Dan Shingler, Crain’s Cleveland
“Right now, it’s nothing … it’s a big open lot,” said Rick Barga, the Site Readiness Fund’s manager of site identification and development. “There’s a bunch of trees and shrubs. There used to be factories there and we’re hoping to repurpose it.”
The land has been vacant for years. It sits on a street that is nearly nothing but vacant land, with empty fields lining both sides of Sherman Avenue.
“It was hiding in plain sight,” Barga joked.
Not that the city didn’t know about it. But the city didn’t have the means to clean up the site so it could be marketed.
“It had been held privately for a long time, and we were sort of wondering why it hadn’t been developed yet,” Barga said. “When we ran into the contamination issues, we understood it a little more.”
The issues aren’t significant, he said, but soil at the site needs to be cleaned of some industrial oils and chemicals left behind by various manufacturers who used the site over the last 100-plus years. It’s nothing major, Barga said, but such cleanups are costly regardless of what has to be removed, and it needs to be removed before something new can be built.
Things have changed, too, and money is now available. The Site Readiness Fund is working with the Cuyahoga Land Bank to clean up the site, using state funding the land bank secured in June when the Ohio Department of Development awarded it $17.9 million to help fund the cleanup of eight sites in total.
“We were lucky in that we applied for the ODOD brownfield program and were awarded $2.5 million to clean up this site,” Barga said, referring to Sherman Avenue. “It’s not done, but it should be wrapped up next year in the first quarter.”
The land is now owned by an LLC set up by the land bank. Barga said the goal will be to sell it for development.
“We’re very excited to bring this one to market. We will market it for industrial manufacturing purposes,” Barga said. “I hope, on a 14-acre site, we can get 100,000 or 150,000 square feet of industrial space. We’re looking for industrial partners that have expertise in that type of development.”
But not just any development, he said. The city wants to see manufacturing jobs created at the site, Barga said, so it’s not likely to sell the site to a buyer that wants to use it for something like a warehouse or distribution center, which tend to have fewer jobs than production plants.
“We are not looking for 15-bay truck docks,” Barga said. “This is an opportunity to redevelop this site to create jobs for neighborhood residents.”
Data center developers also need not apply. “There will be no data centers there,” Barga said.
The site is well-suited to support manufacturing, he added.
“There’s a high-voltage line that runs right down the railroad right there,” he said. “And it might actually make a good site for a railroad user.”
It’s not the only parcel in Cleveland being prepared for sale. The Site Readiness Fund, the City of Cleveland and others are working to clean up at least eight other sites, including the Rose Building that’s being converted to a hotel Downtown and land along Canal Road that housed a former steam plant. Its largest project is cleaning up the 37-acre former National Acme and Republic Steel manufacturing site on the East Side along East 131st Street, just south of the Shoreway.
Other cities, including Strongsville and Beachwood, also have been working to identify available land and make it ready for development. Most are eying industrial uses, since that’s in demand and often is the best for municipal tax bases.
Cleveland has missed out on a lot of potential industrial development, often for a lack of sites, said George Pofok, a principal at Cushman & Wakefield | CRESCO.
“If you look at new construction over the last 12 years, there’s been more than 36 million square feet of new construction, and only 1.2% of that has been in the City of Cleveland proper. That’s a staggering number,” Pofok said. “The challenges lie in there’s a lack of ready-to-build sites, so this will help.”
But there will still be strong competition from the suburbs next year, and they’re often easier to work with and therefore more attractive to many developers, he added.
“There’s also the complexity of navigating city hall and having a tax abatement structure in play. Multiple facets have to be in place at the same time,” Pofok said. “You’re competing with the suburbs, that’s the reality. And when you have the opportunity to move faster with fewer hurdles, you’re probably going to go that route.”
No price has been determined for the Sherman Avenue site, but Barga said that it should be available in the first half of 2026.
“Look for us at the end of the first quarter,” he said.
