What might green collar jobs look like in Cleveland? To get some idea, see the dozens of Cleveland kids combining work and hands-on environmental learning this summer.

For the second straight year, teams of young adults participating in Cleveland’s Summer Youth Program are building rain barrels, digging and planting rain gardens, collecting water samples and cleaning beaches at Lake Erie, painting ‘Dump no waste’ stencils at storm drains, reading water meters, and using GIS to track light poles for Cleveland Public Power.

Cleveland, Youth Opportunities Unlimited, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District and Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (NPI) are the program sponsors.

We visited with the teams building rain barrels and laying the groundwork for a rain garden.

Cleveland’s Kareema Jackson and Robben Abkins (pictured) were busy converting 55-gallon drums into rain barrels— tapping out and caulking plugs for diverter hoses and twisting-on spigots—in a city-owned warehouse on the southwest side. They will build and install 280 rain barrels at residences in NPI’s six 'model block' neighborhoods. After their crew meets a 40-barrel-a-day quota, the barrels are loaded onto trucks and another team will ride out to homes where supervisors help them place two cinder blocks for a base and hook them up to a backyard downspout.

A 15.9 mile connector trail linking West Creek Reservation and the following cities to the Towpath Trail:

• Village of Brooklyn Heights
• City of Independence
• City of Parma
• City of Seven Hills

Location(s)

Architect, designer, educator Fritz Haag has been called a contemporary Buckminster Fuller. Haag's recent work is "Animal estates", regional model homes as dwellings for a variety of animals that have been displaced through loss of natural habitat. Other projects include "Edible estates", a book on reclaiming private front lawns into plots reminiscent of World War II victory gardens.

The lecture, part of the 2008 Kacalieff series, is free and open to the public. 

Neighborhood Progress, Inc is working with the Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio on a strategy that would put vacant land in Cleveland back into productive use. In 2008, they will identify ways to reuse abandoned properties—both in the city’s landbank and in the hands of private owners who might be interested in an opportunity to convert it to a park or even an urban farm.

After mapping the sites and meeting with residents to listen to what they want, the groups will tap a major grant from the Surdna Foundation to produce a resource book and to pay for demonstration projects. These may ultimately be holding strategies until development interest increases, or they might be longer term. The group has mapped where vacant parcels exist—some where houses long since torn down have become fields. Some of the bigger vacant lands in the city might be ripe for a proposed urban tree farm, a place to research using plants to draw toxins out of the soil (a process known as phytoremediation), or as the site of small scale wind or solar fields or even sown for crops.

Initially, the project is working on a "pattern book", a resource for neighborhoods that will contain data, guidance and examples of how to redeploy vacant land in a way that addresses the aesthetic, ecological and economic needs and enhances neighborhood life, Schwarz says.

Cleveland is one of five “weak market cities” in which Surdna will invest $2.5 million during the next five years, says Bobbi Reichtell, Senior VP of Planning at NPI. In the first year, Surdna has asked NPI to explore ways to address the impact of a smaller population and excess vacant land. The project includes:

One of hundreds of "vacant" lots in the city of Cleveland, like this one near E. 55th Street, are beginning to be reclaimed by nature. Some areas of the city have a number of green lots that may be consolidated to form a large urban green space or farm.

One of hundreds of "vacant" lots in the city of Cleveland, like this near Beaver Avenue in the "Forgotten Triangle", are beginning to be reclaimed by nature. Some areas of the city have a number of green lots that may be consolidated to form a large urban green space or farm.

One of hundreds of vacant lots in the city of Cleveland, like this one in Slavic Village, are beginning to be reclaimed by nature. Some areas of the city have a number of green lots that may be consolidated to form a large urban green space or farm.

One of hundreds of "vacant" lots in the city of Cleveland that are beginning to be reclaimed by nature. Some areas of the city have a number of green lots that may be consolidated to form a large urban green space or farm.

One of hundreds of "vacant" lots in the city of Cleveland that are beginning to be reclaimed by nature. Some areas of the city have a number of green lots that may be consolidated to form a large urban green space or farm.

One of hundreds of "vacant" lots in the city of Cleveland that are beginning to be reclaimed by nature. Some areas of the city have a number of green lots that may be consolidated to form a large urban green space or farm.