Update July 18th: More on Ohio, here.
If you live in Cleveland or any other Rust Belt city this may be the most important article you will read this year (or for years to come). I simply haven’t the time to analyze it all for you, but for any activists concerned with the future of your community, this reporter ( at The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer has done her homework.
You now must demand full transparency from local elected officials and if necessary figure out where and how to throw a shoe in the machinery of government! Find out who is going to benefit financially from the re-development in this public-private partnership scheme to colonize Cleveland.
If I lived in Ohio, I would also be trying to find out right now how “welcoming” Governor Kasich has been to this plan. He surely knows about it!
Before you read “Dream neighborhood….,” please go to a story we posted exactly two years ago yesterday about how Welcoming America had come to Cleveland to get this ball rolling.
Somalis will be invited to be part of the “Dream” neighborhood! Will they live in one big happy multicultural melting pot along side Hindu Bhutanese and Christian Ukrainians?
Changing America by changing the people! Story, sounds like a blueprint for Obama’s plan to “seed” your cities and towns with “New Americans.”
Here is how Ms. McFee begins her report at The Plain Dealer (hat tip: Julie).
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Kat Oberst Ledger and her husband, Art, recall when West 48th Street teemed with drug dealers and sounds of gunfire peppered the night. Now their street, near the intersection of Cleveland’s Stockyards and Clark-Fulton neighborhoods, is quiet at sundown. Empty houses sit, windows boarded, awaiting demolition. A hummingbird sanctuary and gardens have sprung up on vacant lots.
During the last decade, the Ledgers say, the neighborhood has improved. It also has emptied out, thanks to foreclosures, abandonment and urban decay. But the Ledgers could be welcoming new neighbors – hailing from places as far-flung as Bhutan, Somalia and Ukraine – over the next few years, if a consortium of community leaders, nonprofit groups and public officials has its way.
These newcomers, refugees fleeing danger or persecution in their home countries, need places to live. Cleveland has plenty of empty homes, many of which could be rehabbed rather than bulldozed if potential landlords knew tenants were on their way. That supply-and-demand equation is the basic premise of the Dream Neighborhood, a plan to reinvigorate a slice of the city’s West Side by appealing to refugees while improving living conditions for existing residents.
On Friday, the Cleveland City Planning Commission will get its first look at this land-use concept, during an introductory presentation at City Hall. At this point, there’s nothing that requires a public vote. There’s no mountain of government money on the table, though councilmen have pushed for more demolition spending to raze the worst eyesores in the neighborhood. But there appears to be city support, from Mayor Frank Jackson on down, for the idea of making Cleveland a more welcoming place, a haven for people forced to leave their home countries.
[….]
Cimperman wants to capture some of those new households and concentrate them near Thomas Jefferson school, chipping away at a citywide vacancy challenge that spans thousands of properties. He envisions a repopulated neighborhood where longtime residents live next door to refugees who help maintain shared gardens, find jobs in the area and start businesses on Clark and Storer avenues, two depleted commercial corridors.
“I’m telling you now,” Cimperman says, conveying his passion for the project with words that can’t be printed in a family newspaper, “the … USS Refugee ship is coming to port. Get on.”
Please read on, this is great reporting (even if you don’t like what you are hearing)!
One big problem—-so where are the jobs?
