All Cindy Wants for Christmas

In the most recent Scene Magazine (free and available everywhere), Northeast Shores Board President and Beachland Ballroom Co-owner Cindy Barber shared what she most wants for Christmas. What does she most want? Artist immigrants for our Waterloo Village initiative.

What Cindy wrote:

All I want for Cleveland is homesteading legislation like in Paducah, Kentucky, where they created a live-work artist community by giving away houses.

Here in Cleveland, instead of letting out-of-town investors and shady developers land-grab our savable foreclosed properties, let's create a national call, and invite artists and immigrants with entrepreneurial spirit to repopulate our city by giving them $1 homes if they have the will and means to rehab the property, a plan to be self-sustaining to keep the property out of future foreclosure and a willingness to invest emotional capital into Cleveland. It means getting creative with the building and housing code, and finding a way to funnel some of the "stimulus" funds we are getting into a revolving loan program perhaps, but we need population and we need small neighborhood jobs more than anything.

Forget the medical mart or condoing the lakefront — if we don't focus on repopulating the abandoned properties in our neighborhoods in a faster, more inventive way, we might as well hire Blackwater to usher visitors in and out of the central city in a couple years.

As board president of Northeast Shores Development Corporation in North Collinwood, I am seeing firsthand how slow it's going to get abandoned HUD properties turned around. I'd love to see council and city leaders get back to our progressive roots and ask themselves, "What would Tom Johnson do?" (Maybe take over RTA!) Just let me help write the press release for the Great Cleveland Housing Rush of 2010. — Cindy Barber, owner of the Beachland Ballroom and former editor of Cleveland Free Times