Fears of CH's doom are overplayed

Recently I’ve noticed comments by some Cleveland Heights citizens about two important issues: the new apartment buildings going up in Cleveland Heights, and septic/storm overflows in our sewers. These comments need correcting.

A complaint about the new apartment buildings is that they are for “outsiders,” and few people from outside Cleveland Heights want to move into these buildings. The thought is that Cleveland Heights shouldn’t even consider that people would move here. And complaints are leveled at Cleveland Heights City Council for approving the new, some say misguided, development.

Given that Cleveland Heights is less than two miles from University Circle and the main campus of the Cleveland Clinic, with over 82,000 jobs according to the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, I argue that at least some “outsiders” who work in the Circle want to live in new housing in Cleveland Heights if proper housing can be found here.

And there are many empty nesters who live in Cleveland Heights who want to stay here after their kids leave and they sell their single-family homes. Friends of mine, the late Pete and Heidi Spencer, lived for decades on East Monmouth Road and raised three children. When they went to sell their home and looked at renting in Cleveland Heights, they found nothing modern enough for them. Instead, they moved to an apartment in Shaker Heights near Shaker Square and took their taxes with them. 

Most Cleveland Heights apartment buildings date to the 1920s and mostly have not been renovated. While students will live in unimproved housing, retirees want something better. Until the new apartment building construction in Cleveland Heights, little such housing existed here. I’m more concerned that the new buildings are good enough to attract renters, not that these buildings are here.

And there is fear that sewage overflows into Lake Erie, from combined sewer and stormwater systems, will doom this region. But the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District is dealing with this problem. About halfway completed is the construction of a federally mandated, ratepayer financed, $3 billion deep sewer system to deal with the sewage storm overflows. You can see a rectangular cover over an entrance to a 100-foot-deep sewer in the large sidewalk at the corner of Coventry Road and Euclid Heights Boulevard, in front of the Coventry Village library. 

Leila Atassi and Andrew Tobias of The Plain Dealer/Cleveland.com wrote in a Feb. 19, 2014, article, “One fact is indisputable, the district says—by 2036, those tunnels will result in fewer than 500 million gallons of annual sewage discharge with only two or three sewer overflows per year. That means 98 percent of sewage overflow will be captured and treated, making Northeast Ohio’s program one of the most effective in the country in solving the combined sewer conundrum.”