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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, September 25th, and I'm David Wittkowsky, retired nonprofit executive and a proud member of the City Club Board of Directors.

It's my pleasure to introduce today's forum, which is part of the City Club's Health Equity Series and presented in partnership with the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

For so many of us here in the room, the 2008 foreclosure crisis was more than a critical junction in our region's prosperity.

It was a rigging— a ripping open of a wound decades in the making, uncovering the fragile infrastructure of housing and inequitable access to basic needs in our communities.

Born from the demand of the moment, county leaders, city council members, nonprofit organizations, and community partners came together to find a path forward.

Since 2009, the Cuyahoga Land Bank has stood as a pillar of what our community can accomplish when working together to face immense hardship and obstacles.

The Land Bank's work is clear: transform vacant, abandoned, and tax-delinquent properties into community assets that strengthen neighborhoods and expand economic opportunity.

And the Land Bank doesn't stop there.

They design programs to help veterans, low and moderate income citizens, refugees, and other underserved populations to achieve the dream of living in safe, affordable housing.

Since its creation, the Land Bank's strategic partnerships with public, private, and nonprofit organizations have helped usher in more than $3.6 billion in economic impact.

In 2024, and after serving 2 years as Chief Operating Officer, Ricardo León became the 2nd president of the org— in the organization's history, succeeding Land Bank founder and longtime president Gus Frangos.

Before joining the Land Bank, Ricardo served as Executive Director of MetroWest Community Development Organization.

With deep experience in community and economic development, Ricardo brings a new perspective to the challenges and opportunities the land bank seeks to solve.

Today, we will first have the opportunity to hear directly from Ricardo with brief remarks on his vision for what comes next for the land bank.

Then Ricardo will be joined by Joyce Pan Huang, the Chief Impact Officer at the Cleveland Foundation, to discuss the challenges faced in housing and the promise of neighborhood revitalization in Cuyahoga County.

Before we begin, a quick reminder for our livestream and radio audience.

If you have a question for the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to 330-541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.Now, me and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Ricardo León.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

Hey, good afternoon, everybody.

Good afternoon.

It's been a while.

I was actually talking to Dan about this in the back and Joyce as well.

I've presented at City Club before, but this is my first time in the new digs.

And shout out to you, Dan, it's a nice place.

So I'm gonna keep my comments brief 'cause I really do want this to be focused on the conversation that Joyce and I will have, and then certainly wanna have conversation with all of you.

I hope you can think of questions and ask me all the toughest questions you can think of.

Ready to answer.

But wanted to start off by saying, first of all, thank you to all of you.

Who would have thought a conversation around land banking would sell out the City Club?

That's amazing.

Thank you for being here and spending your Friday with us.

Secondly, I know I'm probably repeating a little bit of what Dan said, but thank you to all the elected officials that are in the room with us today.

First of all, thank you for your time, particularly at this time of year.

But we have representation from every level of government in the room today.

And I think that's a testament to the collaborative nature of the work of the land bank and the way that we work to be kind of the bridge between government and nonprofit and private sector.

And I think you'll hear a little bit more about that as our conversation unfolds.

Also want to thank the table sponsors.

Thank you all so much for buying tables and having folks in the seats.

It's amazing.

And along those lines, I think this might be the first time we have all of our funders in the room or almost all of our funders in the room.

So thank you to our funders, our particular philanthropic partners.

You've entrusted us with your resources, and more so than just your resources, you've entrusted the Land Bank to help deliver in collaboration your mission as well.

And so that collaboration is incredibly meaningful to myself and to the team that do this work every single day.

And to that end, I want to thank the Land Bank staff.

And if you're a member of the Land Bank staff, if you could please put your hand up.

I'll put you guys on the spot.

If we could just get a round of applause.

I say this all the time, and I genuinely mean it.

I genuinely mean it.

I am blessed to lead the most passionate, dedicated, intelligent, hardworking group of individuals.

I often say we are the best team in town, and I genuinely believe it.

You may have seen the map that was up on the board.

You saw little dots kind of, and I'll explain that a little bit more through, you know, through my comments and through our conversation.

But all those little dots represent some transformative action, whether it was a demolition or a new house or a renovation or a strategic brownfield project.

None of that would happen without the amazing folks who do the work day in and day out.

And so again, thank you to them.

So I'm gonna give just a very truncated, kind of brief history of the land bank, who we are, how we got to this point, and then we'll jump into a conversation.

So as David mentioned, we opened our doors in summer of 2009, so we just had our 17th birthday a couple months ago.

For those of us who are in this space, in the kind of community economic development space, if you think back to 2009, The conditions back then were a little bit different than today, right?

We had rampant vacancy and abandonment.

While we weren't the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis, we were, I would say, one of the epicenters.

And so we were truly created as a response to the mortgage foreclosure crisis with the goal of trying to mitigate the impacts.

For the first decade of our life or so, the primary tool was blight remediation.

Largely through demolition.

I think everyone got a little postcard at your table there.

I will say that that work is still a foundational part of our work.

We're nearing the 11,000th demolition in our region.

It just goes to show the need, the vast need in the community.

However, along the way we realized, well, you don't have to knock everything down.

You can certainly save stuff.

And so early on, whether it's through a mix of our own programming, partnerships with nonprofit partners like CDCs, Habitat for Humanity, CHN Housing Partners, partnerships with our faith-based organizations like Lutheran Metropolitan or Building Hope in the City and others, we've been able to save over 2,700 homes in our county as well, homes that folks live in today, families live in today.

Then about 6, 7 years ago, we had the opportunity to really pivot from our, you know, from a strategic perspective we were selected to be the administrators of a program that was a collaboration between Cuyahoga County Council and County Executive at the time, the County Housing Program.So th $30 million program to strategically invest in the housing markets in historically disinvested communities.

Some folks— I'm sure a lot of folks in this room probably know this, but some folks may not be aware that in a lot of communities across Cleveland, homes today are still worth less than what they were pre-2008.

And the cost to build a home or renovate a home is more than what that house can sell for.

So you have entire tranches of our community where folks can't generate wealth, they can't pass that wealth on, right, through generational wealth building.

Folks aren't able to get, you know, a HELOC against their home to do a repair, right?

So folks are kind of trapped in these properties that are underwater because of a fundamentally failed housing market.

And so for 6 years, this program just sunset at the end of 2025.

We invested that over $30 million, and that created over 225 new units of housing, new home opportunities of all different kinds.

It's market rate, affordable, with partnerships with the nonprofit sector, work we did ourselves.

We were able to stand up what I would call a vertically integrated real estate development team within the organization and through partnerships with our nonprofits.

So that body of work has continued to evolve, and we're to this day, we So we finished the county housing program.

We've now transitioned.

We're doing 2 kind of big pieces of work, working in partnership with City Council in Central, Clark-Fulton, and South Collingwood to building homes, and then partnering with the Bibb administration in the Southeast Side Promise, where we are the kind of home creation, homeownership arm of that body of work.

And so that work continues to evolve.

And then a couple years ago, maybe 3 years or 4 years ago, the state of Ohio, the state legislature, partnered with the Ohio Department of Development to really start tackling legacy blight.

As you all know, most folks in this room I'm sure know, at one point Cleveland and kind of Midwest was the center of industrial development in our country.

Thousands of people worked day in and day out, oftentimes in the same neighborhood, living and working in the same neighborhood, moving forward kind of the manufacturing industry in town.

Well, unfortunately, for a whole host of reasons I think a lot of folks are familiar with, those— a lot of those sites are now vacant and abandoned.

And unfortunately are dirty land.

It's land that can't be developed.

And so the state of Ohio, in partnership with the legislature, created this program and picked county land banks to be the entities that would lead this body of work, at least in the first few rounds.

And I see, I think, some of our Ohio Land Bank Association members are here as well, so shout out to all of you.

We were the first county land bank, but there are now 71, which is amazing, with 2 more on the way.

So we think, you know, little by little we're, we're getting to all 88.

But what that body of work has allowed us to do here in Cuyahoga is Over the last 4 years, we've had over $140 million of state investment to over 40 brownfield projects, revitalizing 40 brownfield projects across our region.

And it's a mix of housing development, some of the work you're seeing on the waterfront, nonprofit headquarters, kind of the full gamut of the scope of development.

And then most recently, I'd say in the last 12 to 18 months, we've been invited by a number of anchor institutions and philanthropic partners to really start thinking cohesively about commercial corridor development.

And this idea that just building a few homes doesn't necessarily move the needle in a neighborhood, but instead you should— we could also work on revitalizing our commercial corridors, investing in the infrastructure, bringing new opportunities for neighborhood-scale amenities to the table.

And so I say that all to say, and I hope you'll see this theme throughout the conversation today, While our mission hasn't really changed, our mission is to get units back into productive use, right, of some type.

Our mission has evolved to meet the needs of whatever's happening in our regional economy.

And so our conversation today will hopefully give you a sense of how we've been able to do that.

And then I would add, again, as I mentioned, everyone got a postcard.

We do have hard copies of our strategic plan.

Looking at our comms team, I think that'll be publicly available in the next day or so.

So you guys get a little bit of a sneak peek 'cause you get to be here today, so please feel free to take a copy.

But, you know, the conversation today will center around how not just the strategic plan, but how elements of our strategy are thinking through how we kind of get through the end of this decade and again continue evolving the mission to the needs of the community.

So with that, I'll join Joyce for a conversation.

Thank you.

Wow, wow, we're so excited to be having this conversation.

And this opportunity really to speak with you, Ricardo, as I think one of the most important organizations in our community and one of our most consequential leaders for this time.

So just so excited.

So I resonate with the story around vacancy and blight.

20 years ago when I moved here as a Cleveland transplant, we were really in the thick of vacancy, blight, the subprime mortgage crisis, and Why don't you take us back to 2009 and give us some more detail about what that looked like and walk us through what's changed, not just for the land bank, but the Ohio context and what the public sector is going through?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

So again, it was interesting for me.

I started undergrad in fall of '08, kind of at the start of— and I did my undergrad in economics.

So I got to live in real time what it means to do quantitative easing and figuring out what's going on in the economy.

But here locally, we were seeing huge spikes in foreclosures, both tax foreclosures and mortgage foreclosures, largely in our urban core neighborhoods, but we started seeing it spreading out through our suburban communities as well.

Again, as I mentioned, we weren't the epicenter.

I think there's a couple cities across the country where you could point to that probably had a higher volume, you know, number of units that went through foreclosure, but some of our neighborhoods had more than half of all properties in their neighborhood went through foreclosure.

I think of Clark-Fulton, Stockyards, Slavic Village, some of these communities where this was a serious issue.

the state legislature was trying to figure out what could be done to solve this problem.

In comes in my predecessor, the late, great Gus Frangos, worked with a whole group of folks to write this legislation to create county land banks.

And at the time, the state said, well, this is actually a cool idea, but if it fails, we don't want everyone to suffer, so let's just let Cleveland do it and see what happens.

And so we were created as the first.

So we were the first county land bank.

Subsequently, within about a year or so, maybe 18 months, more and more counties started taking on.

I know Summit and Lucas and a few others were kind of some of those early adopters.

And as I mentioned, we now have 71.

I think the big difference now is we still have vacancy and abandonment.

I know some folks think maybe the problem has been solved, but certainly not the case.

I think the data coming that we are working— we work hand in hand with building and housing at the city of Cleveland.

And just the city of Cleveland alone maybe has 3,500 or 4,000 properties that need to be demolished.

And we probably think there's another couple thousand, you know, in the suburban communities as well.

So the problem hasn't been solved per se, but the evolution has been to reinvesting in community.

So the lot— the bulk of the blight has been solved for, and now it's getting these communities back to be high-quality communities of choice that have amenities of all different kinds.

And as I mentioned in my comments, the biggest piece is the fact that there's now 71 county land banks.

So this industry has really started to really take off.

I had the benefit, a couple of us from our team had the benefit to spend the last 2 days up in Pittsburgh for the National Land Bank Conference.

There was over 350 land banks, you know, from across the country there.

And it's funny because like they joke and they call us like the 1 percenters because Ohio actually leads the country in land banking.

And certainly Cuyahoga is viewed as kind of the leader within our space.

But it's amazing to see like that the idea of this tool that can evolve to meet the needs of whatever's happening in our community and kind of in the community and economic development space has really— is really taking flight.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think for me, as I reflect about the scale of the problem— so if we think about, let's just say, community development over the last 50 years, you know, for decades there was a very, you know, one property at a time approach.

And when I was at the City of Cleveland, we had about 18,000 vacant land bank lots in the city's land bank alone.

And since then, which has been what, a year and a half, there's 19,000 and growing.

And so this, the scale of the problem is incredible.

A third of the land that we have in the city of Cleveland is actually owned by the public sector.

So what have you learned, and tell us the answers, of like how to create change when this is such a massive structural issue?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.

It's a tough one, certainly.

I think we look at it a couple ways.

One is we— while the scale of the problem can be intimidating, we also see the scale of the resources that are invested are almost as large, right?

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent from the state, federal, county in demolition for the first 10, 12 years of our lives.

As I mentioned, the state is investing in brownfields.

We're working with all of our philanthropic partners to invest resources in communities.

So the way— in a way, to attack the scale of the issue is to leverage more resources.

Certainly.

I think one of the things we've really learned though is that you have to be very strategic about the communities you're— the community you're working with.

And from a market perspective, right, of trying to find a new equilibrium in the housing market, you have to be very intentional about how you do that in a way that both protects the folks who live there and have had the opportunity to live in this community.

If you've been a homeowner for 25 years in Glenville neighborhood, right, there was Your neighborhood has gone through ups and downs.

Well, you should be able to stay in your neighborhood when this new wave of investment comes in and there's new folks who maybe look different or feel different or live differently than you do.

And so we've been incredibly intentional in trying to protect the folks who are there.

And then as we're investing in housing, taking approach of both market-rate housing, right, to help create comps in the market, establish comps, rebuild the housing market, while also bringing on the partners that do affordable housing to create more affordable housing opportunities.

Then you can get real crazy like we do sometimes and maybe go build a park, you know, like we did in Circle East.

Or you can start investing in the commercial space or some of the work we're hoping to do in Collinwood where we have a commercial asset.

One side of the street is owned by Euclid, one side of the street is Cleveland.

They came to us.

We're owning both assets now.

We're working with them.

We submitted a federal earmark request.

To do infrastructure and streetscaping and try and incite someone to come bring a job center to the 185th corridor.

And so there's no one answer, there's no silver bullet that solves for it, but it's just again being intentional of the needs of that neighborhood, understanding them, and then using one of the, one of the many tools in the toolbox to try to address that issue.

Yeah, love that.

I love one of the first headlines in your strategic plan.

It says, land is about more than what's on it, it's about what happens because of it.

And I want to understand, and for this group here, what role does the county land bank play in economic development of the region?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I feel like oftentimes, and I think this is our own, this is kind of our ethos, we've always been the type of organization just kind of do the work, put your head down, do the work, get the project done, move on to the next one.

But the reality is that we do, in my opinion, we play a big role in the ecosystem, oftentimes not from the driver's seat, right?

Again, I think about the work that we do where we serve as the execution arm of the Cyrenius for Good Jobs Fund.

That's a 501 that was established by Mayor Bibb.

It's its own entity with the purpose of revitalizing 1,000 acres of industrial land.

While that's its own group, then they're leading the charge, we serve as the execution arm.

We hold the land on their behalf.

We help with, you know, the brownfield applications.

We help with the demolition.

We're helping them think through strategy, right?

So that's one example.

We often have been in the land aggregating space.

I think about the Amazon in Warrensville Heights.

We were the ones who put the 100 parcels together 12 years ago.

We worked with the VA and the Fisher House to get that done.

We're currently working with a number of municipalities across town who have 3, 4, maybe 5-acre sites, and they're trying to figure out what to do with it.

And they could go to the private sector and pay a boatload of money and get them to come in and help them figure it out.

And oftentimes when you hire a consultant, they spend 12 months doing it, and then they say, well, good luck.

And then they leave.

I think the unique benefit to us is that we're here.

We're here.

We're a mission-oriented organization.

Our goal is to move our region forward.

Our goal is to improve the quality of life for residents in our community.

And so that's the lens with which we do the economic development work.

And so again, as I mentioned, we— I say this often— we kind of oscillate in that space between government and nonprofit and private sector.

And sometimes we're all of those things, sometimes we're none of those things, sometimes we have to speak with both sides and kind of be the bridge, the connective tissue that connects it all.

But I think that has been to the benefit of the county, in my opinion, and has certainly allowed us to continue taking on really cool, exciting stuff.

That's great.

Let's talk a little bit about the future.

So you just completed your strategic plan for 2030.

In it, it's actually a great read.

I encourage everyone to pick up a copy.

I want to know why it was important for you to put that in place now?

Absolutely.

I think for a few things.

One is, I'm a firm believer that if you believe in your mission and you can do the work, you should be able to talk about the work, right?

We should stand on the things that we believe.

We have, we have a mission, we have a vision, we have goals, and we have core values that we believe in, and we should be comfortable saying that and showing the world that.

So that one was just kind of like the ethos of having a strategic plan.

But I'm also a firm believer, and I've seen this— I probably serve on more boards than I should— but I've seen this in town where, you know, organization releases a strategic plan and it's a pretty document, it's very beautiful, and then it kind of just ends up living on a shelf and no one really ever touches it again.

And maybe you use it to go chase a funder down, right?

They'll sit down with you and show you the plan, but other than that, it doesn't really become the work.

So for us, it was a way to kind of embody the living, breathing work that we do in a document.

But I think outside of just the organizational piece is the reality of the world is in an odd place.

Our regional economy is in a strange place, and our community economic development ecosystem is, is in an odd place as well, right?

We're seeing lack of resources, lack of talent, harder— projects are getting harder and harder to finance and get across the finish line.

And so this is our attempt to say, well, here are the things, the buckets of things that we do and we do well, and we're going to continue doing because we've always been the organization that can do this work.

Here's this bucket of things that we've been doing for the last few years, but we know we can improve upon and maybe have greater impact with and and evolve the way we do it.

And then here's like this kind of body of work of like things that we believe should exist in the ecosystem, and we're trying to figure out whether we're the right entity to do that work.

And there's some element of that work that we're already undertaking.

And so, you know, that's kind of the approach I take with, or at least we've taken as an organization with the strategic plan.

That's not to say that if some national funder shows up tomorrow with some opportunity, well, we wouldn't size it up, but it at least gives us an opportunity to have a clear playbook of what are the things that we we could and should be doing.

Yeah, it really strikes me because you've talked a little bit about how your identity has shifted.

You know, you were really known for demolition for some time, and now you're really entering many spaces.

And it also strikes me as a moment where probably everybody, everybody is coming to you for solutions, right?

They want to know how the county land bank, because of your powers, can really help.

So I'm really curious, there's a couple things in the strategic plan that I'm really interested in.

So the first is One of your strategies is about focusing or concentrating resources on a singular neighborhood at a time.

That seems new.

Tell us a little bit more about that and what the strategy is there.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'll be honest, a lot of that is driven by the anchors who have invited us into conversations around neighborhood-based development and this idea that— so the land bank has all these tools in the toolbox.

And I think the work that we're doing in East Cleveland in the Circle East District is probably the best example that we have of taking all the tools in our toolbox and deploying them in one place and then seeing what comes from that.

And I don't wanna act like we have all the answers, 'cause we certainly have had to figure a lot of stuff out along the way, but our thought process is in those situations where an entity, whether it's a funder or an anchor institution or a partner like the city or the county comes to us and says, hey, we really want you to focus attention in this community, It's like, well, which tools do we have at our, you know, in our toolbox that fit here?

What organizational capacity do we have to do this work?

Because we've always been known as an organization that gets stuff done.

That's kind of to your point.

That's kind of, I think, why folks continue to reach out to us.

And there is real reputational risk and organizational risk in not being able to deliver.

And so do we have the capacity?

It's kind of the second question.

And then third is, is this really in line with our mission?

If it's not in line with our mission, we're happy to help that partner find the right organization who can deliver upon whatever it is that they're trying to achieve.

But while it is new in the sense that we're intentionally speaking about it, in a lot of ways it's work we've always been doing, but now we're concentrating that effort and trying, again, trying to create kind of the, what we call is a filtering mechanism to ensure, like, is this the right fit for us?

Are we the right partner?

And can we actually deliver on the thing that's being asked of us?

Yeah, that's great.

And I'll also add that I think one of your tools that I think is a superpower of yours is actually that you really know how to work with data.

And I don't know if everybody knows that, but data has been critical.

In fact, when I was an intern at the County Land Bank many years ago under Mike Schramm, my job was to map properties using the geographic information systems, GIS mapping, and I don't think I was a very good student of GIS, but here I am today.

But that work is so important, the way that you have been able to take data, whether it's through NST, which is a neighborhood stabilization tool, even the way that you calculate the number of homes that it would take to turn around a market.

Talk to us a little bit about data as a tool and how that works with your strategy.

Absolutely.

Data's always been a major part of our work.

I always joke that we're just data nerds who get to do community development.

And so a couple things.

So since our inception, the organization's inception, we have partnered with Case Western Reserve and the Poverty Center.

To house NST, which is a tool that tracks in real time, I think, all 600,000 parcels across the county.

Basically, anything you can think of is being tracked when it comes to whether it's taxes, vacancy, square footage size, last sales price, all these things.

It feels like an infinite amount.

So that's been, from our inception, that's been a core value of our work, because if you don't have data about the communities that you're serving, then how do you know that you're actually moving the needle in those communities, first.

Secondly, we've always had a partnership with a whole bunch of organizations in town and groups like VAPAC and First Suburbs Consortium and others who also rely on that data to make decisions for their communities.

And so that's always been a big part of, like, if we can't— if we don't have good data, then you can't make well-informed decisions.

And if you can't make well-informed decisions, then you won't really know whether the decision you're making is the thing that needs to happen in that community.

So that's been the second piece.

Thirdly is most recently, I think in the last couple years, where we've really started getting exciting, and the map you saw, and I always shout him out, I know he doesn't like it, but our data scientist, Dr.

Ryan, was a— So we have an in-house data scientist that was originally, has been funded through a partnership with the foundation to really think through, well, how do we use that data for future, like, forward-thinking decision-making.

So that, you know, as you mentioned, there's— we've been running studies of like, well, I mean, you know, in a neighborhood where there is a housing market where the cost to renovate or build a home is less than what it costs— what you can sell it for— well, how many houses do you need to build before the neighborhood catches up, right?

And again, it's all— it's data, but it's a little bit of art too, right?

You know, it's a lot of guesswork, but we're trying to help solve for those questions.

And so that body of work you saw there was just thinking about our impact and The data, the little flyer you have is our data through 2024.

Ryan actually ran kind of a back of the napkin to get us through the end of 2025.

And we actually, so we add another 18 months of data or so, and actually it's over $4 billion in impact.

And we don't plan to do this every year.

It's probably something of every 5 years or so.

But the reality is that the work continues to compound upon itself.

And I think it's important to be able to leverage that work and then again, leverage the data to help others do the work as well.

That's incredible, $4 billion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What is it, 17 years?

Yeah.

Got a teenager that has made $4 billion of impact.

It's incredible.

So I have a question for you.

So if you could wave a magic wand and you could change some public policy or financing tool or development practice to kind of set and accelerate community revitalization, what would it be?

Ooh, that's a great question, yeah.

I think of 2 things.

One is there's a lot of speculative investment that happens in our communities, particularly our historically disinvested communities, underserved communities.

If there was a policy tool or a way to stop or at least slow down extractive speculative investment, I— That is something that I would, would make anyone who does this work, it would make our lives easier, one, and two, it would make our communities healthier and better.

And that second piece, if there was some magic wand to start bringing in or combining the efforts of community and economic development with the health of our communities and finding ways to really create that linkage between our health institutions, And I have to— I am board chair of Neighborhood Family Practice, and I am on the MetroHealth Foundation board, so I am a firm believer in access to healthcare, particularly in underserved neighborhoods.

And so if there was a way to bridge that gap through some kind of policy initiative, that's where my mind goes.

That's excellent.

So I want to spend the last couple of minutes really hearing from you about you as a leader.

And when we first talked about this, Ricardo was saying, you know, in Cleveland we really like to have all these darlings, and I don't want to be that.

But I think it really is important, and that speaks to me about your humility.

You're about the work and you're about service, and that's truly important.

But I do— you know, there's a couple things that are on my mind.

You know, we lost Gus too early.

For those of you who knew Gus, he was equal mix, like dogged determination to do right by our neighborhoods.

And then he had this sprightly character.

He had this sprightly hope for our future.

And you had a chance to work under him for 2 years, right?

And I'm curious, you know, what did you learn from him that you'll take into the future?

Oh man, so much.

Yeah, Gus was an amazing mentor, leader.

Learned so much from him I would say the 2 things jump out at me.

One, Gus was very adamant, and I try to keep this ethos, is like 99% of problems can be fixed.

We used to say, like, we work— we always say it still to this day, like, we don't deal with social— we're lucky in that our work is difficult, but we don't deal with Social Security numbers, we deal with parcel numbers.

And so oftentimes, if you make a bad decision on a piece of property, you can often fix it.

And so that's an ethos that I genuinely believe in because it's something that allows our team, my colleagues, to take risks, to take a chance, to come up with a cool idea, to bring some kind of, you know, something forward to say, hey, I think we could do this differently.

So I think that's the first piece.

The second piece was, it's something that has stuck with me.

It's not really my expertise, but I always think about it.

Gus was a master legislator.

Like, he could write legislation.

And I think over the course of his tenure in leadership, we had some dozen and a half pieces of legislation passed at the state level.

And his thing was always like, well, that's not necessarily, you know, some hurdle shouldn't stop us.

Let's just change the law.

Let's improve it.

Let's fix it.

That's great.

Let's do it.

And so those 2 things, like, that is the ethos I think that has permeated across the land bank for the last 17 years.

And while I, you know, I'm not him and I'm not the type of leader that he is, I think I'm very different in a lot of ways, that ethos, that thread is what has connected the body of work and what's allowed us to do a lot of the, like, really cool creative stuff we're doing now.

That's incredible.

That's incredible.

And we need that creativity.

What is it about this work that feels personal to you?

Was there a moment, was there an experience that really shaped you as a leader and how you think about the neighborhoods and the work?

Yeah, it's a great question.

I think what feels personal is like, it's just my— I'll give a story.

So I grew up in Stockyards neighborhood, west side of town, West 70th and Clark, 6900 block of Clark.

My family moved here from the '90s from Puerto Rico.

And when they first moved here, when we first moved here, I guess there's 2 things.

When we first moved here, we lived on West 65th, north of Detroit, in the mid-'90s.

If you're familiar with the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood, the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood of today is not the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood of 30 years ago.

It was very different.

So my parents, 6 kids living in a 2-bedroom apartment, trying to figure it out, had the opportunity finally after about a year or so working and saving up money, had the opportunity to buy a home.

And they had a choice.

They could buy the home that we were living in, or they had found a home in the Stockyards neighborhood, which at the time was a stronger community.

And so at the time, they made the decision, the sensible decision then, to buy that home in Stockyards, the home my mom still lives in today.

What's funny is, fast forward 30 years, that house that my parents didn't buy a couple years ago sold for $400,000.

The house that my parents did buy, by just counting auditor value— of course, you always have to acknowledge that you could sell a house for more than what the auditors value.

The auditors value today is the same as it was when they bought the house 30 years ago.

So it goes to show, because they were on the wrong side of the highway, our neighborhood went one way and the other neighborhood went the other way.

And that's not to say anything bad about the folks who live in that community or the way it was invested in, but it's just the reality of neighborhoods.

And then the second piece is living in that neighborhood, on that house in Stockyards on Clark Avenue.

When I was in high school, the house next door went vacant, was abandoned, ended up turning into a trap house.

People were selling drugs out of it, ended up catching on fire, almost burned my mom's house down, and then got demolished by the city.

It was pre-Land Bank, and then sat vacant and has sat vacant since then.

So I grew up next to an abandoned house, and I've seen the aftermath of what it's like.

And so I think those 2 things have been like the most like unique thing that have tied me back to the work here.

That's— I mean, it's both your passion for the work, but it's also your lived experience and how you've seen the impacts directly on your family and yourself.

So I just think that's incredible.

And we're so lucky to have you in this seat.

And I know that there will be many years of work ahead where we'll look back 30 years from now and say, thank you, Land Bank, County Land Bank, for doing this.

So we are going to pause because we're going to transition to audience Q&A.

I know that there are many questions out there.

For those just tuning in via livestream or radio audience, I'm Joyce Pan Huang, the Chief Impact Officer at the Cleveland Foundation and moderator for today's conversation.

I'm here with Ricardo León, President and CEO of the Cuyahoga Land Bank.

We are discussing the land bank's past, present, and future, and and the promise of neighborhood revitalization in Cuyahoga County.

We welcome questions from everyone in the room, City Club members, guests, and also those joining via our livestream at cityclub.org or live radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for Ricardo, please text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

Let's have the first question, please.

Hey, Ricardo.

Hey, Joyce.

Thanks for this conversation.

Ricardo, I'll answer the policy question in my way, which one of the most powerful tools in the tool belt for solving the problem of vacant land in a city is land value taxation.

That is shifting the burden from the buildings that are on land to the land itself.

Mayor Tom Johnson of Cleveland was a huge proponent.

So was Martin Luther King, among others.

3 years ago, the city of Detroit had a huge push to shift to land value taxation.

It just barely failed at the state level.

State Senator Lou Blessing has introduced the possibility here in Ohio.

He's from the Cincinnati area.

I love those 2 places, and I have a little bit of a Cleveland-friendly rivalry with those places.

I don't like being behind them.

What do you think it is about the environment, the current climate of Cleveland that doesn't have us on the front edge of some of those policy decisions anymore, pushing for them?

Yeah, good question.

I'm not a policy wonk, neither am I an attorney, so I appreciate it.

I think the way I look at it, and I would argue that the city of Cleveland and our county isn't necessarily, it's not that we're not on the cutting edge.

I think the problem that we're facing here is so massive, or has historically been so massive, that there's, You can't have— there's not going to be a singular silver bullet that's going to solve the issue.

And again, I gave that— I gave the personal example of valuations in our community, but I think it's also— it goes beyond just the work we do.

This valuation issue is an issue that goes back 60, 70 years to redlining.

And if you look at a neighborhood, a redlining map, and you look at a neighborhood of home values, they're the same map.

It's the exact same map, right?

The redlined neighborhoods have the lowest value.

The neighborhoods that weren't redlined have the highest values.

That's just the reality.

And so I— while I do agree that there may be other ways to think about the work and bring new tools to the table, the reality is until we can solve for the root cause of why neighborhoods get disinvested and why that speculative extractive investment happens in those neighborhoods, I don't think one singular tool is going to necessarily change what's happening with valuations in our region.

Hello.

Our next question is a text question.

It says, I think all of us are familiar with the billboard famous residential real estate investor John Williams.

How should we think about a figure like him and the way he exploits and capitalizes on weaknesses in our housing market?

Uh, uh, I will preface this by saying I do not know him.

I've only ever seen the billboards, uh, so I, I can't speak to him.

What I would say is I, I Prior to my time at the land bank, I ran MetroWest CDC, and I can give a real-world example of how this works.

And I see my colleague Greg, who was at the table with us way back then.

Speculative investment is a real problem, particularly when it's shaped in a way that is not designed to help the people who live in that neighborhood, right?

We can all think, or probably a lot of us can think of that, your neighbor, Mrs.

Smith, who owns 3 houses on the street because she bought them in the '70s, and she rents out to a single mom, or she rents out, maybe you rented from her, right?

That's not extractive speculative investment.

That's just somebody who cares about their neighborhood and creating homeownership opportunities.

The issue we have with folks like this gentleman who has the billboards is— and what we saw back in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood 7 years ago is something happened.

So these neighborhoods are neighborhoods that, again, have either historically been redlined or have been on the wrong side of a highway or a bridge, have very low values consistently.

Don't often have a lot of homeownership, right?

A lot of those neighborhoods trend in less than 40% homeownership.

I think Clark-Fuqua at the time was at 35%.

And then that creates the environment where something happens, like a spark happens, that then folks with capital can come flying in.

And so what happened then was in 2018, MetroHealth announced their billion-dollar campus transformation, which was amazing, and it is an amazing campus.

It's beautiful.

What happened was overnight, these speculative investors start knocking on doors, buying up properties left and right because they knew that one day those properties will be worth more.

And so, you know, Mrs.

Gonzalez, who's maybe lived in her house for 20 years, she thinks— she doesn't know what her house is worth.

She bought it for $30,000.

Someone shows up and knocks on her door, says, I'll give you $50,000 a day, but you got to get out in 30 days.

And then they turn around and sell it to an out-of-state investor for $100,000.

Well, that's $50,000 in equity that she lost because she, she wasn't informed enough to know that there are other options.

And that's my issue, or I think I would argue maybe all of us who are in this space's issue with the way speculative, that extractive speculative investment has happened.

It's not that we don't want people to make money and own houses, by all means, we live in a capitalist society, but at least do it in a way that protects and respects the people who live there and respects the social fabric of the neighborhoods where the investment is happening.

Well, Ricardo, thank you for this talk.

So much really good information.

My name is Dr.

Nick Mays.

I'm an educator, a historian.

I also have the privilege to serve as the board chair at MetroWest Community Development Organization.

And my question is two-part.

One, as the former executive director of MetroWest, Can you talk about how your work as an executive director at the CDC informs the work you do at the land bank?

And 2, can you talk about the collaboration of the Cuyahoga Land Bank today with the CDC ecosystem?

Yeah, absolutely.

Great question.

And thank you, Dr.

Mays.

I appreciate it.

I think, and I look around the room 'cause I know there's a lot of former CDC directors in the room, and I see you guys.

I don't know that there is a better way to learn how to do this work than go be at a CDC or run a CDC.

You are blocking and tackling in real time.

You are putting out fires left and right.

Every single day is an emergency.

And what I learned the most was a few things, but one of the things I learned the most was you have to bring residents into the fold.

Talk to them, ensure that they understand what's happening, and then let them lead you.

A resident of a community will always know that neighborhood better than anyone else who wants to come into that neighborhood.

It's just the reality.

And so at the CDC, and historically Cleveland has had such a strong CDC ecosystem, the CDCs have been able to uplift that voice of the community and then create the bridge between the residents of that community with philanthropy and private investment and all, you know, all the other kind of functions of our ecosystem.

And so I feel like I was just forged by the fire of dealing with residents.

I also had the opportunity as executive director to— we were under the umbrella of a different organization, so I was able to learn what it means to create your own 501 and fill out your tax form 1023 and build a board and set up bylaws.

And so my former chair, Luis, is here as well.

We literally were filling out 1023s on a Saturday by ourselves trying to get our our 501 set up.

And so I was really forged by fire of like learning what it means to run an organization too.

And so you get both, and you learn what it means to be a good member of your community and work with your community, but it also teaches you the skill set of budgeting and finances and how to read a finance statement and what's a balance sheet.

And oh, oh, you mean when you get a grant you can't just spend all the money immediately on whatever you want?

So it was, it was a life lesson in that way.

Where we are today, I think we want to continue and have always been a partner to the CDC ecosystem and encourage the CDCs to work with us.

We're doing work with MetroWest, we've done work historically basically with every CDC essentially.

I think the challenge that we're seeing is that the CDC ecosystem funding is being challenged, and so that's where I think we can be a value add where maybe there are elements of the work that CDCs have historically done that maybe we're better positioned to either lead or partner on, and then allow the CDCs to really do the civic engagement, community engagement, the community building, working with the block clubs.

We are not an entity, and I would argue we should never be the entity that is boots on the ground in a neighborhood making decisions for a neighborhood, because we're too— we're not proximate enough.

But if there are entities like CDCs that can do that work, then maybe we can come in and do the real estate development, the data analysis, the the aggregating of land, the other side of the community development ecosystem.

We have another text question.

It says, what is the turnaround time for land to be improved when being used for green space?

Oh, that's a good question.

I guess it just depends.

I think we have our demolition process down pretty fast where we can get a house down relatively fast.

So I guess it all depends.

Taking a back step, the houses can sit in vacancy and abandonment for a very long time.

I mean, I think that's the reality, whether it's a house gets caught up in legal limbo or shout out to the treasurer or county treasurer and board chair, there's finite capacity in the treasurer and prosecutor's office, right?

So houses can just sit in vacancy for some time, or what we used to use this term, and I think other CDCs use it at MetroWest, zombie properties where it's vacant and abandoned, but some random LLC, somewhere owns it, and they actually pay enough of their taxes that the tax foreclosure never actually starts.

And so that is an issue.

So an empty property can sit empty for literally years, maybe decades.

Once that property is kind of through the— has gone through the cycle where it's on either our radar or the city's radar or a municipality's radar where that property needs to come down, then the system is relatively fast, in my opinion.

And I think we've kind of got it down to a science.

And then from there, It's just a matter of working with the community to see what are the needs for this community.

We've historically had a side yard program and still do, where if we have a lot and you own the house next door and you want it and you're up to date on your taxes and you haven't had a foreclosure, we'll work with you and sell you the lot for, I think, like $100.

So we can do that work relatively quickly, but I think it's actually the more important work is how do you protect the vacant houses and how do you get to the vacant houses sooner and faster so that you can protect from them being vacant for so long.

I'd love to share an observation too, which is that because of the structure that you have, which makes you a quasi-public entity, you get the powers granted to you by the state, but you function essentially as a not public entity, right?

A quasi-public entity, which means you can quickly turn around property once it gets into your hands.

And this is actually very important because you can turn around a deed in a day, right?

Like you can get that property.

You can get that property.

Yes, all the time, all day, right?

And that's really critical because you can get it to the end user that is going to be the good end user.

And you can have your demo process, right, quickly, but then you can also develop quickly.

Like you actually have a power to develop very quickly.

And so that to me is what is really powerful about the way that a land bank, a county land bank, is set up.

And I think that's really important to underscore.

Yeah.

Thanks for sharing your insight today.

There's a lot of talk about the land bank putting property into productive use.

The term development is often used.

People think housing or businesses.

I'm curious what you think about farming and repurposing land for that use because of food insecurity that exists throughout our community, and whether or not you look at pricing land differently and aggregating it so that in fact urban farming can be part of the solution.

Oh, absolutely, great question.

Yeah, absolutely.

We believe— I'm a firm believer personally, but we see it across the region— that having, you know, the ability for folks to grow, like food sovereignty, this idea that you can grow your own food and you can provide food for your community It's a blessing.

In town, I know we have Rid-All Farms, we work with Food Strong, that's over in the kind of South Euclid area.

We've definitely worked with groups, we've worked with nonprofits in different neighborhoods.

I think for a long time the OSU Extension was doing kind of food sovereignty work, and we were a partner to them.

We're a firm believer in that those type of things should happen.

Communities should have community gardens and urban farming.

I think the only challenge we've seen historically is that you can get a group of folks who are super excited and interested and want to do that work, And then they'll get going, and then 2 years later, you know, somebody lands a new job and moves out of the neighborhood, or the priorities shift, or, you know, or that group disbands, and then you have some like languishing land.

So I think there's always a little bit of downside risk there, but to the extent that we want to support urban farming, absolutely.

It was a little bit of a revelation to me to learn 2 years ago that you were playing such an important role with the Site Readiness Fund and with industrial properties.

Give us your vision of what impact you can have on the incredible number of brownfields we have in this community and what support you need from those of us in this room to make that big vision happen.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you.

So yeah, so we are kind of serve— again, we have a contract with Cyrenius and the City of Cleveland to serve as the execution arm.

What that means is we hold the land.

I think it's a few hundred acres.

I don't know how much public it is, but a few hundred acres of land that we hold on their behalf, which they're actively working to revitalize, remediate, get back into productive use.

And the goal there is to bring job centers back to the city of Cleveland.

The idea that Stockyards is the perfect example.

At one point in time on West 65th, there were 3,000 jobs in the meatpacking industry, and an entire neighborhood was built to support the folks who lived who worked in that community, and they lived and worked in the community, and they walked to work every day.

And so in a lot of ways, that's what the Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund is trying to do, and we are the kind of execution arm that is helping them do it.

I think in a global perspective, we're just like kind of taking a step back.

For us, you can't have a healthy neighborhood if that neighborhood doesn't also have job opportunities, if that neighborhood doesn't have green space, if that neighborhood doesn't have tree canopy.

Shout out to Western Reserve Land Conservancy and the work that they're doing.

All of these things together create a great neighborhood, right?

If you think of the best neighborhoods, if you're a traveler and you like going to urban places, cities, think of the best neighborhoods you've ever spent time in, and they have all of those things.

And so we should have those things here in Cleveland as well, and the county as a whole.

Afternoon.

Thank you so much for being here and all your comments.

My name is Greg Zucca.

I'm with MetroHealth, and you We've done a lot of great work together in the past, but I wanted to touch base on 2 things you mentioned, anchor institutions and health, looking at our neighborhoods from a living ecosystem in terms of how health comes directly from those neighborhoods and impacts people's lives.

And just wanted to get your thoughts on, we have a lot of great anchor institutions, how do we leverage those institutions to make investments in housing, understanding that that is one of the ways that impacts people's health most directly, whether you think about the lead paint issue or some of the physical issues of vacant houses and people using them for nefarious reasons.

Just get a sense from you, like, how can we leverage these institutions and deliver better, healthier neighborhoods and communities?

Oh, absolutely, and great question, Greg.

This is a great question.

I think this goes back in channeling kind of the healthcare side of my outside of land bank work.

Housing is a social determinant of health, right?

The healthier your home is, the healthier you will be, the healthier ideally your family will be in the future.

And so leveraging anchor institutions to understand that housing is a critical component of our community health and individual health, and that the healthier the community is, the better off for the long term that anchor institution will be.

And so my, you know, the way we look at it is let's partner with our institutions to and either invest in that housing or help eliminate blight or create vehicles where residents and community members can partake in the development that's happening in their neighborhood and leverage their investments.

We've been blessed in that most of our anchor institutions in town are great partners.

They're good neighbors and they care.

That's not to say that we can't always do more, but our hope would be that we treat housing not only as a human right, because it is, but also as a core component of our health.

Okay, our last question is the text question.

It says, looking through the lens of serving the underserved and those who have recently had the withdrawal or unavailability of federal and state support, in what area of your transformation— transformative efforts could you most use donations or support from small businesses, foundations, or individuals?

Absolutely, that's a great question.

Well, you know, the hat's always— I'll pass the hat around if anyone wants it, for sure.

Yeah, so we do have a 501.It's a wholly owned 501 where it is both a fundraising and grant-making arm of the organization, where in the lead-up to coming up, we mentioned that we've historically helped support vulnerable housing opportunities, opportunities for housing for vulnerable populations.

And so certainly that body of work, but also think about, again, for the work that we do, it's all of the above, right?

Our neighborhoods need green spaces.

Our neighborhoods need neighborhood business amenities, coffee shops, bookstores, things of that nature.

Our neighborhoods need home repair, right?

I mean, a lot of senior citizens on fixed incomes can't afford to fix their homes, and there's only so much home repair money that's available at the city and the county level, right?

Our neighborhoods need jobs.

Our residents in our neighborhoods need to be trained for the jobs that we're hoping to bring.

So I would argue that if you're feeling like you want to donate, please, by all means do, but it can be for any of those things.

Of those or all of those services all at once.

Thank you to Joyce and Ricardo for joining us at the City Club today.

Forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a member of the City Club and how to support student engagement at cityclub.org/passthemike.

Today's forum is part of the City Club's Health Equity Series with support from the St.

Luke's Foundation, and is presented in partnership with the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

The City Club would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by Building Hope in the City, CAP Square Advisors, City of Shaker Heights, Cleveland Foundation, Cuyahoga County Executive's Office, Cuyahoga Land Bank, First Federal Lakewood, First Suburbs, Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity, KeyBank, Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry, Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs, MetroHealth, Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, PNC, Project Management Consultants LLC, St.Luke's Foundation, Taft Advisors, Third Federal Savings and Loan, Thompson Hine LLP, and Western Reserve Land Conservancy.

Coming up next Friday, October 2nd, at the City Club, we will dive into the recent resurgence of independent bookstores.

We will hear from 4 of your favorite bookstores, Loganberry Books, Visible Voice Books, Third Space Reading Room, and Parallel Universe, about how they connect people, improve communities, and rekindle the joy of reading.

You can learn more about this forum and get your tickets at cityclub.org.

Thank you once again to Joyce and Ricardo, and to our members and friends of the City Club.

I'm David Wittkowsky, and this forum is adjourned.

For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

Production and distribution of City Club Forums on IdeaStream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.