Why we should build the Opportunity Corridor, and why its critics are wrong

The boulevard to University Circle would begin here, where I-490 abruptly ends at East 55th Street and a junkyard.

When I wrote my commentary about the Opportunity Corridor in the magazine's current issue, I resisted the urge to spend the entire piece arguing against the activists who want to stop the road.

The $331 million boulevard from I-490 to University Circle has funding and preliminary approval. It’s going to be built. I think it’s time to ask a new question. How can Cleveland make sure this project benefits the neighborhoods it’ll go through as well as the neighborhood it’ll go to?

But naturally, when my piece went online, the boulevard’s opponents challenged my arguments for building the road in tweets and comments. Here are some of their responses and what I think.

ODOT wouldn't talk to you, opponents would've. then maybe you could've given a more accurate portrayal. disappointing article.
— krissie (@krissiepotato) January 28, 2014

The Opportunity Corridor’s opponents have dominated the conversation about the boulevard for the last six months. You can read their arguments in The Plain Dealer, Scene, Freshwater Cleveland, on their own website, and on anti-Opportunity Corridor outlets such as RustWire, GreenCityBlueLake and Streetsblog.

I’ve read nearly everything written about the project since summer and listened to leaders of the opposition speak at two forums. I disagree with them.

So I wrote a commentary to ask new questions, advance the conversation, and quote people who haven’t been heard from much – leaders in the neighborhoods along the road’s path who support the project and think it could help encourage prosperity there.

Cleveland has road capacity for 1 mil. + already. Why build more? Put that $ into public transit.
— Casandra Vasu (@CasandraVasu) January 28, 2014

Shouldn’t a shrinking city just fix the roads it has? It’s a wise and sensible argument most of the time. But it’s simplistic and unwise when the existing road network is inefficient, irrational, has an obvious missing link, isolates some neighborhoods, was built for another economic era, and doesn’t fit where jobs and workers are today. A road network should adapt, not freeze in place.

The issue isn't whether the road might do some good, it is whether it does enough good to spend $350 million on - public money that could be spent elsewhere, or not at all. (Anonymous commenter on story)

Tough question for a frugal guy, but I’ll bite.

Cleveland’s road network has major flaws. It isn’t built to get people across town. It inefficiently funnels traffic bound for University Circle, the region’s second-largest employment center, through downtown, our largest employment center. It breaks up around one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, leaving the area geographically isolated.

Those are problems that a five-lane boulevard, similar to
Chester Avenue, can address. A couple of traffic circles won’t.

The Opportunity Corridor debate reminds me of the argument 10 years ago about the HealthLine, the electric bus line on Euclid Avenue. Critics called it, too, redundant and too expensive at $196 million. They also claimed it would hurt, not help, the corridor it went through.

Now the HealthLine is celebrated as a national model for bus rapid transit. Though much of the billions of dollars in new development along Euclid Avenue would’ve happened anyway, various developers in Midtown and University Circle have cited the HealthLine as one reason they committed to their projects. The Opportunity Corridor could do what the HealthLine did – encourage prosperity to spread to a mostly abandoned neighborhood.

But how is it going to undo the bottleneck? We already have plenty of east-west streets that run parallel to the OC.
— Casandra Vasu (@CasandraVasu) January 28, 2014

How can you prove that the OC will undo bottlenecks when studies show that increased roads only increase traffic?
— Casandra Vasu (@CasandraVasu) January 28, 2014

The boulevard’s opponents claim we have plenty of perfectly good roads near University Circle, and for some reason, drivers just aren’t using them. But then they claim a new road wouldn’t solve the traffic jams between downtown and University Circle – it would just attract more traffic.

Well, first, drivers avoid east-west roads like Woodland and Quincy avenues because they aren’t direct routes to University Circle. They’re narrow streets, two lanes each way, broken up by parked cars. Patchwork ideas for using these roads don’t address the most ridiculous flaw in our road network, the fact that a major thoroughfare, I-490, ends abruptly at a junkyard.

Second, if the Opportunity Corridor brings more traffic to University Circle, great. We need more people to come to Cleveland.

Instead, some of the road’s opponents want to constrict traffic to University Circle. Maybe that works in cities more vibrant and dense than Cleveland. Here it would just hurt the central city by encouraging people to stay home.

Are you suggesting more people will come to cleveland because we're building a big road?
— Angie Schmitt (@schmangee) January 28, 2014

I think if it’s easier to get to University Circle, it’ll encourage people to work there and visit the city. If it’s easier to get to the Kinsman’s neighborhood’s so-called Forgotten Triangle, it’ll be more attractive to businesses.

But I sense a cliché of political debate behind the question. If someone supports a significant project, they’re often portrayed as thinking it’s a magic bullet that’ll solve everything.

No, good transportation infrastructure doesn’t automatically attract jobs and prosperity. It’s just a prerequisite for attracting jobs and prosperity.

Of course the “Forgotten Triangle” has a lot of problems besides geographic isolation. That’s why didn’t write a simple defense of the road, but an argument about the work Cleveland still has to do for the Opportunity Corridor to live up to its name.

Brown: “You have to establish a new tone and culture”

Of all the candidates for Cuyahoga County executive, Terri Hamilton Brown has the most experience at one part of the new job: Cleaning house after a corruption scandal. She took over the county’s public housing agency in 1998 after Clare Freeman, her predecessor, was fired. Freeman later went to prison for theft in office. Brown cleaned up the mess.

“I used to describe it as being parachuted behind enemy territory with no map or compass,” Brown says. She fired staffers loyal to Freeman, not the organization. She hired a new financial officer, recruited an audit committee of outside advisers, and transformed the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority’s books from unauditable to clean. She cooperated with the FBI investigation — and learned that wasn’t enough.

“You have to look and make sure there aren’t other areas that they haven’t identified,” Brown says. If elected county executive, she says, “We would look for other areas where there may have been abuse, or just poor practices that would allow for abuse.” Like some of her opponents, she says she’d issue a new ethics policy on her first day in charge. “You have to establish a new tone and a culture,” she says, “and you have to lead by modeling it.”

Brown has never run for office before, but she has a lot of executive experience: former president of University Circle, community development director in Mike White’s City Hall, vice-president for corporate diversity at National City. Unlike her more polished opponents, such as Ed FitzGerald and Matt Dolan, Brown doesn’t speak in clear, catchy sound bites. Her longer answers show she’s new at campaigning, more used to the boardroom. She's thinking as she answers, figuring things out as she goes, weighing a bunch of factors, then naming her top priorities.

Brown says she voted for Issue 6 with reservations because she thought the county needed a single, strong leader. She was concerned that the county council, with 11 members elected by district, might act like Cleveland's city council in the 1990s, which sometimes wanted to split her department’s development money equally among all wards instead of tackling the greatest needs.

“I believe that would have disastrous effects if the county council viewed its role and viewed budget resources similarly,” she says. “What I know about needs and services at the county is that they’re not equal by districts and wards.”

Still, she voted for 6 because she thought the county commissioners’ decision-making on the Ameritrust Tower and Medical Mart revealed a need for a single executive. The commissioners spent $40 million on the Ameritrust Tower, disagreeing all the while on whether to move into it or tear it down -- then canceled the project. “That created a question: Are we using resources effectively? Are we good stewards of our tax dollars?” She felt the Medical Mart project suffered from the years-long debate on where to build it. “[In] economic development, time is money,” she says. She thinks a single executive could’ve moved faster. “It’s about being able to execute decisions and move decisively.”

That’s the sort of talk the new charter's supporters in the business community love to hear, though it may not go over well with the insiders who'll decide on the Democratic party endorsement next weekend. (Brown, running against two well-connected suburban mayors in the Democratic primary, has called on the party to endorse no one.) But she’ll probably be well-funded enough to get her message out. And she hardly lacks political connections: Her husband, Darnell Brown, is Mayor Frank Jackson’s chief operating officer. If she can communicate well with voters and combine business support with support in the city, she’s got a good chance.

To fulfill the charter's top goal, encouraging economic development, Brown says the new government should find a unique niche where it can be most helpful. She thinks that means doing more of what the county already does: “Creating places -- redevelopment sites -- acquiring, re-subdividing, identifying locations.” The new county land bank “would be an important tool to use strategically,” she says, to “set the table.”

Brown says creating places is her specialty. One of her first projects at City Hall, the Church Square shopping center and homes at Euclid Avenue and East 79th Street, was celebrated as a model of urban redevelopment. However, her three years as president of University Circle, Inc., 2002 to 2005, ended without spectacular new development in the neighborhood. Brown says she laid the groundwork for the still-anticipated Uptown project at Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road by buying property at the corner and attracting new businesses, including a Starbucks and a Charter One bank branch. She pushed for the Opportunity Corridor, a proposed boulevard to connect University Circle to I-490 -- a project she's also worked on for the Greater Cleveland Partnership. To bring more visitors to University Circle, she built a new stage in Wade Oval, created popular events such as Wade Oval Wednesdays and improved outreach to Glenville and other nearby neighborhoods.

“I’m passionate about things,” she says. “I think that passion can become contagious and invite others to join.” In her City Hall job, “I got really excited about rebuilding places. As I progressed in my career, it moved from bricks and mortar to investing in people, to helping people succeed. I think now it’s a mix of both.”