Meeting the moment on the housing crisis
Whether you live in Detroit Shoreway, Ohio City, Tremont, or the Flats, you’ve been hit by the housing crisis.
Prices have skyrocketed. Families are struggling to find anything with enough space. Aging housing stock is outpacing repairs—and less wealthy tenants are being pushed out as investors scoop up properties and raise rents. Grown kids are priced out of the neighborhoods they grew up in, and older adults can’t find the right home where they can fully live out their next chapter of life.
This is the human cost. It’s happening on our streets, to our neighbors, right now.
The City of Cleveland’s population is finally growing again. That’s fantastic news. But in 2024, Cleveland had the steepest rent increase and the steepest property value increase of any metro area in the country—while building the fifth-fewest new homes.
If we don’t act now, we’re looking at a recipe for unaffordability and gentrification in our neighborhoods, not shared prosperity.
Holding the Line on the Near West Side
As the co-chair of my block club: I know how important it is to protect community vision and voice while addressing the market pressures that are stretching us all thin.
As a resident of our amazing neighborhoods: I know how precarious our dynamism feels—how our character could “flatten out” if we don’t tackle this crisis head-on.
As a parent: if my family grows, we’ll need a home that can house us all. One still in the neighborhood. One that we can afford. And affordable, family-sized homes here are simply too few and far between.
We need an all-of-the-above, all-hands-on-deck housing agenda to meet this moment. Affordable housing, public housing, and market-rate housing—all of it, and fast. Here’s the fight I want to have as your next councilmember:
Legalize More Housing.
Our goal must be more housing for more people, better housing for everyone, and housing that you can afford—regardless of your income. And to facilitate increased and equitable housing production, we should legalize not just duplexes but triplexes, quadplexes, in-law suites, and alternative dwelling units.
A strong diversity of housing stock—not just large luxury apartment buildings, not just single-family homes—provides more options for more life stages and more income levels in our diverse community. This means serving real people: seniors aging in place, young adults looking for a first apartment that fits their budget, growing families that need another bedroom, workers who want to live near transit, and empty nesters aiming to downsize without leaving the neighborhood.
Design and form should continue to match our community character. But especially on the Near West Side, we can embrace infill development and provide the “missing middle” that reflects what already works in our neighborhoods.
Our Near West neighborhoods were once leaders in beautiful, family-friendly multi-unit housing. We can be again.
Build Housing on City Land.
The City of Cleveland owns more than 18,000 parcels of land all across the city, including here on the Near West Side. We should put that public land to good use and build housing—while ensuring control stays in public hands.
There’s a number of ways to produce public-minded affordable housing on public land. One of the most powerful ways to do this is through long-term ground leases, in partnership with community land trusts like the Near West Land Trust. The public can retain ownership of the land while allowing the private construction of new housing—leased for up to 99 years. That housing can include deeply affordable rental units, permanently affordable homes for purchase, co-ops, or mixed-income developments that prioritize local residents.
Ultimately, the goal must be to ensures that our public land remains a tool to fight back against rising rents and exclusionary housing markets. It’s a strategy to build more housing—and keep it affordable—for this generation and the next.
PUSH UNDER-USED PROPERTY TO BACK TO USE.
On one hand, vacant land and abandoned buildings drag down our blocks. This is as true on the Near West Side as it is anywhere in Cleveland. And on the other, short-term rentals like Airbnbs force neighbors to take on more noise, trash, and chaos than they signed up for—while living next to a home that also sits vacant most of the year.
In both cases, much-needed housing is taken off the market and stops new neighbors from moving in. That’s a family that can’t make our neighborhood into their home, can’t put down roots, and can’t contribute to the life and prosperity of our community.
We need to support that push back against these forces. First, that means investing in city staff to perform necessary code enforcement work—and making sure those efforts are targeted where they’ll have the biggest impact. We should also require short-term rentals to be licensed and tracked, with serious limits on how many can operate in residential areas and prohibitions against operators with multiple offenses. And we should redouble our efforts on vacant properties—using tools like civil tickets, tax delinquency, and receivership to put those homes back into circulation for Cleveland families.