From the perspective of a Downtown Cleveland optimist, the area spells promise for the near future as far as development is concerned.
A new Rock & Hall of Fame extension is coming. Bedrock just broke ground on its $2 billion riverfront neighborhood. And Mayor Justin Bibb’s Lakefront Plan’s likelihood got a boost after his Shore-to-Core-to-Shore tax-increment financing plan was passed earlier this year by City Council.
But, a group of students at Cleveland State’s College of Urban Affairs asked recently: What is to be done with Downtown’s prime piece of transit potentially linking—key word being potentially—all of the area’s newest points of interest?
That is to say, how do we ensure the Waterfront Line, the RTA’s two-mile line of track that hasn’t been in daily service since 2021, doesn’t miss out on Cleveland’s trajectory forward and serves as a reliable connector?
Such speculation was at the heart of the study released this week by a team of 16 graduate students, a plan detailing, in a highly-comprehensive 125 pages how the city, the county and the RTA could efficiently makeover the line and idling land around it. A plan that cried with a resounding voice: build housing, build housing, build housing.
“Right now, there are a lot of great opportunities, but there’s not a residential density that supports the Waterfront Line,” John Miesle, 29, a graduate student and member of 17th Street Studios, the moniker the CSU team gave to their cohort project, told Scene. “There’s not a commercial density that could support it. That could support 24-hour rail service.”
Mark Oprea
John Miesle, a graduate student in CSU’s College of Urban Affairs, helped, with 15 others, create a capstone class’ massive makeover plan for RTA’s flailing Waterfront Line.
Miesle’s lament, common amongst transit advocates, revolves around the cry to reopen the Waterfront Line to how it used to function before it went out of commission following the need for necessary repairs in the fall of 2021.
Although the RTA teased its comeback by running the line during Browns Sunday home games last season, the result—and ridership—was somewhat disappointing. Only 2,300 Clevelanders and Browns fans rode the line on average each football Sunday; twenty-two years ago, in 2002, the entire light rail system (including the Green and Blue lines) clocked about 259,000 riders per month.
Hence 17th Street Studios’ central thesis. The team believes that, like found in light rail systems in Denver and Minneapolis, the Waterfront Line could see a whopping comeback if large amounts of shops and apartments were built nearby it, primarily on the vacant parking lots built decades ago to meet a perceived demand for cars.
Like the actual feat of reviving the lingering waterfront in general, the students’ ideas are quite massive in both scale and financial heft.
Along with trails and bike paths up and down West 3rd and East 9th, the students suggest a new connection—with a line of townhomes—linking East 18th St. to the easternmost South Harbor Station. (Near where Noble Beast Brewing is.) Over in the Flats East Bank, redoing West 10th with a tree line and erecting a brand new Settlers Garage to consolidated parking demand left by new housing a few blocks north.
And, of course, the plan’s pièce de résistance: linking the South Harbor Station and the Tri-C Station with an on-street track line running down East 17th, a line that would link Historic Chinatown, Playhouse Square and Cleveland State with, for the first time ever, an actual route.
And call it, appropriately, the Waterfront Loop.
Cleveland State
Part of the study suggested better connectors to Waterfront Line stations, like a bike lane linking West 3rd pedestrians to its station near Cleveland Browns Stadium.
Cleveland State
The master recommendation from CSU’s year-long study: suggestions for housing in orange, and new or improved green space in green.
In urbanist parlance, that’s transit-oriented development, homes erected as close to transit stations as city permits will allow. Which should in theory lead to, the students believe, “increasing density, getting parking right, providing safe connections, fostering vibrant public spaces, and prioritizing affordable housing.”
“As the area becomes more livable, walkable, and connected, this will attract more residents and visitors and increase demand for regular light rail service,” it added. “This, in turn, will make the Waterfront Line an even more convenient and attractive option for getting around, thereby creating a virtuous cycle that benefits everyone.”
The key word being everyone. Though Downtown’s population has grown 41% in the past decade or so, the growth has been mostly composed of white people in their mid-to-late twenties and thirties. RTA’s average rider, which it has long catered to, is a carless Black woman in her twenties making less than $25,000 a year.
17th Street’s study, which echoes Bibb’s calls for equity on the lakefront, makes an attempt to bridge the gaps left by demographics and pure economics. (And those who can afford a car in the first place.)
Either near the Settlers Landing Station or the Muni Lots hugging the North Coast Station on East 9th, the students suggest, based on housing data, that there’s “unmet demand” for some 1,840 apartment units. And units of varying rent levels. In one analysis of the Historic Flats, the students found that 400 units clocking $456/month would be worthwhile to build—just as some 500 units charging renters $1,902/month.
But, as 17th Street’s shiny renderings give off, anything is better than barren concrete lots. In the Muni Lot West, they imagine a shipping container park and mid-rises. In “The Pit,” the gargantuan lot south of the Browns Stadium, some 70,000 square feet of day cares, pet goods stores, apartments and restaurants.
Both the demand and promise for defeating RTA’s, and transit in general, oldest stigma as lesser than car trips comes straight from 17th Street’s survey of hundreds of Clevelanders, about half of which claimed they would ride the Waterfront Line even if they didn’t own a car. A little more than half called the line “not convenient”; two-fifths found the train cars took “too long”; twenty percent couldn’t find the RTA sufficiently safe.
“The Flats have lost their color,” another stakeholder wrote. “Everything is gray.”
“Public transit has a stigma,” another said.
Thomas Hilde, a professor who co-teaches, with James Kastelic, the “Planning Studio” graduate course that produced the study over the past two semesters, told Scene that his students came to the typical conclusion that planners have long arrived at: defeating RTA’s “unsafe” perception and increasing its riders are parallel goals.
“I think that’s the biggest challenge, just getting more people” on the line, Hilde said. “Like Jane Jacobs said in the 1960s—eyes on the street, just having people present. That’s the best way of changing that perception.”
But could the city actually build all of this? Will developers, often skeptical observing rising construction costs and steep lending rates, see the vision promulgated by a series of optimistic planners in their mid-to-late twenties?
Hilde thinks so, to some extent.
“Many of these planning studio projects have influenced real outcomes in the city,” he told Scene. He cited “Balancing Broadway,” 2022’s study of Lorain’s Main Street. “They’ve taken off! I mean, not as they’re written, but they’re influential. And they contribute to the conversation.
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Mark Oprea
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