CLEVELAND, Ohio – Former Cleveland city planning director Norman Krumholz, one of the nation’s most respected and progressive city planners, died Saturday morning at Casey House, Montgomery Hospice in Rockville, MD., after suffering complications following a stroke, according to his family. He was 92.

As planning director and later as a professor at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs, Krumholz became a widely known advocate for equity planning, which holds that planners should work to improve life for the city’s poorest residents rather than serve powerful interests in big development projects.

Krumholz put his philosophy to work as Cleveland’s city planning director from 1969 to 1979, during the administration of Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a major American city, and succeeding administrations of Ralph Perk and Dennis Kucinich.

Instead of producing a traditional plan for the physical development of Cleveland, Krumholz led the formulation of the city’s 1975 “Policy Planning Report.” It stated that, “in a context of limited resources and pervasive inequalities, priority attention must be given to the task of promoting a wider range of choices for those who have few, if any, choices,”

Translated into action, equity planning meant promoting better transit service in the city, pushing for an end to redlining, and helping neighborhood organizations.

Krumholz was part of a generation of urban thinkers who reacted against federally-funded Urban Renewal projects that displaced low income and minority residents.

“Norm represented the interests of the people versus the corporate interests, the development interests, the growth machine, the people who had little care for, little thought for, the people of the city of Cleveland,’’ said Hunter Morrison, the city’s planning director from 1980 to 2000.

“We’ll keep celebrating what a lion he was in this community,’’ said Chris Ronayne, president of University Circle Inc., and Cleveland planning director from 2002 to 2004. Ronayne said he frequently asks colleagues, “What would Norm think? What would Norm do?”

Krumholz’s official biography on the website for the Cornell University Department of Architecture and Planning, where he earned a master’s degree in planning in 1965, says that his “equity planning practice on behalf of the poor and working people of Cleveland has become a national model for planners in other large cities who are struggling to retain their industrial and economic base while making their neighborhoods more livable.’’

Lillian Kuri, Vice President for strategic initiatives, arts and urban design at the Cleveland Foundation, said that Krumholz’s 1990 book, “Making Equity Planning Work,’’ co-written with John Forester of Cornell University, is considered a classic.

“Every person who goes through the planning and urban design field has been touched by the book – at any school in America and internationally,’’ she said.

The Cleveland Foundation recently funded a follow-up volume, “Advancing Equity Planning Now,’’ published in 2018 by Cornell University. Krumholz co-edited the volume with Kathryn Wertheim Hexter, retired director of the Center for Community Planning and Development at CSU’s Levin College, and wrote the introduction.

“We invested in the book to continue to make sure his thinking and his legacy continued to be in the hands of every student,’’ Kuri said.

Krumholz was born in Passaic, N.J. in 1927 to Izzak and Molly Krumholz. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Missouri in 1952, and followed up with the master's degree from Cornell.

He married the former Virginia Martin, whom he met at the University of Missouri, and who worked as archivist for the Roman Catholic Diocese, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Episcopal Diocese before her death in 2014.

Norman Krumholz served as assistant director of the Pittsburgh City Planning Commission from 1965 to 1969, before he moved to Cleveland.

He served as president of the American Planning Association from 1986 to 1987, and as president of the American Institute of Certified Planners in 1999.

His honors and awards include a 2016 honorary PhD. From Cleveland State University, a 1987 Rome Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and the 2019 Morton L. Mandel Leadership in Community Development Award from Cleveland Neighborhood Progress

After his decade at City Hall, Krumholz established the Cleveland Center for Neighborhood Development at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs in 1979, with funding from the Cleveland and Gund foundations.

He later became a professor, teaching generations of students including Ronayne, and Freddy Collier, Jr., now serving as planning director under Mayor Frank Jackson.

Krumholz considered teaching as a way to influence future generations.

“Equity planning is like a long-term relay; you pass the baton to the next guy,” Krumholz said in an interview with Crain’s in 2016.

Krumholz took a dim view of the era of public-private partnerships that fueled development under Mayor George Voinovich from 1980 to 1989, and later Mike White, from 1990 to 2002.

Such ventures, blending government and private sector funding, led to the renovation and expansion of Tower City Center, the construction of the Gateway Sports complex and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the 1990s.

Krumholz said in a 1996 interview with The Plain Dealer that such glittering accomplishments had failed to address Cleveland's poverty and lack of social mobility.

"The public absorbs all the risks and the privates get all the profits," he said.

He conceded then that some neighborhoods, aided by nonprofit community development corporations, "have had great success," but he said, "it's not nearly in terms of the scale that's needed.”

Krumholz continued to criticize big-ticket redevelopment projects through in the 2000s during his years as a member of the city’s planning commission.

In 2014, he was the sole “no” vote when the city planning commission approved the design for a $50 million renovation of Public Square, a revamp timed to coincide with the 2016 Republican National Convention.

He said he was worried that the Public Square project would harm riders of Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority buses.

He also lashed out at a proposed $25 million pedestrian bridge from the downtown Mall to North Coast Harbor. “The bicycle-pedestrian bridge is a total waste of time,’’ Krumholz said, urging Clevelanders to focus on safe streets and better schools.

In the introduction to his 2018 book, Krumholz said equity planning was not radical in nature, calling it instead an appropriate way to address the “inherently exploitative nature” of urban development, which sorts people by social class and consigns “the poorest and darkest to the central city or first-ring suburbs.”

And he warned that as a pragmatic matter, until social inequalities are addressed, “older industrial cities are not going to attract significant amounts of new private investment.”

Survivors include a daughter Laura Krumholz (husband, Ron Zartman), of Newberg, OR; and a son Andrew Krumholz (wife, Masha Moskovich), of San Francisco; and Helena Koenig of Bethesda, MD, a close friend. A third child, Daniel I. Krumholz, of New York, died in 1990.

Arrangements and burial are private.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Levin College Annual Fund for distribution to the Norman Krumholz Lecture Series or Norman Krumholz Scholarship Fund.

A celebration of Krumholz’s life and contributions to Cleveland is tentatively scheduled for Feb. 29 at Cleveland State University, details to be announced.

Note: Norman Krumholz joined Cleveland State University in 1979 when he established the Center for Neighborhood Development. A previous version of this story said that Krumholz started at the university in 1985. The story has also been updated to include the names of those who collaborated on Krumholz’s books.

Note: The office of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson issued the following statement Saturday Dec. 21 at 11:10 p.m.:

“I want to express my condolences to the family and friends of Norman Krumholz. He was a pioneer in the field of City Planning and as Planning Director for the City of Cleveland. He was also known as the father of equity planning. He initiated the 1975 Policy Program Report which addressed urban redevelopment issues at a time when cities were dealing with very complex social and economic issues. His passion for urban development and transportation issues gave voice to the issues of individuals who were most impacted by development policy but least empowered.

The legacy of Norm Krumholz is forever cemented in Cleveland’s planning and development history. He will be missed.”