FEATURE
Photo by Sam Allard. Cover illustration by Joel Herrera
THE HORROR!
Mayor Gregory Kurtz and his anti-homeless crusade in Independence By Sam Allard
ON APRIL 15, ROUGHLY 150 MEN EXPERIENCING homelessness were transferred by shuttle from the Tudor Arms Doubletree Hotel in Cleveland’s University Circle neighborhood to the Ramada Inn in Independence. The men were scheduled to stay there, per the terms of a contract between the hotel and Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry (LMM), until the end of August. Neither Cuyahoga County’s Office of Homeless Services nor LMM regarded the City of Independence as an optimal location for the unhoused men. Most of them, before Covid, would have been staying at 2100 Lakeside, the largest men’s shelter in the state. But since March of 2020, the county and its partners have pursued a “hotel hub” strategy to decongregate shelters. It’s a strategy seen almost universally as a success: by the county, by the nonprofit agencies coordinating logistics, and indeed, by the 10 hotels that have benefitted from $7.5 million
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in county contracts. The win-win is straightforward. Unhoused men and women have been able to move to environments where they can physically distance and comfortably shelter in place, and area hotels have received critical business during a time of unprecedented precarity. Strategies of this sort have been adopted across the country, and in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine expressly called on cities to participate in them last March. “We are asking all local communities to include homeless shelters in your planning, so that we can more quickly help support these
| clevescene.com | June 16-29, 2021
Ohioans to meet social distancing guidelines,” he said. In Cuyahoga County, the investment of both public and private resources yielded positive results. One of the pandemic’s few heartening headlines arrived in January, when the Executive Director of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, Chris Knestrick, told Cleveland City Council that due to the county’s efforts and expanded street outreach, the city had witnessed a 30% decrease in unsheltered homelessness. Independence nevertheless seemed like an odd choice. It is an office park suburb, 15 minutes by car from downtown Cleveland during nonpeak hours, and home to an array of basement-tier regional attractions: the Cavs’ practice facilities, satellite locations of Melt and Slyman’s, the northern terminus of the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad, the tallest building between Cleveland and Akron, Stipe Miocic’s Strong Style MMA gym and a very fancy McDonald’s. It is also home to 7,200
residents, 0.0% of whom, according to 2019 census estimates, are Black. Like many suburbs in segregated, car-centric Northeast Ohio, Independence is defined less by its racial homogeneity than by its highways. (It’s the one where I-77 meets I-480.) Rockside Road is its main commercial corridor, transecting the community across its northern crest in a relationship not unlike the Ohio Turnpike’s to the State of Ohio. Rockside recalls both Solon and Breezewood, Pennsylvania in the respect that it is both blandly and oppressively commercial, pocked with beige hotels, chain eateries and drab office parks. These are all businesses, it seems needless to specify, and in the aggregate, they employ upwards of 10,000 people. The Rockside Corridor is, in fact, one of only six locations in the region that qualifies as a “job hub.” As such, the Ramada’s pre-pandemic clientele was overwhelmingly business travelers. Proximity to highways, though, made Independence a popular
