The city of Cleveland (see Map 1) was founded in 1796. Like so many other cities, it was founded as a speculative real estate venture. The city’s founder, Moses Cleaveland, was an investor in the Connecticut Land Company, which hoped to reap a tidy profit by selling all the lands it owned in what then was called Connecticut’s Western Reserve. The town was surveyed in 1796 by a team under the direction of Augustus Porter. Porter’s was the earliest plan for Cleveland, a simple grid design around a town square on the New England model. It was the only model...

It might be nice if a new planning director with new ideas and a new work program could bring in an entirely new staff and set to work. Nice but impossible. Planning agencies have on-going responsibilities that predate the arrival of a new director. Inherited assignments, traditions, people, and politics alls must be dealt with. Just how they are dealt with may determine the success or failure of the new director’s program.

I was ready for the job as planning director of the city of Cleveland when it came along in 1969. I had just turned forty and was increasingly...

Like most city planners, I considered my most important professional assignment to be the preparation of a current General Land Use Plan. As I learned in graduate school, the preparation and publication of a general plan and the land-use regulations and capital improvement programs necessary to implement the plan were the most important products of the planning agency. Planners traditionally assumed that every piece of land in the city had intrinsic value, and that pressures for new development were strong and required regulation in the public interest. Public and private development decisions were powerfully influenced by the plan. When I...

The Euclid Beach case began as a dispiriting defeat and ended ten years later as part of a victory that would delight the most zealous park enthusiast. It was also the first significant issue I had to deal with as director of the Cleveland City Planning Commission. It was on the agenda of a staff meeting held at 10 A.M. on my first day on the job, November 7, 1969.

The old Euclid Beach Amusement Park was a vestige of Cleveland’s elegant past. It consisted of sixty-seven acres with a roller-coaster, a Ferris wheel, a dance pavilion, and a beautiful...

City planners have for the most part been believers in the necessity of regional planning and the possibility of regional solutions. I certainly was before coming to Cleveland. Afterward, I was still a believer in regional planning, but more worried about its potential for abuse.

In December 1969, Sid Spector, one of the mayor’s executive assistants, asked me to represent Stokes at a NOACA board meeting to be held the next morning. I was pleased to go. An assignment like that meant visibility, and visibility meant the possibility of influence for planning. NOACA was the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency,...

Early in 1970, Irv Kriegsfeld, director of the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA), brought proposals for 1,200 new public housing units to the City Planning Commission for its comments, as required under Ohio law. I scheduled the proposals for an immediate hearing. And all hell broke loose.

Two of the most serious problems in Cleveland involved housing. The first was the overwhelming concentration of the region’s low-income public housing within the city, and within the worst neighborhoods of the city. Without the dispersion of new public housing units into better city neighborhoods and into the rest of Cuyahoga County, my...

We didn’t start out to change the state law regarding property ownership in Ohio, but that’s where we ended up.

It began with our determination to address the issue of low-income housing in Cleveland. We made this a high priority in our work program for a number of reasons. First, low-income housing was a problem of obvious importance; one needed only to walk or drive around Cleveland to see major concentrations of dilapidated housing and rotting neighborhoods. Second, it seemed clear to my staff and me that all of our national and local housing policies and programs had accomplished relatively...

So many actors shape public policy in the United States that it is often difficult to know who is responsible for which outcome. Not so in the case of Cleveland’s regional transit system. Here, Cleveland’s planners played a key role in establishing the terms and conditions for setting up the regional system and for protecting the interests of Cleveland’s transit-dependent population (those who depend entirely on public transit for their mobility). This chapter covers the protracted negotiations and the other events leading over a five-year period to the creation of Cleveland’s regional transit system.

Ours is a private automotive society....

Most planners believe that public goals should be set only by the elected officials they serve. But what should planners do when they are convinced that the mayor and council are supporting a project that is wasteful, destructive, and perhaps corrupt? To whom should they look for guidance: their political superiors, the ethical canons of their profession, the broader public welfare, or their own inner sense of duty? I believe their judgments must be shaped in large part by the general requirements of a well-informed planning process. In this case, that of the Downtown People Mover, that meant opposing the...

From the moment in 1969 that we tried (and failed) to create a public beach at Euclid Beach Park (Chapter 4), we had been interested in Cleveland’s lakefront, which seemed to offer so many recreational possibilities. Most of these were going unrealized because of the city’s dismal fiscal condition and the fact that the city could not conceive a new administrative approach to the parks. But financial and political circumstances came together in the mid-1970s, aided by the persistence of the planners, to produce a marvelous park facility for Cleveland.

The city had four public parks on Lake Erie—Edgewater,...

The basement of St. Benedictine High School in the Buckeye-Woodland neighborhood was filled with about a thousand excited people. It was the first Buckeye-Woodland Community Congress Convention in 1976. Older white ladies exchanged pleasantries with younger black men. Clerks from two local Hungarian bakeries were offering kolatchy and coffee to anyone who seemed interested. Politicians and downtown bureaucrats, Some of whom had never been in the neighborhood before, were circulating, smiling and pressing the flesh. On the walls and stapled to poles marking different areas of the auditorium were the names of the different block clubs and organizations that testified...

City planners have rarely attempted to provide analytic staff support to other city agencies in order to improve their performance; few city tables of organization provide for such linked support. Yet the quality of life in the present and future city depends heavily on the quality of services provided by a city’s line departments. These departments may lack any internal planning capacity at all or may be unable, because of structural constraints, to analyze their present operations in order to modify and improve them. In that case, it is appropriate for the planning staff, if it has slack time and...

We now turn from the cases to explore their implications for planners in other locales. In this chapter, we argue that opportunities for equity planning like those found in Cleveland exist more generally. In many cities, planners can use their access to elected officials, for example, to shape decision-making agendas. They can use their research and analysis to support particular projects or oppose them, to encourage or inform citizen action.

In Chapter 14, we review several ways the Cleveland planners integrated political judgment and initiative with professionally sound analysis. Just how did the staff take advantage of the opportunities they...

To play an effective role in the messy world of urban politics, planners have to be professionally able, organizationally astute, and, most of all, politically articulate. In Cleveland, developing that professionally sound and politically articulate planning voice did not mean back-room deal making. It meant actively anticipating and counteracting threats to Cleveland’s vulnerable populations. It meant articulating a vision of a better Cleveland, a city of more services and less poverty, a city of greater choice and less dependency, a city of adequate shelter not only downtown but all across town. Being politically articulate planners meant defining issues and setting...

We suspect that many other planners have been doing similar but more quiet work: resisting massive projects that threatened the public welfare, calling attention to public opportunities, seeking to inject high quality analysis into political decision processes. Unfortunately, though, many planners, and most of the public at large, never see much of the most important work that planners around the country do because their work often involves preventing or resisting public-threatening boondoggles, schemes for private enrichment at public expense, or projects that are just poorly planned and designed. Who can see the monstrosity that was never built? Who knows that...