Episode Summary

  1. Cleveland's political leadership seeks to take advantage of federal stimulus and partner that with a 15 minute neighborhood strategy that many other cities have hope to accomplish in their backyards. I wonder what other cities are thinking this way?
  2. Creating a 15 minute neighborhood requires getting everyone at the table: butcher, baker, candlestick maker...and even your major league sports team owners.
  3. Regardless of your net worth, if you're a developer it's all about solving the same problems. In this case, parking. As a developer that's just getting started that should excite you because you'll continually build our your learning inventory and each deal you do will feed the next deal.

Cleveland going for 15 min vibes (3 min read)

15 minute neighborhood refresher (4 min read)

Cleveland sports teams' redevelopment plans (8 min read)

For fun: source for subject line (3 min vid)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone. I’m Kyle Gulau and on this show, patterns of development, we take less than 10 minutes each week to deconstruct what's going on in real estate, architecture, and urban planing.

And this week. Something different. As you might have noticed.

Usually I pick three words to summarize miscellaneous content I've stumbled across related to the world of real estate.

This week. I've chosen the catch phrase and tune from season 1, episode 20 of NBC sitcom 30 Rock.

30 Rock's Liz Lemon needs to get away from the busy life of New York City and chooses the "simple mid west town" of Cleveland, OH.

I'm reminded of this episode from 2007 because Cleveland has been on my radar...my urban planning developer radar...this week .

I had this article in my back pocket about Clevland's major sports teams considerations for real estate plans.

Cleveland has 3:
The basketball team: The Cavaliers (Le Bron James)
The football team: The Browns (Don't win much)
The baseball team: The Guardians (Used to be the Indians)

Then I stumbled across this article from local station "wkyc" titled, "Can Cleveland become a 15-minute city? Experts say it's a real possibility."

Boom. Hooked!

Let's dive in. And I know. I know. 10 minutes isn't enough to really discuss the complexities of an entire city. The purpose of the this episode...and this podcast really...is to think about all the patterns we've seen before and figure out how do these new pieces fit. If at all. It just so happens that this week I've focused on one particular area rather than particular topics.

For the uninitiated a 15-min neighborhood is a place where all residents live within a short walk of a good school, rapid transit, a place to buy fresh food, and a park.

Mayor Justin Bibb says Cleveland wants to be the first 15-minute city in North America, introducing the concept during his State of the City speech Wednesday, April 13th of this year.

City Planner Matt Moss is setting up the process to engage community members to take inventory of what communities already have, identify what's missing or what's needed, and then looking to fill those gaps.

Also quoted in the article is Dr. Darcy Freedman from the Swetland Center for Environmental Health. And she brings up a great point, quoting Freedman now, "The problem isn't we don't have a store, it's well why don't we have a store?"

There's a lot of things that can happen and have happened that have created our food deserts, decreased walkability, and ripped holes in our urban fabric.

That's a whole different episode but it leads to the another question of why now? Why now in Cleveland? Both the city planner and the mayor feel that now's the time to consider the 15 minute strategy with the funding coming from the federal infrastructure bill and other sources that haven't historically been available for urban areas.

And what large metropolitan area would be complete without a major league sports team?

To quote an article from NeoTrans by Ken Prendergast, "All three major league sports teams in Cleveland have real estate development plans for downtown Cleveland. They are some of the grandest visions that have been put out there. And while some of those plans have been made public, most remain a secret because they’re still in the process of refining those plans. Some details are unknown because they depend on the resolution of significant infrastructure investments."

And here we start to see the delicate balance of development playing out. How do we get the density from missing middle housing and support the needs of the community? How will those federal infrastructure and stimulus dollars be spent in a transparent way? Do billionaire sport team's owners need the help?

So how do we connect the 15 minute neighborhood to these potential sports complex investments? On the basketball side we have Dan Gilbert purchasing properties in downtown Cleveland. Sources familiar with the transactions say that Gilbert's intending to demolish existing structures to open up land along the river. This includes land that is currently being used as surface parking lots. We're talking almost 9 acres of land. And people are speculating that the project will be huge.

I guess when you put those two sentences right next to each other it's safe to assume that it will in fact be a large project. Dan Gilbert owns a lot of Detroit real estate and is the co-founder of quicken loans. He has experience with large scale projects -- The Hudson site in Detroit had a price tag of $1b, was 1.4 million square feet and included mix uses of: retail, housing, hotel, office.

According to the article by Ken Prendergast...Dan Gilbert is coordinating with his neighbor. The Dolan family who are the majority owners of Cleveland's baseball team. What could these guys possibly need to partner on?

Well p arking. They're hoping to construct and share a parking structure.

Let's get some perspective. Kyle not a billionaire sports team owner is ALSO trying to coordinate with his neighbors to share the costs, maintenance, and pain of dealing with parking requirements. I love it. Regardless of your net worth, if you're a developer, you're solving the same problems.

I'm realizing I'm already at my word count for this episode and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface so I'll end with our patterns of the week:

  1. Cleveland's political leadership seeks to take advantage of federal stimulus and partner that with a 15 minute neighborhood strategy that many other cities have hope to accomplish in their backyards. I wonder what other cities are thinking this way?
  2. Creating a 15 minute neighborhood requires getting everyone at the table: butcher, baker, candlestick maker...and even your major league sports team owners.
  3. Regardless of your net worth, if you're a developer it's all about solving the same problems. In this case, parking. As a developer that's just getting started that should excite you because you'll continually build our your learning inventory and each deal you do will feed the next deal.