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Strategies for rebuiding Cleveland: What can be learned from other cities

Posted by dsims October 17, 2008 22:50PM


Gus Chan/The Plain DealerMarigolds bloom in front of Tulsie Persaud's white picket fence in the inner city of Schenectady, N.Y. In recent years, he and hundreds of other Guyanese immigrants have bought up the city's vacant houses and helped to spark an urban renaissance.
Like a flower in the sand, a peach-colored house blooms from a bleak and battered street in the inner city of Schenectady, N.Y.

On a block of outdated and sometimes boarded-up double deckers, the slender home wears vacation clothes. Its siding gleams in cool Caribbean colors. A decorative black fence necklaces a front garden bursting with colors.

Strangers might suspect they had stumbled upon an artist's enclave or a bed and breakfast in the urban blight, but anyone from around this upstate New York factory town knows better. They will assume another Guyanese immigrant family has moved in and that, chances are, the street is on the rise. For where one Guyanese buys and restores, others follow.

Facing the kinds of job losses and abandonment known to Cleveland, Schenectady pursued a creative solution. It introduced itself to an immigrant group in New York City, lured curious couples north to view its impossibly cheap homes, and let capitalism and immigrant dreams run their course.

In less than a decade, people who hail from the South American nation of Guyana have become about 10 percent of the city of 62,000, and streets once considered worthless now stir with fussy homeowners.

"They breathed new life into this town," said Albert P. Jurczynski, the former mayor who marketed his city with bus tours and his mother-in-law's homemade cookies. "They changed Schenectady. And they never asked for a dime from anyone."
...................http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2008/10/strategies_for_rebuiding_cleve.html