Western Reserve Land Conservancy surveyed every parcel in Cleveland in 2015 using the Loveland survey app. In 2018, they revisited more than 70,000 parcels on the east side, in order to see the impact of demolition funding during the past three years and analyze change over time in some of Cleveland’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.
Legacy cities rely on data concerning vacant properties and building conditions to make informed community development decisions. By preparing and conducting property inventories, Western Reserve Land Conservancy’s Thriving Communities program provides municipalities with information to most effectively target their limited resources for rehabilitation and demolition, especially in the wake of the foreclosure crisis.
In 2015, the Land Conservancy surveyed 158,800+ parcels within the City of Cleveland.
In order to truly maximize the power of the 2015 inventory, the conditions of these structures and vacant lots need to be reassessed and evaluated. Though a complete resurvey of the City of Cleveland in 2018 was not possible, the Land Conservancy was able to update the data in 13 at-risk neighborhoods on Cleveland’s east side which included 78,000+ parcels in: Broadway-Slavic Village, Buckeye-Shaker Square, Buckeye-Woodhill, Collinwood-Nottingham, Fairfax, Glenville, Hough, Kinsman, Lee-Harvard, Lee-Seville, Mount Pleasant, St. Clair-Superior, and Union Miles.
The indicators used in determining overall distress in these neighborhoods included the percentage of vacant structures, the percentage of structures receiving a grade of D or F in 2015, median housing sales price between 2005-2018, and they percentage of parcels that were vacant lots in 2015.
We recognize that there is no quantifiable way to adequately describe or evaluate neighborhood conditions, but with the continued efforts to stabilize the housing market, these neighborhoods provide critical insight into how the city continues to deal with population loss and a diminished demand for rapidly-aging housing.