EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio — Broken, vacant and forgotten: that’s how neighbors near this block of Northfield Ave in East Cleveland feel about these abandoned homes. A drain on area property values and a safety problem. A story too often repeated in Cuyahoga County.
“That’s what vacant properties cause; they make people feel like nobody cares about their community,” said Adam Stalder, the director of community stabilization for the Cuyahoga Land Bank.
That’s where the Cuyahoga Land Bank steps in, acquiring vacant properties and bringing them back to productive reuse to improve the quality of life for residents. It’s their mission today, as it was 15 years ago when this work began.
“They understood that vacancy and abandonment and blight was an issue that our community was going to be dealing with for the long term. And we needed a vehicle to be able to help assess that problem and remediate that problem,” said Cuyahoga Land Bank Interim President, Ricardo León.
The Land Bank just completed their 10,000th demolition and has redeveloped 3,000 properties. Now, a recent $23 million state grant will allow them to improve even more neighborhoods.
Watch the full story on WKYC.com HERE.