CSU housing study

Richey Piiparinen, co-author of a new housing study performed by the Center for Population Dynamics at Cleveland State University, says Cleveland could capitalize on growth in its housing market by adding new for-sale townhouses and detached houses to persuade educated millennials to stay in town and raise families here rather than decamping for suburbs.

(Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - After decades of population losses, the city of Cleveland achieved an important tipping point over the past five years by gaining more housing units relative to its suburbs and outlying counties.

That promising fact, identified by Cleveland State University's Center for Population Dynamics, could lead to overall growth if the city can add new housing in depopulated neighborhoods to retain young new residents as they age and raise families.

"Cleveland can make its own fate, but this requires dismissing the oft-stated notion that there are parts of the city fated to decline," said the new report (embedded below), entitled "Population Loss and Development Trends in Cleveland."

Over the last five years, the report states, Cleveland has gained 4,733 housing units while Cuyahoga County suburbs have lost nearly 7,000 and the surrounding counties of Geauga, Lake, Lorain and Medina have remained virtually flat.

Diverging from the suburbs

To Richey Piiparinen, a senior research associate at the CSU center and co-author of the new analysis, the numbers mean that Cleveland could be turning the corner from population loss to growth.

"The re-urbanization is pivoting back into the urban core," Piiparinen said Monday in an interview. "We're returning to where we came from. The donut hole is filling in."

A previous study by the CSU center detailed how Cleveland owes its "back-to-the-city" movement to its nationally high level of growth in college-educated millennials between ages 25 and 34.

Another previous study mapped the neighborhoods affected by the pattern.

The new report cites an analysis from Transport Politic that shows that between 1960 and 2014, Cleveland regained 69 percent of its 1960 peak population, within 1.5 miles of City Hall.

Of the six cities in that analysis, only Chicago, where downtown population gained 149 percent over the 1960 baseline, did better than Cleveland, which bested Columbus; Charlotte, North Carolina; Pittsburgh; and St. Louis.

"We all tout Columbus' population growth," Piiparinen said. "But Columbus is performing pretty poorly in its urban core. All its population growth is through sprawl and annexation. Ours is through infill [housing] and [large] scale [development]. Cleveland is doing really well. We need to keep that going and pushing out [into nearby neighborhoods]."

Life-cycle housing needed

Piiparinen says new data on housing indicates that Cleveland needs to build on its success not just by attracting educated young workers but also by creating new "life-cycle" housing, for sale, in which new residents can eventually settle and raise families.

"We know those millennials are going to have kids," Piiparinen said.

But he said the city's housing market is ill-prepared to provide the next level of housing for young residents who want to stay and raise children.

"Do we have the next product? I would say no, we don't have that product," he said.

"We have to take some millennials from living downtown in rentals and allow them to move two miles away [in for-sale housing] instead of to Bay Village and Avon," he said.

Keeping the millennials

That means building not just more high-rise apartments, but for-sale townhouses and single-family houses.

It also means, Piiparinen said, that the city and private-sector developers need to be looking at how to redevelop city neighborhoods that have the most available land because they suffered the greatest population losses.

Piiparinen said it's important to continue to encourage new housing in Tremont, Ohio City and other successful neighborhoods and adjacent areas such as Clark-Fulton on the city's West Side.

Where growth could occur

But he also pointed to the East Side neighborhoods of St. Clair-Superior and Hough as strong candidates for redevelopment because of their abundance of empty lots.

Piiparinen indicated that Cleveland's Health-Tech Corridor along Euclid Avenue, where the Cleveland Clinic is growing, is driving demand for housing.

And he indicated that the long-fallow 70-acre Scranton Peninsula on the Cuyahoga River, controlled by Forest City Enterprises and the Scranton Averell Trust, could soon be ripe for development.

He called Scranton "the land jewel of the city."

An upcoming study in the works at the CSU center will examine more closely where demand for new housing in the city is highest.

Piiparinen described the new residents who might want to stay in the city and raise families as "knowledge workers," including nurses, nursing assistants, medical scientists, doctors, "people from all over the world living in Cleveland, who want walkable access to employment."

He said such new residents "don't have the psycho-geographic prejudices most Clevelanders have" against neighborhoods such as Hough, which erupted in race riots 50 years ago.

The new residents "want to live where amenities are, close to work," Piiparinen said.

He pointed to strong residential neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, near Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, as an example to follow, along with that of residential areas near Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Examples to follow

A key factor in the new CSU analysis is that it draws a distinction between population loss per se, and the parallel decline in the size of Cleveland households.

Nationally, household size has shrunk in the United States from 3.14 people in 1970 to 2.54 people today. In Cleveland, household size dropped from 3.44 in 1950 to 2.37 today.

That means that a significant amount of the city's population loss can be attributed not simply to out-migration, but to the decline in family size.

The lesson, Piiparinen said, is that new housing in the city needs to take into account the decline in the number of residents per household.

Developers should consider, for example, the high number of Clevelanders who live solo, or that have smaller families with fewer children.

"We have to plan for a city that is probably far less dense," Piiparinen said.

At the same time, he said, the city may want to consider slowing the pace of demolition of vacant and abandoned housing.

"Knocking down houses induces non-demand," he said. "It ensures no one can live there."