Advocates Push the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative and Sustainable Development

By Lee Chilcote

Writing isn’t usually a health risk, but the day that I tried to find the Cuyahoga River, I found myself wandering across six lanes of truck traffic on State Route 21 in Valleyview.

The reason for my trek was a story about the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative, an effort to reclaim the Valley as an eco-friendly zone of entrepreneurialism that is being led by the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission. I wanted to check out a part of the Valley targeted for future renewal. Crossing the highway on foot was the only way to get to the river from the Interstate. I knew it was there – I’d seen a glimpse of its muddy banks pulling off of I-77, as I was spinning down the cloverleaf.

The city of Valleyview is upstream from the Ohio and Erie Canal Reservation, the park located at the northernmost tip of the Cuyahoga Valley, just south of the industrial Flats. It’s close to the Towpath Trail, the bike-and-hike trail that traces the old canal, and runs all the way south down to Akron.

My drive that day traced a path from Lake Erie, through the city’s industrial core, and out to its sprawling suburbs. From downtown, I hopped on I-77 south, gliding through the concrete highway walls, catching a glimpse of the steel mills outside my car window, whistling white smoke like furious teakettles. Then I flew past the aluminum-sided bungalows of Broadway, and got off the highway at the Brecksville-Granger Road exit. There I was, in the flood plain of the Cuyahoga.

Not that you could tell. A low-flung hodgepodge of one- and two-story buildings and parking lots surrounded me. There were small manufacturers, fast food joints, gas stations, even a squat, windowless strip club. There was no connection between any of the buildings, just an endless daisy chain of concrete.

Yet I could still see the river here and there, its muddy water flashing from behind a rusted bridge railing, or under a neon sign. Once I got out of my car, I was able to get closer – by trespassing on the back lot of a car detailing shop (avoiding dirty looks from the owner).

And there was the river, tumbling past its soft brown banks, rolling by a few sturdy trees, leaning out over the water as if to catch a breeze.

To Chris Alvarado, the Project Manager for the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative (CVI), an effort spearheaded by the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, this forgotten stretch of riverfront in Valleyview represents all of the potential that the Valley has to offer.

Alvarado is a thin, intense man who seems to know everything about the Valley. He explains to me how this area became such a stepchild as we sit in his office at the Cuyahoga Planning Commission. “You’ve got several municipalities around the river,” he says, touching his wire-rimmed glasses. “Over the years it became the neglected backyard of these cities – Garfield Heights, Cuyahoga Heights, Brooklyn Heights, Independence, Valleyview. The land uses or businesses that are less valued, or that they want to hide are at their borders.” The result is that the area is used for things that most people don’t want to live next door to – warehouse space, parking lots and strip clubs.

Pollution and poor land use planning upstream has impacted land use here. “This is the site of a lot of flash flooding, because of the development that’s upstream,” Alvarado says. “Storm water gets washed off into storm sewers or the creek, and then you have flash flooding. There hasn’t been any incentive for high-value development.”

How could this be improved? The CVI aims to promote ecological development, such as the creation of wetlands at nearby Kingsbury Run or West Creek (two streams that flow into the Cuyahoga). Alvarado would also like it to facilitate local zoning codes that encourage green and high-performance building. The CVI aims to encourage collaboration. “This isn’t regionalism in terms of cities getting together to buy firetrucks,” he says, “but in terms of cities stepping beyond their boundaries.”

The CVI’s broader aim is to stimulate economic redevelopment through sustainable development, whether this means green space, parks and trails, green building, or sustainable products. “We want to use the Valley as a lab for sustainability,” he says. “We’re trying to bring about an overall cultural change, using sustainability as the model for a different kind of economic development.”

It’s easy to argue that the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative is untested, and sure, a few high-profile pilot projects would help to move it along. Alvarado and other Planning Commission staff are working on this. Yet there is at least one business in the Valley that’s already working to implement the principles of the CVI.

Rosby’s is an 80-acre farm on the Cuyahoga River that operates a garden center, greenhouse, berry farm, soil production facility, and landfill/recycling facility. Despite pressure to develop this land and the obsolescence of many greenhouses, Rosby’s has adapted and prospered for over thirty five years.

Like the river in Valleyview, Rosby’s Farm is hard to get to, but worth the trip. You pass through an area of low-rise manufacturing buildings, and turn off onto a road winding down to the Garden Center. You drive by 19th century homes that are among the first settlements in Brooklyn Heights. Across from the Garden Center sits an ancient row of glass greenhouses that have been there for eighty years. Driving into Rosby’s, I felt as though I’d descended into a part of the Valley time had forgotten – a natural landscape untouched by manufacturing and industry.

The Garden Center is a place to buy perennials, mulch and other garden supplies, but it’s much more than another retail venue for gardeners – it’s the front door to what Scott Gordon, General Manager at Rosby’s, calls the “farm in the city.” It features a wide variety of plants, including a great herb selection, and helps gardeners with ecological restoration (i.e. water gardens, backyard wildlife). Other functions include selling from Rosby’s raspberry and strawberry farm and providing an educational setting for “learn how they grow” tours for kids.

“We want to be a place to visit, a different experience,” Gordon says.

Greenhouses surround the garden center. Built in 1917 with the latest technology, these greenhouses are built with natural Cypress wood from the South, and they are steam-heated. Now outmoded, Rosby’s is hoping to convert one group of these greenhouses to an educational center someday.

“This area of Brooklyn Heights was the largest concentration of production greenhouses in the country at one time,” Gordon says. “The best analogy is an antique car – for the time, the engineering was unbelievable. Now, it’s long been surpassed.” Rosby’s innovation has garnered success, making it a poster child for a new breed of industry in the Valley.

Scott Gordon is in his element here. An energetic man with close-cropped hair who rarely remembers to finish one sentence before starting the next, Gordon has twenty years of experience working with the Growth Association and Optiem Industries. His specialty is “looking at start-ups and growth businesses and helping them to become more efficient,” he tells me. At Rosby’s he’s applying these skills to an environmentally-friendly business.

Gordon admits that, if one is looking purely at economics, the farm “shouldn’t be here,” but insists that sustainable businesses can be profitable. “From a business standpoint, the farm is the smallest part of our profits, but takes up the most amount of land. You know the 80/20 rule – twenty percent of your business generates 80 percent of your profits? Well, this is the ‘eighty’ part.”

Telling me to hop in the passenger side of an ‘80s van that he jokingly refers to as the “all terrain vehicle,” Gordon offers me a tour of the farm. Our next stop is a dirt path that leads to the raspberry and strawberry fields – neat rows of green-leaved plants, bronzed by the morning sun.

“When we bring our berries to the North Union Farmers Market at Shaker Square in the fall, we can’t pick enough!” Gordon says. “They’re picked the night before, so it’s an exquisite crop. They cost more than at the grocery store, but they’re better. This isn’t a large farm – by Ohio standards, it’s just a hobby – but the way to make it marketable is to grow something other farms can’t.”

Gordon compares Northeast Ohio growers to the steel industry. Both were outmoded because “they kept pushing the same product even though no one was buying it”; to be successful, growers must be “more like businesspeople” he says. To compete, Rosby’s not only has grown a unique product, but has honed a method of growing with Cuyahoga riverbed soil and natural cultivation.

Another ‘crop’ produced at Rosby’s is soil. Gordon drives me past the strawberry fields, then pulls up beside a huge pile of dirt, stops and gets out.

“See this?” He grabs a handful of dirt and motions to me. “We have the most unique soil in Cuyahoga County. It’s our native sandy loam; this is ancient ocean bed!” I pick up a clump of soil – it’s soft, fine grained, and the color of wet sand. Small pebbles are scattered here and there among the grains. The soil is made from the native sandy loam, mixed with leaf humus that’s been generated from leaves from yards across Northeast Ohio. Gordon describes it as “locally grown soil.”

It doesn’t start out clean. In fact, when Rosby’s gets the soil, it often contains unwanted items like plastic dolls and Gatorade bottles. The soil and leaves are carefully sifted, and whatever remains is either recycled or thrown away. The soil is placed in a compost pile and occasionally turned by machines, exposing it to sunlight and thus speeding up decomposition. Rosby’s prides itself on having the “cleanest soil around,” as Gordon likes to put it. This soil is then sold as garden topsoil, or provided to the city of Cleveland “Summer Sprout” program, which nurtures community gardens in neighborhoods across the city.

Dirt isn’t the only thing that gets recycled at Rosby’s. They also sell used building materials such as bricks or PVC. Gordon pulls the van up to a group of workers that are lined up by a machine – something that looks kind of like a post-industrial assembly line. They are not putting new goods together, but rather, deconstructing old goods, recycling them, and bringing them back into the marketplace to be used as something else.

“All the trash that’s generated from a building site, we put it on the line and sort through it,” Gordon says as we watch workers in protective yellow suits pick through piles of garbage, old bricks, copper pipes and roofing shingles. (This gives new meaning to the term ‘trash picker’, I think to myself.)

“We happen to be lucky here – we have a licensed landfill, so we bury whatever we can’t recycle,” he says. “But that ain’t much.”

“Can you make money at this?” I ask.

“We’re making it profitable,” says Gordon. “Right now, our competitors would say, ‘Why bother? Is this really worth it?’ And in truth, we don’t know yet. We think it is – or else we wouldn’t be doing it!”

Some items, like recycled bricks, are fairly easy to sell – others are more of a challenge. “We have some metal bumpers from an old parking lot,” Gordon explains. “Finding a buyer isn’t easy. People think they need new stuff. The key is that we have to make it cheaper to buy here. People won’t pay extra because it’s recycled; we have to be competitive with the new stuff.”

Gordon takes me past the “resource recovery” portion of the farm and down a twisting, dirt road to the Valley. We are almost at the end of the tour. From the van window, I can see a few landfills and, across the way, the Ohio and Erie Canal Reservation.

“Are these kinds of green businesses growing?” I ask. “Are there more businesses like this in the Valley?”

“The potential is great,” Gordon says. “Whatever we do, we try to take advantage of our location by the river – we could be a poster child for what could happen.”

The success of Rosby’s represents the potential of the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative to take off. Planners such as Alvarado hope that they’ll be able to replicate its success with other businesses.

Gordon’s ideas are influenced by his time at the Growth Association; he left because he didn’t feel the organization was doing enough to help small, native businesses reach the next level of success. According to Gordon, the group would have been more effective if they focused on helping local businesses like Rosby’s, businesses succeeding quietly despite the so-called “Quiet Crisis.”

We sit in the idling van, staring out of the window at the Valley. Hidden by overgrown trees and mounds of trash and machinery, the river is down there somewhere, snaking along through Slavic Village and Tremont, wriggling past Tower City and the Flats.

He takes me rumbling down a dirt road to the bottom of the hill. When we get to the bottom, Gordon pulls around a corner and stops.

Through a tangle of bushes I can see the river’s bend, lapping against the brown banks, moving past the landfills and nesting birds, the piles of gravel and the overgrown trees, making its way down to Lake Erie.

“Cleveland is stuck in traditional ways of doing things – we have to break out of that,” Gordon says. He points out at the mounds of dirt and construction debris, at the leafy green Valley. “We have to capitalize on our location, take advantage of the Valley’s resources. This is the new business model.”

Story and photos by Cool Cleveland contributor Lee Chilcote (:divend:)