Cleveland City Council voted 19-to-zero for legislation enabling the Upper Chester project. But the Finch Group must reckon with institutional concerns about the plan.
A remnant of a brick alley runs across vacant land north of Chester Avenue, with the Cleveland Clinic's main campus in the background. The property is part of the long-dormant Upper Chester site in Cleveland's Hough neighborhood.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Finch Group can start putting together a $94 million project in Cleveland's Hough neighborhood, after City Council support overrode the objections of several powerful institutions.
In a 19-0 vote Monday evening, the council approved legislation that will help the developer seek tax credits and loans to remake a district known as Upper Chester.
The city now can enter a development agreement and, eventually, sell land to the Finch Group, once the company lines up financing, gains control of other properties and produces more detailed plans.
The vote was a big step for Upper Chester, a blighted area viewed as one of Cleveland's greatest redevelopment opportunities. But the decision won't quash the debate over the best way to transform vacant stretches of land between East 93rd and East 101st streets and running north from Chester toward Hough Avenue.
"This is not an end. This is a beginning," Wes Finch, founder and chairman of the Finch Group of Boca Raton, Fla., told council members during a committee meeting Monday morning.
He plans to meet Thursday with officials from the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University and nonprofit groups with significant investments in the area. Meetings with Hough residents, organized by Councilman T.J. Dow, could be held early next year.
Upper Chester spans more than 100 acres at the Clinic's doorstep, at the edge of University Circle and just west of CWRU's planned medical campus. The city is focused on 38 acres, including parcels where Finch hopes to build 295 market-rate apartments, a grocery store, other retail and senior housing.
But several major institutions aren't convinced that's the best plan, for the neighborhood or the city. This is no time to rush, they say, adding that the area has changed significantly since 2007, when the Finch Group was tapped as the likely developer during a master-planning process. Upper Chester stalled in 2008, as the U.S. financial crisis crippled projects across the country.
"We think that this plan, though it has many good aspects to it, is ripe to be revisited," said Joel Ratner, the chief executive officer of Neighborhood Progress Inc., a nonprofit that owns slices of Upper Chester.
The Finch Group, with the support of city officials and Dow, is racing to meet a Feb. 21 application deadline for tax credits; hoping to secure government-backed apartment financing at low interest rates; and trying to strike while the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is willing to modify deed restrictions that make it difficult to develop the property.
Ratner has been pushing for a "more open" process, including a request for proposals from other developers. On Friday, a Clinic executive echoed that stance at a Cleveland City Planning Commission meeting. On Monday, representatives of CWRU and the Cleveland Foundation, a major area investor and the largest supporter of Neighborhood Progress, joined in.
"The Cleveland Clinic, Case, the Cleveland Foundation as well as NPI don't feel that we've had a chance to be part of the conversations," Ratner told committee members.
After the city, a Neighborhood Progress subsidiary is the second-largest landowner in the project area.
In 2007, the nonprofit agreed to buy houses and lots in Hough and to sell those properties to the Finch Group - if the developer came up with a city-approved plan. That agreement ends Dec. 31 of this year. And Ratner points out that any land not developed by the Finch Group reverts back to the Neighborhood Progress subsidiary, at the end of the agreement.
In an interview, Finch said he can adjust his plans and build without land controlled by Neighborhood Progress. But he questioned whether the nonprofit would stand in the way of the development.
"We will work with whoever is the developer to move an exciting project forward," Ratner said in a follow-up conversation. "We won't compromise, though, on the quality of the project. The project needs to deliver everything it can for the city and the neighborhood."
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