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Additionally, the traffic light governing this segment's exit has a right-turn light. As a pedestrian, I am worried that turning right is still seen when the red light is on.
The tree canopy helps to protect urban residents from the dangerous effects of the climate crisis. We know the tree canopy can lower ground level temperatures considerably, by as much or more than 10 degrees F.
We know the dangerous effects from the climate crisis preferentially target urban neighborhoods like Cudell, whose residents are in no position to endure the urban “heat-sink” effects of rising climate crisis temperatures, which are highly likely to get much worse. And we now know full well that the climate crisis is here.
So it makes no sense that the tree canopy in this park will be substantially reduced, especially in an area where residents and elementary school age children will recreate and seek shelter from the unreasonably hot days we know are ahead.
How is it that decisions were made to remove the protection those trees provide in Cudell Commons Park? Were those protections understood? If not, why not? Was the effect on residents of destroying the tree canopy understood and ignored or thought to be inconsequential? Would the same decisions have been made in any Cleveland neighborhood, or is Cudell somehow unique?
The thinking behind the decision is not just breathtakingly illogical, given the climate crisis, but appears to be driven primarily by concerns about construction cost. What about the cost to the quality of life of neighborhood residents, elementary school children and park users, given that these urban residents will preferentially suffer the dangerous effects of the climate crisis?
It indeed looks a lot like an assault on the Cudell neighborhood residents: removing protections they will desperately need to help withstand the dangerous effects of the climate crisis, and putting their health in more peril than it otherwise would be.
Yet this development project process and its predictably contentious outcome is very typical of the way property development is done in Cleveland and helps explain why the protective tree canopy here has been devastated, especially in disinvested neighborhoods, and why the project to restore the tree canopy is so far behind schedule.
This city just does not properly value its trees and their health benefits for neighborhood residents. Trees do require maintenance, and city budgets are constrained. And property development here is conceived, designed and accomplished with lowest possible cost as the primary driver, so resident needs and preferences tend to be given lip service, at best.
Destroying mature trees is the easy and least cost option for development, despite the many health benefits mature trees provide to the people that live, work and play near an urban green-space like Cudell Commons Park.
And, painfully, public engagement with transparency and detailed information comes so late in the development process, it’s hard or impossible for residents to have an impact on the project. One has to wonder if that’s intentional.
Because this development scenario repeats itself again and again throughout the city. Property development processes are opaque, inscrutable and impenetrable to the lay public. The processes are shrouded in mystery and secrecy, with the public invited in only occasionally to see conceptual pretty pictures and hear meaningless sales pitches marketing flimflam.
Key decisions are made early in the process behind closed doors without effective public knowledge, understanding and input. Official meetings at the city are held when people have to work, and public comment is highly constrained. Then, at the 11th hour, the neighborhood gets a data dump about what is about to happen to it, and is asked for its opinion, which will have zero practical effect on the project.
Over and over the bureaucratically esoteric, development-centric, tone-deaf, top-down, inequitable process repeats itself. And when the community routinely reacts with outrage at the manner with which they have been disrespected, misled and ultimately bullied, development proponents react with indignation, attacking and blaming the neighborhood residents for being NIMBY’s, or for not paying attention, or not participating or not understanding the convoluted process whose effects they will be forced to live with in their neighborhood. Accuse the accuser. A very typical, reflexive and predictable bureaucratic misdirection used habitually by development project proponents in this city.
But that’s the way property development is done in Cleveland, and that’s exactly what has happened in the Cudell Commons Park planning to build an elementary school. The project as proposed will destroy 40 mature trees that protect the public, and the neighborhood’s residents are quite understandably pushing back.
Thank You
First, this is a matter that should be of great concern to City Council.
Ms. Jackson’s recent testimony to City Council and its reporting in the media was a welcomed breath of fresh air and finally offered some encouragement to me and many taxpayers I know, in which she questioned the wisdom of certain taxpayer subsidies like abatement and Tax Increment Financing, highlighting their ineffectiveness in truly helping the situation of poor people in our community.
These are City policies and practices that many, many taxpayers have known to be gigantic problems for decades, and finally someone in government here was willing to call them out for what they unquestionably are: grotesquely inequitable.
It seems ironic then and highly coincidental that she speaks out like that, and now just weeks later she’s gone? Apparently developers didn’t appreciate her candor and as a group complained to the City. I wonder if her demeanor, as described by a developer in a Plain Dealer article, would have been perceived to be less “harsh” and “abrasive” had it been coming from an older, white male?
It’s critical for taxpayers to know exactly what happened here.
Because it seems pretty obvious that powerful business interests and developers pushed back hard and got her fired, because she expressed an honest, informed professional opinion about public money subsidies that have to date failed to benefit disenfranchised people in Cleveland in any economically measurable way. She seemed to very much be an advocate for all Clevelanders, but developers apparently think that’s a bad thing.
It smells really bad, that’s for sure. It appears she was canned for simply speaking an inconvenient truth about how economic development in our community has benefited some but by no means all. If that’s the case, it’s frightening, embarrassing and emblematic of why Cleveland remains one of the poorest big cities in the United States.
It suggests strongly that our “leaders” answer preferentially to the business elite, investors, banks and speculative real estate developers, but not so much to neighborhood residents, voters and the overwhelming majority of taxpayers. Because we know that poverty is a policy choice, it’s clear our “leaders,” both in government and in civic life, have refused to make poverty a high enough priority here for the last fifty years.
So this is what happens when you have the courage to speak truth to power in Cleveland? Unconscionable.
Results matter. Data matters. Facts matter. Tessa Jackson simply brought forward the results, the data and the facts regarding Cleveland’s track record in subsidizing economic development. And the results, facts and data were not pretty, so she was expunged.
The facts are it’s been a great ride for the posh, powerful and privileged in greater Cleveland the last fifty years, but not at all so great for the middle class and positively tragic for poor people. This firing suggests not much is changing under Mayor Justin Bibb, and initial indicators are our new County Executive is on the very same wave length as our mayor: catering to big money special interests and ignoring average and poor people, while glossing over the raw inequity with slick marketing and feel-good bromides of verbal gobbledygook.
Let’s hope Tessa Jackson stays here and helps to push for an equitable Cleveland in other ways. We need a lot more truth-tellers like her in our government and civic organizations.
Nonetheless, this looks like another bleak and embarrassing confirmation of the deeply outsized influence the business, investor, real estate development and finance community has on government in Cleveland. Tessa Jackson likely was fired because she spoke the truth as she and many taxpayers understand it, and it obviously peeved some of the power elites, so they had the Mayor show her the door.
Councilpersons from the forgotten wards get it, but the overwhelming regional push now is for even more glitzy, expensive new stuff to try to attract population back to our region, especially downtown, to pump up the tax base and fill the pockets of the power elite.
So, the shakedown of taxpayers in subsidies and lavish public money for private wealth development is likely only going to get worse: for the failed MedMart, to county council members pet projects, to the Browns, to the CAVS, to a pricey gargantuan unnecessary land bridge, to the lakefront, to Bedrock, to a jail, to a courthouse, to more tax-abated luxury rental paradises and now to “reimagine” how the lower level of the Detroit-Superior bridge can entertain tourists and the well-to-do.
And correspondingly, because trickle-down economic development is a cosmic lie we have been force-fed here in Cleveland for the last 50 years, we will almost certainly remain one of the poorest big cities in the United States, affordable housing to rent and buy will remain elusive, as will plentiful living wage jobs.
Our public schools will remain underfunded, infant and maternal death rates for people of color will stay tragic and the city will remain particularly unlivable for black women and families (as reported in the media.) Our rapid transit system will stay anemic, and the tree canopy that can protect the most vulnerable of us from the climate crisis will take an inordinate amount of time to build back.
Because there has never been a nexus between Cleveland’s ever changing and chaotic economic development schemes chasing the most recent bright and shiny object of attraction for the wealthy and the desperate need here for more living wage jobs accessible to poor people. Because our economic development priorities have to date not directly addressed the region’s aching deficiencies in living wage jobs, affordable housing, segregation and discrimination, funding to public schools and violent crime that have driven population away.
But the urban buzz-speak, effervescent toxic positivity and blah, blah, blah bloviating boosterism of our government and civic “leaders” will continue. We'll all be "dreaming big" and "reimagining" in our "high density," “vibrant,” "walkable, multi-modal" "15 minute city."
Right. Sure we will.
Because our Mayor asserts his number one job is being Cleveland’s biggest cheerleader, and truth be told, he’s getting darned good at it. Seriously? We elected him to fix Cleveland’s big problems, not flit around the country and world selling the virtues of our, by all objective measures, eminently below average city. Population will return when we finally fix our endemic problems and shore up our obvious deficiencies.
It’s time City Council pushed back and pushed back hard on economic development initiatives and their tax subsidies that do not directly benefit ALL Clevelanders, and in particular the poor, disenfranchised and middle class in our community. Community Benefits Agreements can certainly help, but that’s just a start.
Tessa Jackson had it exactly right, but having it right got her fired. Her advocacy for the underserved in Cleveland should be a model for City Council and the City Administration to follow, and follow closely.
Thank you.