The Bezos Earth Fund on Tuesday announced a $10 million grant to help Cleveland take a bite out of the vast problem of cleaning up vacant residential lots marred by buried debris, rusting fences, illegal dumps and invasive vegetation.
The nonprofit Western Reserve Land Conservancy will spend the $10 million over three years to clean up 600 publicly-owned parcels across roughly 60 acres in the St. Clair-Superior and Hough neighborhoods. Most are held by the city’s land bank.
“I’m really excited we have an opportunity with this investment to improve environmental conditions where people live and current residents have weathered so many storms over the years,’’ Isaac Robb, the conservancy’s chief urban program officer, said Tuesday in an interview.
The clean-up is being organized by the land conservancy in collaboration with the city of Cleveland. The Bezos Earth Fund is a philanthropic project of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos.
The grant from the Bezos foundation is one of eight totaling $100 million awarded to U.S. cities Tuesday. In addition to Cleveland, the winners are: Allentown, Pa., Atlanta, Indianapolis, Little Rock, Ark., Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Sioux Falls, S.D.
The Bezos fund envisions turning vacant urban lots across the eight winning cities into “community-designed parks, beautiful large scale green spaces, and immersive outdoor areas.’’
“Our hope is that these projects serve as a blueprint for turning underutilized spaces into community assets and encourage even more investment in green spaces — from government, philanthropy, and others — in cities across the country,” Tom Taylor, CEO and president of the Bezos fund, said in a news release.
The land conservancy estimated that 11,000 residential demolitions occurred between 2007 and 2015 in Cleveland, where large areas have been scarred by decades of population losses and deindustrialization, compounded by the 2008-09 recession caused by the national mortgage foreclosure crisis.
In 2024, the land conservancy reported on its website that out of the 167,000 parcels in Cleveland, 33,000 are vacant. They account for 14.7 square miles, or about 17.5% of the city’s 82.5 square miles.
St. Clair-Superior and Hough suffer more than most parts of the city from vacant lots. More than half of all parcels in the neighborhoods are empty, according to the news release announcing the grant.
Hough and St. Clair-Superior are home to roughly 17,000 residents. The neighborhoods are characterized by decades of disinvestment, low tree canopy and disproportionate health burdens, the Bezos fund said.
“This investment from the Bezos Earth Fund is a powerful endorsement of Cleveland’s commitment to neighborhood revitalization and environmental justice,” Mayor Justin Bibb said in the news release. “Residents of Hough and St. Clair-Superior have lived with the effects of decades of disinvestment for far too long.’’
The Bezos grant will enable the cleanup of vacant lots where houses were demolished, bulldozed into their basements and covered with an uneven layer of earth, Robb said. Rusting fences, invasive trees, weeds and unauthorized dumping also afflict many lots.
The grant will include remediating soil and re-grading parcels that need it. Existing trees will be properly maintained and new ones approved by the Cleveland Tree Plan will be planted. New ground cover, possibly including clover, will be planted. The goal is to blend aesthetics and a lower need for maintenance.
Residents will be consulted on preferences for ground cover, Robb said, but first, the focus will be on cleaning, stabilization and tree planting.
“People leave, but the land remains,’’ he said. “We have to do something with it.”
