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HUD's Harriet Tregoning spoke at Cleveland's City Club Monday, urging improvements to plans for Opportunity Corridor as a way to implement the region's Vibrant NEO 2040 vision.
(Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer)
CLEVELAND, Ohio - A senior federal official from the Department of Housing and Urban Development praised Northeast Ohio planners Monday for creating the Vibrant NEO 2040 vision in 2014, a framework that calls for a more compact and less sprawling future across the region.
But she also challenged Cleveland and Cuyahoga County to do a better job of designing the city's Opportunity Corridor so the $331 million road project helps create jobs and dense, walkable neighborhoods in a long-blighted part of the city.
"You could either get it gloriously right or horribly wrong," Harriet Tregoning, principal deputy assistant secretary for community development at HUD, said in an interview during her daylong visit.
Jeffery K. Patterson, chief executive officer and safety director of the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority, speaking with HUD's Harriet Tregoning on Monday during a tour of Opportunity Corridor in Cleveland.
Tregoning spent the morning with local and federal officials on a bus tour of Opportunity Corridor, the development zone flanking the pathway of a three-mile boulevard now being planned and built by the Ohio Department of Transportation and largely funded by the state.
The roadway, declared a priority by Ohio Gov. John Kasich and funded with turnpike bonds, will extend from the stub end of I-490 at East 55th Street to University Circle across some of the region's most blighted, depopulated and disinvested neighborhoods.
Road construction has started at the east end of the corridor along East 105th Street south of University Circle. The entire project is scheduled for completion in 2019.
Tregoning spoke at the City Club at noon, and later participated in a forum at Cleveland State University.
On all three occasions, Tregoning underscored that she saw Opportunity Corridor as a massive test case on whether the Vibrant NEO vision would change longstanding development patterns in the region.
Vibrant NEO, the biggest regional planning effort in 50 years, was funded in large part by a $4.25 million grant from HUD, augmented by another $2.2 million in local matches.
The project involved three years of work by the nonprofit Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium, a 12-county group that examined land use and development patterns. Former Cleveland city planning director Hunter Morrison directed the project.
The summary image from the Vibrant NEO 2040 vision shows how Northeast Ohio's 12 counties could be made healthier, greener, more economically competitive and better connected in the future, if sprawl is curbed and development encouraged in areas already developed.
Vibrant NEO was part of the national Partnership for Sustainable Communities, a $250 million HUD program funded by Congress in 2010 and 2011 to promote regionalism and smarter collaboration among federal agencies, rather than spending at cross purposes.
The Vibrant NEO vision, which recently won the top planning award for 2015 from the American Planning Association, calls for bringing a halt to suburban sprawl and redeveloping urban areas that have suffered blight and abandonment, such as the Opportunity Corridor zone.
The vision also calls for stitching the region together with stronger transit, preserving farmland and natural amenities, and building connections between jobs and affordable housing.
The planning project compiled data indicating that if the region continues to expand with low-density suburban development while losing population, its counties would experience growing fiscal strain and would become less competitive economically.
Tregoning said her visit was motivated by an invitation to speak at the City Club, and that she added the tour of Opportunity Corridor and the forum at CSU at the request of local officials including Grace Gallucci, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency.
Gallucci's agency led the original grant for the Vibrant NEO project, and she is spearheading the effort to implement the regional vision through education, collaboration among local officials and a push to change state policies on issues such as transit funding.
A new, long-term Vibrant NEO organization should be formalized by the end of the year, she said.
In her City Club remarks, Tregoning praised the Vibrant NEO project as a launch pad.
"You are prepared," she told an audience of roughly 100 community planners, "so don't even pause with your grant-writing, not just for federal grants, but for state grants and philanthropic grants."
She also said that "communities across the country" are watching Northeast Ohio to see whether it can carry out the Vibrant NEO concepts.
A previously unpublished map created by Burten Bell Carr Development Inc. shows a tentative buildout plan for the central portion of Opportunity Corridor in Cleveland. The plan was shared with 28 local, federal and state officials Monday on a bus tour of the development zone.
"Don't stop," she said. "The effort you've put forward to this point is pretty phenomenal."
Tregoning used Opportunity Corridor as an example of how the region could get the future right or wrong.
She said that building the road "is not the project." Instead, "it's the [surrounding] development and opportunities for employment, not the roadway."
Tregoning said local leaders should continue to push ODOT for changes in the design of the roadway, which she suggested would be overbuilt for the traffic it will carry.
"I love my friends at the state DOT's, but they often overbuild things," she said. "They build for a traffic projection that is very unlikely to happen."
ODOT officials have said that they've already made many adjustments to Opportunity Corridor's design, and that it's now late in the game to make additional changes.
Tregoning also urged the city of Cleveland to create new zoning in Opportunity Corridor to facilitate dense development. The city's planning director, Freddy Collier, has said those efforts are underway.
At Cleveland State University, Tregoning participated in a discussion among 50 invited guests about Vibrant NEO, including former U.S. Sen., Ohio Gov. and Cleveland Mayor George Voinovich.
Former U.S. Sen., Ohio Gov. and Cleveland Mayor George Voinovich, left, discussed regional development Monday at Cleveland State University with Grace Gallucci, director of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, Harriet Tregoning of the federal department of Housing and Urban Development, and Joe Calabrese, general manager of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority.
In a panel discussion, Dr. Akram Boutros said he saw the regional vision as essential to improving the health of Northeast Ohio's residents.
Brad Whitehead, president of the Fund for our Economic Future, a consortium of philanthropies, said Vibrant NEO "is about simple economics" and not part of a plot to dictate where Northeast Ohioans could or should live.
Gallucci pointedly said that while public transit is "sometimes perceived as leftist or crazy," politically conservative regions such as Salt Lake City are investing heavily in transit.
In her closing remarks, Tregoning returned to the issues facing Opportunity Corridor.
"It could be an example how this plan [Vibrant NEO] could be realized or it could be an example that nothing will change," she said. "It might be the same as if Vibrant NEO never existed. It's both a threat and an opportunity."