"Get On Your Feet" is a proposal offered to the Buckeye Area Development Corporation in response to their request to reimagine the Buckeye Corridor between Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Moreland Avenue, in eastern Cleveland. Following our site visit and contact with the residents, we concluded that the neighborhood needed a concerted and coordinated effort to engage the residents and revitalize the street. Primarily, our focus was the development of human capital to make the community more competitive, attractive to outside investment, and ultimately self-reliant. We distilled our efforts into four goals:
1. Cultivate a more inclusive neighborhood identity that blends the rich Hungarian history of the Buckeye-Shaker area with the culture, values, and priorities of the current residents and business owners who are largely African American.
2. Provide a supportive environment for youth development through intergenerational engagement, a range of partnerships, and year-round programming.
3. Establish programs and facilities intended to educate residents in financial literacy and empower entrepreneurs with basic business skills and shared infrastructure. Also to repurpose vacant parcels and revitalize existing commercial buildings to support youth programming and economic development.
4. Rehabilitate the Moreland Theater as a social and cultural anchor for the Buckeye community. Preserving its identity while infusing the theater with activity and new uses such as retail through coordination with educational programming and business incubation.
Our proposal is richer than superficial streetscape alterations, and deals with core issues: Disinvestment, disengagement, and increasing safety concerns. In large part, Get On our Feet, relies on existing social infrastructure, individuals and organization around Cleveland that are already working in parallel to our goals. Furthermore, it is a framework to realize the ambitions established by the City and its Planning Commission, as made evident in "Sustainable Cleveland 2019" and "Re-Imagining Cleveland". We offer a framework to focus those efforts towards this corridor.
Executive Summary
This proposal advances a holistic approach to the revitalization of Buckeye Corridor and the surrounding community through: education, incubation, and preservation. We believe that now is the time to invest in social capital through targeted and layered programming specifically aimed at neighborhood awareness, youth education, business incubation, and economic development through preservation. Through a process of community engagement, networking, program alignment, and resource sharing, Get on Your Feet develops a framework for positive transformation and community empowerment, as well as physical rehabilitation of the buildings, vacant parcels, and physical infrastructure.
We recognize that as a CDC, Buckeye Area Development Corporation has limited manpower, operational capacity, capital resources, and times, that is why we believe that program coordination and building on existing initiatives and institutional knowledge is critical. In this proposal, the role of the CDC is to identify the Targets of Change - those in need of assistance or intervention - and facilitate the Agents of Change - those who can provide mentorship or help create a supportive environment for positive growth, socially, culturally, economically, and physically. Get on Your Feet is about self-empowerment. We envision the Targets of Change eventually transitioning into Agents of Change, who support and advance the these goals of education, incubation, and preservation.
As a result of the 2006 Buckeye-Larchmere Revitalization plan, the neighborhood has seen over $100 million in investment related to the four focus areas: housing, economic development, safety and security, and neighborhood amenities. Some of the notable projects include the Buckeye Woodhill Rapid Transit Authority (RTA) Station, Harvey Rice Library Branch, Harvey Rice Elementary, Emerald Alliance Permanent Supportive Housing, Trumpeter pocket park on 118th Street and Buckeye Road, and the adaptive rehabilitation of St. Luke’s Manor. These projects are important capital investments that address local needs for housing, development, and education, and create nodes for activity and exchange, and continued reinvestment.
Despite this large scale reinvestment in the area, there has been a long history of disinvestment and abandonment with regard to the existing residential and commercial fabric along Buckeye road. With the long term goal of rehabilitating the Moreland Theater as a community anchor for social and cultural programming, this proposal aims to create a scalable strategy for reimagining space and getting people back on their feet through education, mentorships, and partnerships. We want to support and empower the vulnerable groups, primarily children 0-5, at risk youth, women, and senior citizens; those who may need targeted programming to realize their potential; gain greater independence, self-esteem, and self-reliance, and ultimately feel needed within the community. Get on Your Feet sees people, partnerships, and preservation as the catalyst for change.
In addition to specific precedent case studies, our proposal follows the work of Donovan Rypkema on Place Economics, the strategies of National Main Street Center - a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the resources available through the University of Kansas as part of their Community Tool Box. Through these mechanism of education, incubation, and preservation, we believe that program coordination and investment in social capital will lead to a transformation of the physical landscape. Starting with the anchor locations - Harvey Rice Library and Elementary School, Buckeye CDC, the Passport Project, the old library as the new incubation hub, the Moreland Theater as the new social and cultural hub, and the Land Bank and BADC owned vacant parcels as the site of a new park and “Culture Shed.” The plan also identifies potential properties for reinvestment as expansion sites for the new programming. Get on Your Feet is a long-term vision for corridor rehabilitation that operates through a four-phase approach - research, triage, development, and expansion - to build on existing programming, municipal frameworks, and the initiatives of Sustainable Cleveland 2019.
