Slavic Village Development facts for kids

Slavic Village Development (SVD) is a non-profit community development corporation serving the North and South Broadway neighborhoods of Cleveland, Ohio. Over a period of 22 years, SVD has invested $160 million in these neighborhoods through various housing projects.

Mission statement

"Our mission is to preserve, empower, and advance Slavic Village as a thriving diverse neighborhood. Essential to our neighborhood is its unique identity with quality housing anchored by excellent recreational, educational, cultural, religious, and institutional anchors supported by a vibrant retail, commercial, and industrial base."

History

Slavic Village Development (SVD) is a non-profit community development corporation with over 25 years experience in neighborhood development and community building in Broadway Slavic Village, a community of 30,000 people in southeast Cleveland. Historically an ethnic blue collar community, Broadway Slavic Village has faced challenges in recent years from job loss and aging housing; the community is evolving into a diverse, affordable place for people of modest means to raise their families.

Projects, past and present

Slavic Village Development has a long history of highly successful physical development and community building, with particular emphasis on complex real estate site assembly. SVD has rehabbed or built over 1,000 housing units, including a 200+ home planned community, several large multi-family buildings, and over 400 homes for low-income families.

In recent years, SVD has refined its programming and has increasingly used community organizing and community building activities to address quality of life issues, such as activities for youth, safety, and recreation. Arts programming, including public art, concerts, festivals and parades have become more important as has the development of parks, green space and recreational amenities, SVD has been instrumental in the creation of several new parks, and in 2006 opened Morgana Run Bike Trail, a 3-mile trail developed on an abandoned rail line. SVD leveraged the development of the trail and created a new park and history center capitalizing on the Mill Creek waterfall, and linked the Morgana Trail to the Ohio Erie Canal Towpath, an extensive trail system just south of the neighborhood.

Foreclosure crisis

An overview of the history of the crisis in Slavic Village

Cleveland was hit earlier and harder by the foreclosure crisis than almost any other city in the United States. In 2007, one of the zip codes representing Slavic Village (44105) was named the "hardest hit" zip code in the United States. According to Claudia Coulton, co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University, part of the reason for the focus of foreclosures in the Slavic Village area is that the neighborhood was becoming revitalized. Housing prices were increasing gradually, along with its steadily improving reputation. These factors combined with a lot of first-time homeowners to create an environment conducive to predatory lenders. Fraudulent home sales started to increase in volume in the Slavic Village neighborhood in 1999. Investors would buy a distressed property, perhaps make a few cosmetic repairs, and then resell the property for up to two or three times its actual value. This practice helped contribute to an increase in home prices, which then attracted predatory lenders.

Poor housing quality from fraudulently appraised, unrehabbed homes, which often have been sold for inflated prices two or three times, has added to the devastation of the foreclosure crisis. When an owner is facing foreclosure on a property they bought for tens of thousands of dollars more than its actual value, they usually never make any of the necessary repairs and instead abandon the property. Instead of homes in good repair sitting empty for years (as is the case in other hard-hit states like California and Florida), homes that are in desperate need of repairs sit for years rotting away. As these homes decay, they are broken into, vandalized, and stripped of any piping or wiring of value. This leads to the home becoming a haven for squatters, juveniles, and arson.