What people want:
Ideas from the neighborhood

All phases of Cleveland EcoVillage development will involve extensive community involvement. As a part of the early conceptual planning, more than 60 neighborhood residents, along with design professionals from throughout Northeast Ohio, participated in a full-day brainstorming workshop on December 6, 1997. Here are the themes that came out of that workshop.

• Linkages: The W. 65th Street Rapid Transit station and the surrounding neighborhood need to be connected with walking paths, bikeways, and a community circulator bus route. The Rapid station can be a hub for alternative transportation.
• Housing: The density of housing should be increased, especially near the Rapid station.
• Mixed uses: New development should mix residential, retail and office uses to create centers of activity, especially along Lorain Avenue. The Rapid station itself should be an activity center.
• Traffic calming: The streets of the EcoVillage should be designed as places for people, with traffic slowed for pedestrian safety.
• Environmental education: The EcoVillage should be a place of continual learning with partnerships with local schools and programs for recycling, gardening, tree planting, and pollution prevention. Systems for energy and water should be made visible.
• Green space: The EcoVillage should be connected to nature through the development of small parks and linear greenways. Habitat should be restored throughout the neighborhood using native plants.
• Diversity: The economic and ethnic diversity of the neighborhood should be preserved and enhanced, in part by providing a diversity of housing types (apartments, townhouses, detached single family homes, accessory flats). New development should not displace current residents.
• Identity: The EcoVillage needs a name that ties it to the history of the neighborhood, and it needs signage and boundaries to set it off as a distinct place.

Conceptual land use plan for the Cleveland EcoVillage
compiled from ideas generated at a neighborhood design workshop.

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Ideas for the future: Conceptual drawing of possible development opportunities around the W. 65th Street Rapid Station (from the EcoVillage concept plan by City Architecture). The drawing looks north from I-90; the main street in the foreground is Lorain Avenue.

Conceptual Plan Update 2004

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