Suburbs look into revitalization group

Population shifts leaving areas with big-city problems

By RACHEL ZINN, Blade Staff Writer
Article published Sunday, September 26, 2004

Richard and Sheila Krieger stand on the deck of their house in Monclova Township. Mr. Krieger said the house he and his wife had in Maumee had grown too big for just the two of them. (THE BLADE/DON SIMMONS)

When Richard Krieger retired after 20 years as Maumee city administrator, he started looking for a new house. He wanted a single-family house without stairs in a subdivision where somebody else would worry about yard work and snow shoveling.

He found what he was looking for in Monclova Township, just beyond the limits of the city he had called home for decades.

"The house my wife and I had in Maumee was just too big for the two of us," Mr. Krieger said. "The subdivision that we moved into, there was nothing like that in Maumee."

All around Ohio and Michigan, residents like Mr. Krieger are bypassing inner-ring suburbs that surround major cities in favor of outlying areas with new homes. As the population moves, suburbs are left to face problems that used to be the burdens of inner cities: vacant homes, deteriorating waterlines and roads, empty shopping plazas, and small but growing pockets of poverty.

Many suburban leaders in Ohio are joining forces to slow the ripples of population moving outward from urban centers. Coalitions in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati are working to revitalize suburban neighborhoods and change state laws to give older communities a fighting chance.

Local officials are meeting Wednesday at the Maumee Indoor Theater to consider forming a similar group in the Toledo area.

"We need to sit down and talk about where we want to go and what we want to be," said Oregon Mayor Marge Brown, who is helping organize the meeting. "I think there are ways we can work together."

Leaders of 14 cities and villages in Lucas and Wood counties have been invited to the meeting, as well as city officials from Monroe, Mich. Organizers are unsure how many communities are sending representatives to attend.

Some suburban and government leaders in the Toledo area are skeptical about the usefulness of a local suburban consortium.

Tony Rheams, executive director of the Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments, an organization that oversees regional planning efforts for federal highway, water and sewer, and other mutual issues, questioned the need for a suburban consortium. He said his group already deals with issues of urban sprawl and works with government officials throughout the area on policies that would benefit the region's communities.

"I don't know why another group would be needed unless it's one that wants to focus strictly on cities," he said. "It seems to me that working within the system would be more constructive than starting something new."

Perrysburg Mayor Jody Holbrook, who is vice chairman of TMACOG, agreed. He said he does not plan to have Perrysburg participate in a suburban group.

"We ought to work through TMACOG. To me, that's the best vehicle we've got," Mayor Holbrook said. "Let's get on that puppy and ride it."

Across the Maumee River, John Jezak, city administrator of Maumee, said he supports the suburban group initiative.

"It's an important idea to at least be floated and see if there's an opportunity here," he said. "I think it's something we need to follow through on. It will pay off in the future with benefits for keeping our communities intact."

Not everyone is invited to the policymaking party. Townships did not receive invitations, organizers say, because they are in most cases newer communities without the problems of aging infrastructure and housing shared by suburban villages and cities.

However, supporters of suburban coalitions elsewhere say townships ultimately benefit from strong inner suburbs.

Many townships are being overwhelmed by residential growth, said Gene Krebs, a former Ohio state representative who now leads a nonprofit group called Greater Ohio. He said that improving inner suburbs will slow the outward exodus into surrounding townships and allow them to balance residential and commercial growth, giving them a more solid tax base.

"We're about making cities more attractive places to live and thereby taking pressure off farmland and townships," Mr. Krebs said.

Donna Johnston, a research associate at the University of Toledo's Urban Affairs Center and the chairman of the Metro Toledo Smart Growth Partnership, a coalition of housing, religious, and neighborhood groups, is coordinating Wednesday's meeting. She said a local suburban coalition also could have benefits for the city of Toledo by bringing residents closer to the urban core.

Mr. Krebs agreed that strong suburbs can contribute to the economy of a central downtown. He said residents living in the inner suburbs often patronize downtown businesses.

"I think everything is complementary," he said. "Stronger cities will lead to lower infrastructure costs and protect the environment through less farmland conversion."

Suburban coalitions elsewhere in Ohio and Michigan have had some successes in recent years.

The First Suburbs Consortium of Northeast Ohio is the oldest suburban group in the state, dating to 1996. It includes 15 suburbs around Cleveland that pay $3,000 in annual dues to fund advocacy efforts and a part-time staff person.

Ken Montlack, vice mayor of the suburb of Cleveland Heights, volunteers as the group's chairman. He says the group has two missions: sharing ideas and resources to redevelop their neighborhoods and trying to change state policies.

"What brings us together is the recognition that the older, established communities are not getting a fair deal," Mr. Montlack said. "The state and federal governments subsidize the development of farmland at the edges, and that puts us in a very uncompetitive position."

The consortium wants legislators to shift some government money that pays for building new roads, sewer systems, and waterlines to fund repairs of existing infrastructure.

Mr. Krebs agreed, saying lobbying by the First Suburbs Consortium has been effective.

"They are starting to bring a fair amount of political heft to the table," he said. "We've been making some tremendous progress lately in getting state tax credits for rehabilitation of older buildings."

The Central Ohio First Suburbs Consortium, made up of five suburbs around Columbus, has helped change the way a Columbus-area government committee distributes funding.

The committee uses a point system to prioritize transportation and utilities projects, said Virginia Barney, city manager of Upper Arlington, a suburb in the Columbus consortium. She said that thanks to the Columbus group's lobbying efforts, the committee now gives extra points to projects that would help older communities.

"There is strength in banding together to have a common voice," Ms. Barney said.

But city leaders admit that changing government policy is a long process, so they are trying other methods to bring their communities back to life.

For example, the Central Ohio First Suburbs Consortium has helped suburban homeowners get low-interest loans to rehabilitate older homes. The First Suburbs Consortium of Northeast Ohio also initiated a low-interest loan program for suburban homeowners that has given out more than $51 million in similar loans.

The Northeast Ohio group started a development council that offers programs such as a grant-funded project that provides suburban homeowners with predatory lending counseling and helps prevent foreclosures. Another set of grants is funding the council's efforts to buy vacant houses, remodel them, and sell them to first-time homeowners.

Older suburbs from all over Michigan participate in the Michigan Suburbs Alliance, which holds conferences on planning, meets with legislators, and recently partnered with Michigan State University. Graduate students in urban planning from MSU will gain experience preparing free planning proposals for suburbs.

A First Suburbs Consortium of 14 Cincinnati-area communities, which has organized in the past few months, has a similar partnership with the University of Cincinnati.

"First Suburbs is one of the most important initiatives in Hamilton County within our community planning efforts," said Ron Miller, executive director of the Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission and secretary of Cincinnati's First Suburbs group.

"A lot of our goals can only be accomplished through collaborative efforts," he said.

Though other communities have formed active suburban coalitions, Toledo faces some unique challenges in organizing a similar group.

First, most of Toledo's suburbs do not fit the "first suburbs" profile of fully developed communities. From long stretches of farmland in Oregon to undeveloped land that Sylvania has annexed from Sylvania Township, most Toledo suburbs generally have room to grow.

In contrast, communities in the First Suburb consortiums elsewhere in Ohio have little undeveloped land and do not border townships with land that could be annexed. As a result, these suburbs are being forced to redevelop existing properties to revitalize.

"The only development that can take place for us is redevlopment," Mr. Montlack said of Cleveland's inner suburbs.

The city of Maumee, which has been steadily losing population since the 1970s, perhaps is the most similar to inner suburbs of larger cities because its borders cannot expand. Maumee officials already have done projects to improve the city's uptown area, including renovating the Maumee Indoor Theater.

Maumee used federal Community Development Block Grant money to add stone-look sidewalks and wrought-iron accents to its uptown streets this year, much like the historic touches that Perrysburg and Sylvania added to their downtowns in years past. Perrysburg also started a weekly downtown Farmers' Market a few years ago to draw residents to the city's center. Waterville has a similar market every Saturday during the summer months.

Another difficulty for Toledo suburbs trying to start a coalition is that the suburbs straddle the Lucas and Wood County line, and even stretch over the state line into Michigan. The suburbs need to get more jurisdictions to cooperate than the other Ohio First Suburbs groups, which lie in just one county.

On the other hand, Toledo's suburbs do have some advantages over those in other areas.

"Suburbs in Toledo are not in nearly as bad a position as Cleveland's first suburbs because we have some commercial and industrial tax base. They're all residential," Ms. Johnston said.

Officials involved with existing suburban consortiums say they would welcome a Toledo group and would like to work with local leaders on lobbying campaigns.

Ms. Barney will speak to Toledo's suburban leaders at Wednesday's meeting about the experiences of the Central Ohio First Suburbs Consortium. She said she hopes the Toledo area will think seriously about forming a similar group.

"I think these kinds of discussions are essential for the long-term health of any community," she said.

"The futures of our cities will be made in the next decade. If we do not reinvest in our homes and our infrastructure, and create an environment that will encourage businesses to reinvest, that future will not be bright."