Our History
Building Cleveland by Design
After launching in Fall 2006, BCbD began working with its partner organizations to determine market needs, interviewing dozens of private developers and public officials. We studied best practices in other cities to determine which could be replicated in Cleveland.
Subsequently, we identified development projects that would allow us to demonstrate principles of quality design. Key to choosing these projects was their likeliness to break ground, since BCbD was being funded by a two-year pilot grant and needed to show short-term results. The first such demonstration project to emerge was Scott Wolstein's Flats East Bank project, which had already received public funding and was close to achieving site control.
It became clear that in Cleveland, the best opportunity to piggyback on investments of similar scale was in the Flats. The high visibility of the Flats - seat of the city's founding, meeting place of the region's two defining water bodies, home of dozens of historic bridges and buildings - was also compelling. By viewing this entire area as our focus, BCbD could influence the future of a place that had near mythological status in the minds of Clevelanders and the nation as the site of both catastrophic river fires and a storied (but failed) nightclub district. With selective intervention by BCbD and our partners, the Flats could overcome its past and at last fulfill its potential to become one of the nation's most desirable, livable and vibrant urban neighborhoods. In March 2007, we formalized our relationship with the Flats East Bank development. BCbD currently assists the project with planning of its public space and certification as a pilot project of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED ND) program.
