Vacant properties + artists = creative land use in Cleveland

I was working at the From Rust Belt to Artist Belt II summit in Cleveland, Ohio, on Friday when some exciting action broke through the flow of talk. 

Amid the two-day discussion among artists, community developers, arts agencies and funders from around the country about how to transform aging industrial cities to vibrant arts communities, a three-partner collaboration was announced: The Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (or Land Bank) will work with the nonprofit Community Partnership for Arts and Culture  (CPAC) and Village Capital Corporation, a community-development loan organization,  to provide artists with low-cost properties for live-work spaces. 

The collaboration’s overall goal appears to be having the Land Bank, a new county venture headed by County Treasurer Jim Rokakis,  make a number of the foreclosed and/or abandoned properties it receives available to artists, who would be chosen through a process that CPAC would help develop. Village Capital would provide financing to the artists for house purchases. Tom Schorgl, who heads CPAC, said during the announcement that he estimates the purchase program will take six to nine months to create and be a national model. 

There aren’t many details yet and since I was at the summit as an independent contractor for CPAC (which organized the event) and was helping chronicle panel discussions for its archives, it wasn’t my place to ask journalistic questions. But you can find out more about the organizations involved by clicking on the links above. Also, learn about the successful and precedent-setting property-purchase program in Paducah, Ky., that will no doubt be one of the models for the Cuyahogy County program.

Really new ideas will save us

The blogosphere is buzzing about the vice-presidential debate last night. Somewhere in the District of Columbia, and among worried constituents at home, congressional legislators continue to agonize about the threat of another Depression. Like Cleveland’s Council of Smaller Enterprises, local chambers of commerce are probably polling their members to find out where they stand on propping up Wall Street when their own small businesses are teetering.

Let’s face it – no one really knows what to do. Our leaders and lawmakers and candidates and economists are guessing. Some people sound smarter than others and some have relevant experience with money, markets and the dismal science, but there are so many factors in play right now that no one can claim to have the solution to our financial crisis.

Talk about Hail Mary passes – the whole country is muttering a rosary’s-worth of oh pleases while waiting to see where the bailout ball, er, bill, lands.

As co-owner of one of the smallest small businesses in America and someone who will take creative risk-taking over conventional wisdom and stasis every single time, I have to say this:

It’s time to cut the crap and start using our brains here. No reflexive bailout is going to do any real good – the problems are too tangled and ingrown for a double-dip ice cream cone to make them all better. Not doing anything won’t work, either - that’d be like knowing you have an aggressive cancer, but deciding to sit still and just let it sort itself out.  

The fact is that the current administration isn’t smart enough or inventive enough or responsible enough to come up with the innovative strategies we need to rid ourselves of the rotten parts in our financial structure while saving what deserves saving. All we should do right now is help the banks just enough to keep them standing until the next president can collect the best creative brains in the country and start designing a real plan to change the way America’s money is handled. 

I’m not the only one who thinks so.

But I haven’t heard anyone else say that the plan the next administration and Congress devise needs to be  revolutionary. It needs to replace our corrupt and collapsing financial sector with a carefully structured, but imaginative framework of policies supporting not just institutions or the greedheads who run them but, most all, the regular citizens who depend on them.

It needs to create a banking culture that invests in community development by helping individuals, small businesses, neighborhoods and towns get on their feet and stay there. 

I’m not a money or a policy expert, but here are the needs I see:  

Jobs – There aren’t enough good ones. So small businesses, especially the creative kind, need to be encouraged as much as big businesses. Why not expand micro-loans into programs of graduated loans that lend entrepreneurs increasing amounts as they pass certain business-growth milestones? Like those combined college programs that invite a qualified student to earn a bachelor’s and an M.D. without having to go through the med-school application process, a graduated-loan program could select entrepreneurs in the idea stage and move them through growth stages with money and mentoring until their businesses reach pre-determined goals and can operate independently. Unlike venture-capital companies, these programs would aim to help start-ups that would probably always be small, but would also be stable local employers.

Homeownership – There’s nothing wrong with every American wanting to own his or her own home.  Homeowners create community stability, maintain their properties better than renters, have stakes in the future of their neighborhoods. The real-estate industry just got criminally greedy about making money off people’s housebuying impulses. So why not take a similar graduated approach to homeowning? Just as leaders in Paducah, Ky., did, local governments and banks all over the U.S. could offer rundown or foreclosed properties for free or very little to artists and other entrepreneurs who agree to make improvements in exchange for ownership. As these properties appreciated – and in Paducah, they have – whole neighborhoods would improve and become magnets for desirable economic activity such as shops, restaurants and small businesses that employ the residents. And along with creative approaches to bringing homeownership within reach of lower-income people, let’s make sure banks strictly observe the proper standards of income and collateral that regular home-loan applicants should have to meet before they get any money.

Education – We’re going to have to make sure that communities – and thus the larger economy – have the human capital they need to engender creative businesses and provide the skills, knowledge and ideas that all community activities and systems require. How do we make sure that all people get good higher schooling and training and the chance for productive, self-supporting lives?  Maybe financial institutions should offer student loans that don’t have to be paid off in cash. What if students got money for college or vocational training from the same banks that offer graduated loans to small businesses? The banks could let students work off their loans during or after college by serving as apprentices to those same small businesses. The businesses would get skilled, low-cost employees as part of their loan programs, students would repay loans with their labor while gaining hands-on experience and resume credits, and the banks would get an accelerated return on investment in the last phases of the graduated-loan program as the apprentices allow the small businesses to thrive and pay back the banks sooner.

Let’s not come out of this national financial disaster with only a patched-up system and the same old mindsets to show for it. Maybe my creative ideas won’t work. But somebody else’s will.