The city of Cleveland and the nonprofit Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund unveiled a new strategy Wednesday to counteract decades of industrial decline and loss of factory jobs in city neighborhoods.
The new project, called the Midline, aims to revive walk-to-work manufacturing jobs across a 350-acre swath of Cleveland’s neglected East Side extending roughly 1.5 miles southeast from East 55th Street and Euclid Avenue to Opportunity Corridor.
Details were released to Ideastream Public Media and other news outlets prior to the event.
The Midline vision calls for creating at least 1.5 million square feet of industrial and commercial space that would generate roughly 2,500 direct jobs within easy reach of transit and ultimately contribute $100 million in tax revenue for the city annually.
The city and the Site Readiness Fund didn’t announce any deals with specific companies. Instead, they described the event as the launch of a long-term strategy involving land assembly, environmental remediation and future recruitment of companies, with more information to come starting later this year.
Seeking generational change
“This is the new face of Cleveland,’’ Brad Whitehead, the inaugural managing director of the Site Readiness Fund, said in an interview before Wednesday’s announcement.
The Midline area includes portions of the Central and Fairfax neighborhoods, where industries once thrived along the Norfolk-Southern rail corridor that slices diagonally across the East Side. The line was once part of the Pennsylvania Railroad, with a now demolished main station at East 55th Street and Euclid Avenue.
Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund / City of Cleveland
A bird’s eye map outlines the proposed general area of the Midline district extending across Cleveland’s East Side.
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb said in the news release that “for generations, neighborhoods like Central and Fairfax were places where Clevelanders could live, work, and build a future within a few blocks of home.’’
Bibb said that “when industry left, and jobs disappeared, contaminated land was left behind — creating barriers to opportunity that held these neighborhoods back for decades. Today, we are changing that. This is one of the most ambitious neighborhood revitalization efforts Cleveland has undertaken.”
In addition to new industrial plants and jobs, the Midline calls for creating nearly 2.5 miles of multipurpose trails to make it possible to ride or walk to work. That matters in a city where 30% of residents don’t own a car, said Keisha Gonzalez, the recently-appointed executive director and CEO of LAND Studio, the Cleveland nonprofit that will help plan the Midline area and the trail.
Wednesday’s announcement marked the first time the trail project, in the works for a number of years, was discussed publicly.
The Site Fund in action
The Site Readiness Fund was formed in 2023 with $50 million in federal money from ARPA, the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act. Wednesday’s event was held under a tent sheltering scores of reporters and community leaders on Ashland Road near 7000 Central Ave., the site of the long vacant Wellman-Seaver-Morgan factory, where giant Hulett ore unloading cranes were once made.
The fund bought the 10-acre factory site in 2024 for $845,000 as its first big purchase.
The Fund has spent the past two years removing asbestos and completing an engineering study of Wellman-Seaver, which concluded that it is eligible for restoration and adaptive reuse. The fund is seeking roughly $2.5 million historic preservation tax credits from the State of Ohio to help with renovation, and expects to hear a response by June 30, Whitehead said.
The total cost of the project is estimated at $25 million, and work on redevelopment with a specific company could be announced soon, depending on the state’s response.
“If good things happen at the state, we hope to be announcing something imminently,” he said.
Industrial ruins along Ashland Road in Cleveland have been acquired as part of the new Midline economic development project. They’ll be demolished to make way for redevelopment led by the Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund.
On other sites acquired by the Site Readiness Fund, abandoned factories will be demolished and the land will be prepared for redevelopment. Those sites include ruined buildings along Ashland Road where Wednesday’s press event was held.
In an interview after the gathering, Whitehead said one of the Ashland Road structures served as the location for a scene in an Avengers movie in which actor Scarlett Johansson’s character was tortured by Russian generals.
“But now it’s an emblem of environmental injustice,” Whitehead said.
Since 2024, the fund said it has spent $14 million to assemble properties across the city for environmental cleanup and rejuvenation, with help from partners including the Cuyahoga County Land Bank and Cleveland’s land bank, the Cleveland Foundation, the Ohio Department of Development, JobsOhio, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency and others.
Of the $14 million total, $9.5 million has been spent in the Midline area to assemble 160 acres of the 200 it ultimately hopes to acquire. The U.S. Department of Transportation contributed another $1 million to the effort, and the Fund For Our Economic Future added $500,000, for a total of $11 million.
Another 150 acres in the Midline area, which will bring the total to 350 acres, are already occupied by businesses that will become part of the new jobs district, including Pierre’s Ice Cream, SNAP Gourmet Foods, Orlando Baking, Nor-Am Cold Storage and Miceli Dairy Products.
The Midline will overlap with a proposed new tax increment financing district, or TIF, spreading across 2,000 acres on the city’s East Side, Whitehead said. Proposed by Bibb, the TIF is designed to help the city finance infrastructure improvements and other investments to drive revitalization.
Healing past harms
New jobs in the Midline zone would not involve chemicals that pose environmental risks or data centers with low job density and high demand for electricity and water, Whitehead said. Instead, new industries would focus on food-related businesses, biomedical products and light manufacturing driven by new technologies including artificial intelligence.
“We’re not putting dirty industries here,’’ Whitehead said. “It’s going to be people who make food or make people healthier. We do expect to see clean production.”
The news release announcing the Midline said that neighborhoods in the area are “the most burdened in Ohio on key health and environmental indicators, including elevated rates of asthma, heart disease, and exposure to industrial pollution.’’
The Midline news release said that in addition to remediating environmental harms, the project will advance “opportunities for residents to invest in, co-own, and build long-term wealth’’ in the communities it touches.
Gonzalez said the Midline will “centralize community well-being’’ rather than focus strictly on the bottom line of participating companies.
Adding greenways
The greenways described as part of the vision would edge the Norfolk-Southern rail line, once part of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
The idea for the greenways has been under quiet consideration among city planners and nonprofits for five years. The Midline is bringing new energy to the idea, Gonzalez said. Portions could be funded and under construction within two to three years, according to LAND Studio.
Thomas Wasinski
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Aerial Agents
An aerial photo places the onetime Wellman-Seaver-Morgan Factory in context with the Cleveland skyline.
The trails would connect to the lakefront via new routes under discussion for East 55th and East 66th streets, and to Opportunity Corridor, according to maps released Wednesday. The connections on the long-underserved East Side could ultimately link to current and proposed segments in Slavic Village, with connections to Downtown, the regional Towpath Trail, and University Circle.
“I’m super excited about it,’’ Gonzalez said of the Midline vision. “This is a real opportunity to rectify infrastructure decisions of long before that created separation and physical barriers of neighborhoods from opportunity, and bring connectivity to all the different kinds of growth that are happening.’’
Regional vision, big payoff predicted
Whitehead said that current and future spending on Midline site assembly and environmental cleanup would cost $80 million to $100 million, and that public and philanthropic investment is needed because businesses won’t pay for land assembly and remediation. But he said that the taxes the area will eventually generate will handsomely benefit the city.
“It’s a big investment,” he said. “While this stuff doesn’t pencil out necessarily for a private player, this is a very attractive public return.’’
The Midline project is modeled on related efforts in other Great Lakes industrial cities, including Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Milwaukee, that have proven successful, Whitehead said.
And he said the project aligns with key concepts that emerged in the Vibrant NEO vision of 2014, led by the 12-county Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium. Funded by $7 million in federal funds and local matches, Vibrant NEO was the largest regional planning study in more than half a century.
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A rendering suggests what a new manufacturing facility in Cleveland’s Midline district might look like.
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A rendering suggests what a new manufacturing facility in Cleveland’s Midline district might look like.
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A rendering imagines future public spaces for the Midline district in Cleveland.
Merrit Chase
Vibrant NEO recommended repurposing underused or disused industrial land within urban core areas, preserving open land beyond the region’s suburbs and focusing new development primarily within existing transportation corridors.
Whitehead said that the Midline “is Vibrant Neo in action.”
Whitehead said it was important to make the announcement Wednesday because individual projects will be coming forward in coming months, along with more detailed plans that will be unveiled for public review and feedback.
It made sense now to reveal the larger strategy, rather than wait for other pieces to emerge later, he said.
“We simply needed to get out and talk about it now,’’ he said. “You can’t keep not talking about it. We want now to have a steady stream of announcements.”
