalued by traditional investors. Relative to the rest of the region, the roughly 100,000 residents have a higher poverty rate (42% vs. 12%), lower per capita income ($8,258 vs. $17,128) and greater unemployment (14.8% vs. 4.9%).
The Urban Ecological Entrepreneur program, developed by the Shorebank Enterprise Group, the City of Cleveland, local community development corporations and TerrAqua, is seeking to ensure neighborhood sustainability and long-term viability. They are trying a new, more inclusive approach that encourages greater community involvement in deciding their own fates, and introduces (or re-introduces) some of the environmental and natural resource context in which the neighborhoods were first developed and now exist.
The program is establishing environmentally sound business ventures to benefit the neighborhoods with economic growth (jobs, added commercial revenues, new economic clusters) and greater decision-making capabilities. Program elements include providing environmental information, articulation of neighborhood needs, reclaiming abandoned land, pollution prevention and neighborhood safety.
Goals include (1) helping the community identify and assess environmentally sustainable economic and entrepreneurial opportunities, (2) developing a business plan for at least two of these opportunities, and (3) developing a permanent neighborhood capacity to promote sustainable economic development.
Shorebank Enterprise Group was established in 1994 as part of Shorebank Corporation, a community development bank. Shorebank’s mission is to increase opportunities for residents of underinvested communities, and they have invested over $800 million in urban and rural communities since 1973. Since 1995 Shorebank Enterprise Group and its affiliates have invested $55 million in the Cleveland area, most in the city’s Upper East Side. Shorebank also operates two Enterprise Centers that house 50 businesses and finance 700 housing units.
Shorebank has remediated brownfield sites for commercial and industrial use, and works with the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste Management District to encourage environmentally progressive products.
Client: Shorebank Enterprise Group
TerrAqua’s role: Grant writing and program development.