About

An explanation from David Beach

This website is a nonprofit, community project, which I created to collect progressive policy ideas for Cleveland’s 2021 municipal elections. It builds on public forums presented by the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus and other groups. And it incorporates thinking from many city residents, as well as local and national policy experts. The goal is to help citizens and candidates imagine what a more progressive, equitable, sustainable city can be like.

I’m a Cleveland native and current resident of Ward 4, and I have been a writer and activist in the city for 40 years. As the director of organizations such as EcoCity Cleveland (1992-2008) and the GreenCityBlueLake Institute (2008-2017), I had the opportunity to think a lot about the plight — and potential futures — of older industrial cities like Cleveland.

Most of all, I have thought about sprawl. Although the regional economy hasn’t grown in decades, we have continued to spread population, tax base, and infrastructure over the landscape of Northeast Ohio. This low-density pattern of development is costly for everyone and underlies many of our most serious economic, social, and environmental problems. For example, it’s a major reason why Cleveland became one of the poorest cities in the country. As transportation spending for highways opened up new land for development and as new suburbs excluded the poor by zoning land for large-lot, single-family development, poverty and disinvestment concentrated in the urban core of the region. (See the links below for some of my publications about this.)

Our region’s destructive and unsustainable patterns of development have been the subject of dozens of studies and civic planning initiatives over the past 40 years. Sadly, not much has changed. Cleveland (and, increasingly, the inner-ring suburbs of Cuyahoga County) continues to be drained of population and tax base.

In this and other ways, Cleveland is battered by forces beyond its control. So the question for people who care about the city is: what can we do for ourselves? The region won’t save us. The State of Ohio won’t save us. The U.S. government won’t save us. And certainly the global capitalist economy won’t save us. So how can we work to help each other, invest in ourselves, build wealth locally, conserve our resources, and create a city that offers a high quality of life for all? And how can we do this in ways that are resilient and sustainable?

At a time when we’re facing the interrelated crises of inequality and climate change, these questions are more important than ever — for us and for the world.

Regional visions for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio

Some of these publications date back to the 1990s, but they are still relevant today as we think about Cleveland’s challenges.

About the name “Lake Effects”

The term “lake effects” most often refers to the phenomenon of lake effect snows, which occur when cold winds blow over an open body of water, pick up moisture, and then hit a rise of land that quickly cools the air and forces it to drop the moisture in heavy bands of snow. There are only a few places on Earth where lake effect snow occurs. The phenomenon requires an unusual combination of prevailing winds, a water body that doesn’t freeze, and elevated land to the leeward side of the water.

For Cleveland, the term “lake effects” can be a metaphor for all the ways that place influences a city.

About the lands we occupy

Cleveland occupies the ancestral lands of the Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Wyandot Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and other Great Lakes tribes (Chippewa, Kickapoo, Wea, Pinakashaw, and Kaskaskia). This land of the "Northwest Territory" was ceded under force of the U.S. military by 1,100 chiefs and warriors signing the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. Subsequently, the treaty wasn't honored by the United States, just as all 374 treaties with Native Americans ratified by the U.S. Senate have not been honored.