Next American City is carrying a very interesting story about Cleveland’s battle to return vacant land to productive use.

A collection of foundations, government agencies, nonprofit organizations and private citizens are collaborating to return agriculture to the city. What’s unique about Cleveland’s efforts, however, is the level or coordination and the overarching vision for a greener, more cohesive neighborhoods, according to the article.

The process has been dubbed, Reimagining a More Sustainable Cleveland and it has the support of the mayor, the state government and a handfull of well endowed foundations.

I’ve seen a lot of photo collections that pay homage to the city of Cleveland. Often times they focus on Cleveland’s grand monuments: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Quicken Loans Arena, the skyline over the lake. They don’t show abandoned buildings. They don’t show poor neighborhoods. These are the visitors and convention bureau’s version of Cleveland. They’re nice, but in my opinion they lack something.

That’s why I think the photography of Cleveland SGS is so refreshing. I don’t know if I’ve seen a collection of photos dedicated to Cleveland that was this honest, that captures Cleveland’s color and personality so well. If you’ve ever worked or lived in the city, you’re bound to find something that you recognize in Cleveland SGS’s 276 Flickr pages, something that has personal meaning to you, an experience you share with the community.

Rust Wire is very excited to share this newly released, original documentary by our own contributor, graduate student and photographer Sean Posey.

The past three decades have erased much of the city of Youngstown that my father and grandfather knew: An area once known as ” the city of homes” became known for widespread arson; a city once indelibly linked with steel and manufacturing became known as the grave yard of the American steel industry. Youngstown, much like Detroit, went from being
a symbol of the American dream to being a worst case example of the “urban crisis” that has engulfed so many of this country’s inner
cities.

Yet, we should not overlook the fact that much has changed for good in the Steel Valley.

The city of Cleveland’s residential tax abatement program has been a boon for the city, according to a study by researchers at Cleveland State University.

A series of tax abatements for new home construction and rehabilitation begun in 1987, jumpstarted new home construction in the city from a virtual standstill in the city. About 3,000 homes were built under the program, or 3.5 percent of the total housing stock in Cleveland. Including rehabilitations, about 5.7 percent, more than one in twenty homes, have been built or improved using tax abatements. This compared to 1980-83, when fewer than 20 new homes were built in the city each year.

The Pittsburgh City Council voted unanimously yesterday to approve landmark historic status for the Iron City Brewery in the Lawrenceville neighborhood.
Earlier in the month, the city’s Historic Review Commission voted in favor of the designation, as the Post-Gazette reported.
The brewery currently sits vacant. Last year, Iron City Brewing Co. closed this plant and moved all operations to Latrobe.
Planners hope this compound and collection of historic buildings will become the sight of a mixed-use development.
The timing of this designation comes just weeks after a developer announced plans to infill neighboring Doughboy …

Great article in the Plain Dealer about the city East Cleveland–Ohio’s poorest city–its new mayor and the seemingly impossible task of turning it around.

Gary Norton is young (37) and well educated (he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and earned his master’s degree in public administration at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs). And that’s a big change in a city that has been characterized by political mismanagement and corruption. Former Mayor Emmanuel Onunwor was convicted on bribery charges in 2004.

Norton’s election has injected fresh hope in the largely black, inner-ring suburb of Cleveland, which has lost more than 1,500 homes to foreclosure in the past two years–about 500 per mile, the highest in the state.

Take a look at this CNN article about a Chinese firm with plans to build a “Chinese-style mega shopping mall” in Milwaukee.

“The cost of doing business there is very low,” Wu Li, president of Toward Group told CNN. “The people are friendly, the environment is peaceful and the pace of living is slow. It is a good place for Chinese enterprises to go abroad.”

The story explains Wu’s company recently purchased a dormant shopping complex in northwestern Milwaukee that was built in the 1970s, for $6 million. It will open the mall, renamed AmAsia, in August, according to CNN, part of a growing trend of Chinese investment in US real estate. That trend has mostly been in cities outside the Rust Belt –until now.

  The Allegheny Valley Commuter Rail, a proposed commuter line serving the Pittsburgh region, faces another hurdle today. Allegheny Valley Railroad, a freight company which has made their rail corridor available for development into a commuter service, and Buncher Co., a real estate developer, will go before the Surface Transportation Board (STB) in Washington D.C. At stake is whether AVR owns an easement on property that Buncher holds. The easement is located in the Strip District neighborhood east of downtown and would be necessary for bringing trains into downtown stations. …

This article in the Las Vegas Sun seems to think that city’s era of unbridled growth has definitely ended.
The article cites U.S. Census Bureau data showing:
-its slowest rate of population growth since 1967,
-for the first time in a long time, the state experience out-migration (more people left the state than came there).
“The new numbers contrast strikingly with the rest of this decade when an average of 45,000 people moved here every year from other states,” according to the story. “Analysts both here and nationally cited the weak economy of Nevada …

Check out this recent column by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill.

He interviews ‘burgh native Don Carter, who recently retired president of Urban Design Associates and was named director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

For years, Carter tells O’Neill, he has hated the term “Rust Belt.” And he’s trying to get folks to start calling …the “Water Belt.”

In place of “Sun Belt?” Try “Drought Belt.” Cities here, Carter writes, “are low-density, auto-dependent, and survive on ever diminishing supplies of