“Do any of these phrases stand out to you?” asked Mordecai Cargill of ThirdSpace Action Lab. He gestured to a stack of cards on a table at the Ed Davis Community Center.
“The future of the Innerbelt should…” the cards read.
Suggestions included Be Walkable, Preserve History, Look & Feel like Akron, Improve the Environment, Help Akronites Build Wealth and Provide Affordable Housing for Everyone.
“Will it make a difference?” Kevin Tillery asked Cargill. “I thought the city already made a decision.”
In reality, representatives from the City of Akron, design firm Sasaki and organizations such asThirdSpace Action Lab, a Cleveland-based consulting firm focused on disrupting racial inequity, gathered last week on a snowy Wednesday night to listen to feedback from Tillery and other residents about what they wanted the decommissioned mile-long stretch of the Innerbelt highway to be.
Housing was Tillery’s priority. He said he wants to see the city build homes on the Innerbelt and sell them back to residents who were displaced from the area. In a neighborhood that had been a vibrant hub of Black culture before the Innerbelt was constructed beginning in 1970, displacing more than 700 homes and 100 businesses, restoring housing seemed like the most equitable strategy.
“I just want to see justice,” said Tillery, a real estate investor. “I want to see people restored.”
About 200 people, including representatives from the planning organizations, filled the three-hour open house. Organizers updated residents on their progress so far while leaning on them to share their memories, their priorities, their desires.
Their efforts got a boost when Akron Mayor Shammas Malik announced that night that the city had won $10 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation to help move the plan forward; Akron will match the award with an additional $10 million.
‘I was here and I was part of it’
Tatia Harris, METRO RTA’s chief culture officer, believes transportation should be a key component of any project.
That’s why the cards Harris suggested stated the city’s Innerbelt efforts should:
Help Akronites Build Wealth
Preserve History
and Provide Access to Good Jobs
Learning from the past helps create a stronger future, she said, while access to jobs and transportation to take advantage of opportunities “strengthens everybody.”
“I want to be a part of empowering citizens,” Harris said. “I feel like Akron is on the cusp of being great.”
Harris, who moved to Akron from Knoxville, Tennessee, said acknowledging the impact of systemic racism through the city’s Innerbelt efforts can make a difference in residents’ trust of the decision-making process — and the eventual results. Setting the scene and telling the story of what was there before could help give Akron a base from which to build.
“You can have really good intentions, but you want to make sure the original members of the community aren’t priced out,” she said. “I’m looking forward to when Phase One is implemented to say, ‘I was here and I was part of it.’”
Engaging the past to improve the future
Along with asking people what the future should look like, planners also asked about the past — they wanted to hear old stories from the neighborhood and learn about landmarks that were destroyed.
Arrye Rosser, who lives in Stow, came to the community center because of her interest in the “Green Book Cleveland” project, which documents locations in Northeast Ohio that decades earlier were featured in “The Nego Motorist Green Book,” a guide for Black travelers.
Rosser sees the Innerbelt project as Akron’s future but said the city can’t move forward until it addresses the past. Still, she’s excited to see the efforts the city is making to engage the community in what happens next.
The announcement that there is funding to help pay for the ideas that are being generated will help with what Harrington Hargrove called a failure to elevate the community that was left behind. Hargrove, 75, said he’s lived in Sherbondy Hill, near the Innerbelt, since he was a teenager and saw the devastation that was wrought by the road’s construction.
“It took all our businesses down there,” he said. “The city has redlined us from economic opportunity. That was our community and they destroyed it.”
Now, Hargrove said, he simply wants the community to invest what was taken away.
Naida Oliver said her husband’s family was broken up when some members were displaced by the construction. Decades later, she’s glad to see how many people showed up to weigh in on the outcome of the project.
And Rhonda Mallard, who lives and worships in the area, said she thinks grocery stores and pharmacies, in addition to housing and transportation, would help improve the neighborhood.
“I want to be part of this rebuild,” Mallard said. “It’s exciting.”
Innerbelt planning just the beginning
Martin Zogran, a principal urban designer with Sasaki, said the group’s planning process will continue through the summer. The goal of Wednesday’s session was to listen deeply, he said, to understand the themes that people are asking for.
Zogran said he heard a lot about housing needs, from home ownership opportunities to more affordable rentals to helping the unhoused. Wealth building was another priority for residents he engaged with.
He said tangible results likely won’t be seen for three to five years, but the federal grant the city won is validation that what Akron is undertaking is meaningful work.
“It represents a paradigm shift,” he said. “We can not only include communities, we can make communities the authors of their future.”
That was also key for Akron Planning Director Kyle Julien, who said one of the city’s goals was to give people an opportunity to be heard and to build excitement for the ongoing efforts. The first step on Wednesday was level-setting, learning about the needs people had and what their priorities are. From there, the process will move on to developing ideas, proposing different scenarios then developing and refining a master plan.
From the mayor’s office, Malik said he’s ready to see action on the project, and he thinks the work will be ongoing.
“I don’t think there’s an end,” he said. “This is about a longer-term proposition.”