Cleveland's streets are emptying. Should the city accept its shrunken status?

Tecora Gray is the last resident standing on Crowell Avenue.

When Gray and her family moved there in 1951, about 15 houses crammed the short street, and 50 filled her corner of the Kinsman neighborhood. Now, there are four: Gray's, the vacant one next door and two occupied houses on neighboring East 78th Street.

For seven years, Gray has been Crowell's only resident. At the rear of her property, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority trains, packed with rush-hour commuters, break the desolation as they rumble along.

There was a time when the trains dropped people at their jobs at factories nearby. Those are gone, too.

Filled with mowed lots, some with big, leafy trees, Gray's neighborhood looks like a snapshot from rural America. But look closer, and you will see the eerie reminders of a city neighborhood: driveway aprons, marking where houses once stood, and an asphalt street gobbled up by overgrown brush.

"Somehow, when I see the rapid pass with all the people, I don't feel as lonely," she said.

Gray's neighborhood exemplifies the fallout from Cleveland's decades-long slide in population. The city is half what it was in 1950, an exodus that has left thousands of vacant homes and scores of bleak commercial districts.

But some urban planners contend a shrinking city doesn't have to be a sinking city. Cleveland should embrace its smaller status, they say. Replacing abandoned homes with an orchard could be more eco-friendly. Relocating residents from sparsely populated areas could save on city services. Concentrating redevelopment in promising areas and not in neighborhoods past the tipping point could create the density needed for success.

Youngstown could be the model. City leaders there have gained national notoriety for pursuit of these "shrinking city" strategies. They are saying what most big-city leaders wouldn't dare: Let's put aside grandiose plans for growth and make do with a smaller city.

"We are smaller, but we don't believe ourselves to be inferior," said Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams.

Should Cleveland likewise accept its diminished stature?

In 2000, Cleveland's population dropped below 500,000 for the first time in about a century. Many city leaders were devastated. But now even that 478,000 figure is slipping away.

In the last six years, someone left the city for good every 11/2 hours -- 34,000 people in all, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Only New Orleans and Detroit suffered greater population losses.

If the trend continues, Cleveland could dip below 400,000 by 2015 and below 300,000 by 2033, says Mark Salling, a demographer at Cleveland State University.

Mayor won't give in: 'We're going to grow'

Mayor Frank Jackson does not want to preside over a shrinking city. He plans to bust the trend by greatly improving the schools, creating more downtown housing and attracting businesses.

"We're going to stabilize and we're going to grow," he said. "What that growth is, I don't know. When it will happen, I don't know. But I know we're working on it."

Meanwhile, Gray's adult children plead with her to move. They say the neighborhood will never come back. The retired secretary hasn't given up hope. She has seen new houses several blocks away.

If Gray lived in Youngstown, which also has lost half its residents since 1950, the pressure to leave might be more intense.

Instead of investing in empty neighborhoods, Youngstown directs population and resources to areas with assets, like new schools, solid commercial districts or parks.

Youngstown's home fix-up program targets just seven neighborhoods.

"In an area not deemed a prudent investment, we tell them we can't do it, but we will offer to relocate you," said Bill D'Avignon, Youngstown's director of community development and planning.

Mayor Jackson doesn't want such an approach for Cleveland because he believes it teeters on redlining, which is systematically withholding mortgages, insurance or other resources from neighborhoods considered to be economic risks.

For 16 years as a councilman, he represented Kinsman, where so many streets were like Gray's that a large swath of the area is known as the Forgotten Triangle.

"I don't care if there is one person on the street," said Jackson. "They get the same as 100 people on the street."

Neighborhoods changed as population shifted

Back on Crowell Avenue, even as Gray arrived, many of her neighbors were leaving for burgeoning, post-World War II suburbia.

Cleveland's population, which peaked in 1950 at 914,808, has declined ever since. The biggest drop was between 1970 and 1980, when the city lost nearly 24 percent of its residents, reaching 573,822.

In the 1960s and 1970s, owners were walking away from their homes because they couldn't sell them. Redlining made it difficult to get mortgages, home improvement loans and insurance in these areas.

By the 1980s, many houses had fallen into such disrepair that the city's only option was to demolish them. Beginning in the 1990s, foreclosures from predatory loans added to the vacancies.

In Kinsman, one of every three residential lots is vacant, according to Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development. Citywide, one of every 14 residential parcels is vacant.

Gray, 75, isn't against relocation. Many other Forgotten Triangle residents feel the same way, said Terry Schwarz, a senior planner at Kent State University's Urban Design Center, who asked residents their views about relocation as part of a neighborhood master plan.

Compensating residents for moving from areas with low property values can be tricky. Homes in many sections of Kinsman have market values of $10,000 to $20,000, according to the Cuyahoga County auditor's Web site. Finding comparable housing elsewhere would cost several times that.

"If you are going to move people, you are going to have to make them whole, or it sounds like redlining to me," Schwarz said.

Kinsman is already riddled with the effects of banks, insurance companies and other institutions giving up on the neighborhood.

In 1976, a fire engulfed 28 homes on East 82nd and East 83rd streets and Dawn and Glade avenues. Many homeowners weren't covered because insurance companies wouldn't write policies there.

Today, from the elevated portion of Kinsman Road near East 83rd Street, peer down to the right facing the downtown skyline. Much of what you see looks like a forest. Look closer, and you will see street lights among the thicket and the outline of a street where houses once stood.

The Forgotten Triangle master plan said the area would be great for a tree farm. It would provide jobs, cut down on dumping and other illegal activity and provide the city's tree-planting program with trees. Some say plants can help clean up contaminated soil.

Willie Mae Jolly, whose family has lived near East 83rd and Kinsman for more than 60 years, believes the tree nursery is a good idea.

"The area has already gone back to forest," she said.

KSU's Schwarz said residents should embrace the prospect of country life in the city. "What would be so wrong if parts of the city became rural?" she said.

Jolly sees a nursery as a stopgap measure. So does Timothy Tramble, executive director of nonprofit Burten, Bell, Carr Development Inc., which ordered the master plan.

"We can clean the land during a time of a slow housing market and do something that is green while waiting for the opportunity to do a big project," Tramble said.

Mayor Jackson also hopes for housing. For example, several blocks away on Colfax Road, he worked to get both market rate and subsidized homes for low-income families on the formerly desolate street.

Every vacant lot doesn't deserve a new house, said Hunter Morrison, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at Youngstown State University and a former Cleveland planning director.

"Not every site is as valuable as every other site," said Morrison, one of the architects of the Youngstown master plan.

He said shrinking cities should build only near assets, an approach not always followed in Cleveland.

Three houses rise on the edge of a tired North Broadway neighborhood near East 73rd Street and Morgan Avenue, where assets are hard to find. An abandoned factory sits across the street. Commerce is weak along Union Avenue, two blocks to the south.

"There's no need to shoehorn it in here, when the population is dropping," Morrison said during a recent tour of the area.

Youngstown has clamped down on the kind of homes the Cleveland Housing Network Inc. developed on Morgan, built under a federal tax-credit program that allows housing nonprofits to offer purchase and rental options to low-income residents.

Too many tax-credit homes in Youngstown were built without proper planning, some next to homes that were falling down, Youngstown officials say.

Marie Kittredge, executive director of Slavic Village Development Corp., which pushed for the Morgan homes, said the development "allows us to hold together the whole of the neighborhood rather than letting the whole thing disintegrate."

A block away, Chazelle Hawkins, 45, a lease-to-purchase client of the Cleveland Housing Network, said she is moving from her home because thieves broke in and stole items totaling thousands of dollars.

"I'd like to know who will sink money into a neighborhood that looks like this," she said.

Officials differ on way to save, serve city

Inherent in a shrinking-cities philosophy is that some parts of a municipality are too far gone to be saved.

Jackson says he won't give up on any area of Cleveland, including those that are distressed. But Schwarz, the KSU planner, said the mayor's strategy for divvying up public money to neighborhoods suggests otherwise. And that's a good thing.

"We don't have enough population, we don't have enough market force to bring every neighborhood to that vision of a dense, mixed use," Schwarz said.

While Jackson's strategy doesn't write off neighborhoods, it rates their health and requires money to be concentrated within a few "model" blocks, to maximize the impact. Instead of scattering redevelopment dollars throughout a neighborhood, the city intends to pinpoint the money on selected streets.

The ratings, however, show a city in trouble.

Of the 35 neighborhoods the city graded, only Kamm's Corners and Old Brooklyn were named "Regional Choice," the highest distinction. Riverside and Edgewater were the only ones labeled "stable." All other neighborhoods have some measurable degree of distress.

The city labeled at least parts of 10 neighborhoods as "fragile," meaning they showed prevalent signs of decay. Some, like Mount Pleasant and Brooklyn Center, were labeled "transitional/fragile," meaning they had pockets of both distress and stability. On the other end of the fragile distinction was Kinsman, the only neighborhood to be labeled "fragile/distressed."

Three neighborhoods -- South Broadway, Union-Miles and South Collinwood -- were labeled as having at least three ratings within their borders, but none included the "stable" or higher designation.

The analysis was based on several measures, including changes in housing values, homeownership rates and the number of boarded-up or condemned units.

Some say the city's strategy doesn't go far enough because Cleveland allows even the most distressed areas with no assets to get federal community development dollars. That pot of money is $24.5 million this year, and it can be used for such programs as demolition, exterior home repair loans and housing and retail projects.

Transitional areas should get most if not all of the money, said Thomas Bier, a housing expert at CSU's Levin College of Urban Affairs. The city gave the transitional designation to neighborhoods that were slipping but that could be shored up with moderate effort. He said the city should resist pouring money into areas labeled as fragile.

Bier said the nation's poorest big city needs to focus on holding on to middle-class residents, who often flee as neighborhoods slip from stable to transitional.

City Councilman Jay Westbrook, who helps coordinate the council's redevelopment policy, said Bier's proposal is extreme for now.

"I believe that we should talk about smaller being better, but I don't think it would be appropriate for us to embark on some plan of mothballing areas of the city," he said.

Bier isn't surprised at the assessment. "It isn't a politically popular thing to do," he said.

Indeed, Cleveland politicians have never hyped the advantages of a thinning populace.

Former Mayor Michael White threatened to sue the U.S. Census Bureau in 2001 after it announced Cleveland's population had dropped below a half-million. Shortly after taking office, Mayor Jane Campbell announced a campaign to pump the population back to 500,000 by 2010.

Morrison, the former Cleveland planning director, said he championed growth under White because few could project the impact that low-interest rates, subprime mortgages and even predatory loans would have in enabling modest-income Clevelanders to move to the suburbs.

And he is not sure any force is great enough to bring them back.

Bier agrees. Urban sprawl has forced inner-ring suburbs like Cleveland Heights and Parma to focus on replacing residents moving to exurbia, so Cleveland and the inner ring are competing for the same buyers. He said most suburbs offer the advantage of better schools and services.

"Given about the same cost of living in Collinwood or Euclid, most will go to Euclid," Bier said.

KSU's Schwarz questions whether politicians and planners can halt Cleveland's population slide anytime soon.

That doesn't mean Cleveland can't be a better city, she said. It could become a national laboratory for strategies that find value in vacancy and build on diverse assets.

"To say that this is doom and gloom is wrong," Schwarz said. "It's about figuring out how to make an opportunity out of the city we've turned into and stop pretending we'll be Chicago someday."