Group Project tRUST-lab Partnership with Cleveland Neighborhood Progress

A Framework for Underutilized and Vacant Parcels between Shaker Square and Buckeye, Cleveland

In Spring 2024, tRUST-lab research assistants engaged with staff from Cleveland Neighborhood Progress (CNP), a critical non-profit organization in the city that assists local Community Development Corporations (CDCs) with ongoing operations and strategic thinking.

One critical project that CNP is overseeing is the transformation, rebranding, and economic revitalization of the historic Shaker Square shopping plaza in Shaker Heights, Cleveland. Developed in the 1920s as a transit-oriented hub, the plaza thrived for many decades as an innovative model of local business, transportation access, and regional/local businesses that served area residents. Over time, as the dominance of the automobile emerged and with it more intensive suburban development, the neighborhoods around Shaker Square began to experience economic challenges, which were only exacerbated by the loss of jobs and
industry within the city at large. Recently, local businesses have worked extremely hard to keep Shaker Square a viable economic engine with occasional successes but continued challenges. 

CNP's involvement with Shaker Square began in 2023 when it became the organization to oversee a planning and economic development study to reinvest in Shaker Square. To that end, CNP hired a nationally-known planning, landscape architecture, engagement, and market economics team to conduct a community-engaged study to look at neighborhood needs and aspirations for the Square.

To complement that effort, the tRUST-lab worked with CNP to examine underutilized and vacant land directly adjacent and behind Shaker Square as a way to improve neighborhood connectivity (to Buckeye) and the use of Shaker Square. Proposals included enhanced streetscapes, improved sidewalks, and crosswalks, new sidewalks in key locations, reconnecting the urban street grid to and around Shaker Square with mixed-income, mixed-use development on vacant and underutilized parcels, bringing much-needed density and potential customers closer to the shopping plaza itself.