The Greater Cleveland Partnership hopes to make it easier for investors and developers to grasp downtown Cleveland, through a new online tool that highlights recently finished projects, ongoing construction and big plans.
The chamber of commerce published the first version of that tool, an interactive map of downtown and close-lying neighborhoods, on its website early Sunday, Sept. 11.
But the three-dimensional model is far from finished. The team behind the project expects to keep adding to it, to both track progress and highlight potential opportunities.
“There’s a lot more that can be done and built into this,” said Chris Urban, the partnership’s director of civic engagement and projects.
The idea is to create a centralized source where businesspeople — and the public — can see how the landscape is changing. Other downtowns across the country maintain development maps, but many of them are static images or two-dimensional graphics.
GCP worked with Cleveland-based City Architecture to build a 3D model that stretches from the lakefront to the Inner Belt and West 28th Street to East 30th Street. After creating the outlines of buildings, the partners color-coded properties to identify significant projects — not just new construction and renovations but also city-approved plans and conceptual studies.
Baiju Shah, the chamber’s president and CEO, described the map as a living model, one that supports the organization’s goal of boosting growth and prosperity. Over time, GCP could add other details to the map, including hotel-room counts and office square footage, and expand into other parts of the city, such as Midtown or University Circle.
“I think this first iteration is largely going to be about telling our development progress story,” said Audrey Gerlach, vice president of economic development and chief of staff for the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, which collaborated with GCP on the project. “But I think it can increasingly evolve to be a useful business-development tool, as well.”
The alliance also expects to embed the map on its website, as part of an updated hub for economic-development resources.
The Cleveland tool, which allows users to click and pan around sites, draws inspiration from products in two other cities: An online map created by the Downtown Detroit Partnership and a high-tech tool that tracks permitting activity across Seattle.
The Detroit map, updated annually in September, has been around for a few years. It began with clear boundaries, spanning the 1.2-square-mile business improvement district, but gradually grew, said Joshua Long, data program director for the Downtown Detroit Partnership.
The three-dimensional model, which features pop-ups with building names, owners and timelines, shows the impact of development projects and complements the civic group’s annual report. It also requires a lot of work, said Long, who once hoped to update the map more frequently.
“The more development you have, the more you’ve got to track,” he said. “And if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to do it comprehensively.”
The Seattle map is a much different animal. It’s a mobile web application designed to let residents quickly figure out what’s happening on a lot down the street. And it’s the work of a software developer, who built a program that constantly scrapes the city’s website for permitting data.
The tool, called Seattle in Progress, is two-dimensional, with clickable, color-coded dots. Each dot leads to a pop-up with a project description, filing and approval dates and a full design package. That level of detail intrigued Urban and Alex Pesta, a City Architecture principal who is working with GCP on the Cleveland model.
But the Seattle map, which debuted in 2014, is largely automated.
Ethan Goodman, the founder of Seattle in Progress, actually moved to Portugal with his family during the pandemic and maintains the website from overseas. He created the app as a civic project and, after failing to secure grants to support it or to hand it off to the city, turned the project into a for-profit business.
There’s still a free public version of the site. But there’s also a subscription service, with contact information and other tools used by brokers, contractors and vendors.
“It got just an enormous response back when it was launched. It really had a moment,” said Goodman, who wanted to make public information easier to find and contribute to a discussion around housing scarcity and affordability. “People were really hungry for something like that.”
Tracking development activity poses different challenges in every city, Goodman said, because there’s so much variation in regulatory processes. A model that works in one market won’t necessarily apply in another.
In Cleveland, GCP and its partners are drawing on a behind-the-scenes database, using information gathered from neighborhood nonprofits, public records and news articles. The initial model also includes Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority train lines, multipurpose paths, major infrastructure investments and parking lots that could be candidates for ground-up development.
The chamber set a rough threshold of $10 million for real estate projects. To appear on the map, planned developments must have some level of city approval, typically a preliminary thumbs-up from the Cleveland City Planning Commission.
Urban is bracing for plenty of questions about potential additions and updates.
Michael Cantor, managing director and principal at Cleveland-based Allegro Real Estate Brokers & Advisors, saw early versions of the project. He expects to use the map to take tenants on virtual walk-throughs of downtown or to study high-rise building signage opportunities and views.
“One thing that I’ve given them feedback about is that I think development happens in Cleveland slowly enough that I would like to see projects highlighted that are more than 5 years old,” he said of conversations with GCP about going back a decade instead.
But the map will be most valuable to the marketplace for how it shows the future, said Robert “Roby” Simons, a professor and director of the school of urban affairs at Cleveland State University. He hasn’t seen GCP’s model yet, but he’s intrigued by the concept.
“We all want more investment. Forward-looking will help you get it,” said Simons, who suggested incorporating information about project financing, traffic counts, building occupancy and spending power.
GCP, which paid for the project, wouldn’t disclose the cost of the model so far. Shah said the chamber is committed to building it out and incorporating feedback from users.
Debbie Berry, who joined GCP in March as its senior vice president of major projects and real estate development, spent more than 15 years in planning and real estate in University Circle. Developers and lenders in the city’s medical, educational and arts district constantly asked for maps, and context, as they evaluated sites and weighed the risks of potential projects.
“This,” Berry said, “would have been really helpful.”
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