Entrepreneurs for Sustainability Highlighted in Business Week

(Image courtesy of A Piece of Cleveland, http://www.apieceofcleveland.org)

Cleveland's Green-Thinking Entrepreneurs

With the nonprofit Entrepreneurs for Sustainability as a catalyst, several startups are finding creative ways to put green principles to work

By Emily Schmitt

The entrepreneurs of Cleveland are hoping that next time you think of their city, you'll think "green" (rather than thinking of, say, the Cuyahoga River on fire). At the forefront of Cleveland's green thinking is a nonprofit called Entrepreneurs for Sustainability (E4S), which educates and trains business owners on practices that will help them make their companies more sustainable. The group was founded in 2000 by Holly Harlan, a former industrial engineer for John Deere, and three entrepreneurs: Pete Acorti, Brian Schneiderman, and Grant Marquit.

Harlan, now the president of E4S, got the idea for the group after a stint at the Rocky Mountain institute, where she studied capitalism and its environmental impact. The first meeting of E4S drew 25 business owners, but today the group boasts over 7,000 individual members, and its monthly meetings, where business owners gather to hear a guest speaker discuss a sustainable business practice, often draw about 150 people. Ultimately, the goal of E4S is not only to help companies become more environmentally conscious but also to help them save money.

Companies of all sizes are welcome, but the focus remains on entrepreneurs. "We started out with just entrepreneurs, but we attracted everyone. All are leaders interested in putting sustainability to work," says Harlan. In a July 2008 survey, 70% of E4S members said their company had a waste reduction goal; 60% had energy efficiency goals; and 30% intended to reduce their carbon levels.

Using the Waste Stream

Several creative, environmentally conscious startups have sprung from E4S. Mike Dungan, an E4S board member, and Mike Thomas, who had been a waste-stream consultant, were particularly influenced by an August 2007 meeting at which consultant Janine Benyus spoke about the benefits of biomimicry, or the practice of studying patterns in nature and applying them to everyday problems. Dungan and Thomas were particularly taken with the habits of honeybees, who find resources (in their case, nectar) in faraway places and transmit that knowledge back to others that can help harvest it. In 2009, Thomas and Dungan founded BeeDance to try to model that information sharing and local collaboration in a for-profit company. Their first project, called Zero Landfill, collects carpet samples from architectural firms and gives them to elementary schools and animal shelters, where they can be reused.

A Piece of Cleveland (APOC), founded in 2008 by Chris Kious, Aaron Gogolin and P.J. Doran, also credits E4S for its formation. The company dismantles abandoned houses slated for demolition. APOC, which generally brings in about $10,000 per contract and employs between 8 and 20 people part-time, uses reclaimed materials from the houses to make furniture. "We're looking to dip our hands into the waste stream and put [materials] back into the community," says Kious, who previously worked in community development and says E4S has helped him to meet other business owners. Last year APOC constructed countertops and tables from reclaimed wood for a local Starbucks.

E4S will showcase eight local startups this month. The startups will present their goals and talk to local business owners about how to best reach them. The city itself is also getting on the green train. This August, Mayor Frank G. Jackson will host a three-day summit to outline how Cleveland will meet its goal of becoming sustainable by 2019, a step in the direction of becoming what the mayor is promoting as a "green city on a blue lake."

It's a Family Affair: Developers Tackle Historic Rehab on Lorain Avenue

Michael Fleming first noticed the solid brick façade and big, storefront windows of the former Oddfellows Hall on Lorain Avenue when he was training for a marathon. Wedged between a storefront church and a biker shop, the building seemed like a diamond in the rough.

“I was running one day, and the building jumped out at me,” says Fleming. “Lorain may be shabby and a bit down-at-the-heels, but it’s a very pretty street, and it’s affordable.”

Fleming saw that the property was for sale, and one day he ventured inside. The first thing he saw was the mahogany bar, covered in dust. That’s when he fell in love.

“I’ve always wanted to live above a bar,” says Fleming, who worked as a chef in Boston and Miami before moving back to Cleveland, his hometown, to pursue development in 2005.

Last year, Fleming bought the Ohio City building for $150,000 with his dad, his mom and his brother. The family members formed Solo Development LLC to invest in Cleveland real estate. They plan to renovate the first floor storefront and turn the upper two stories into loft apartments. Michael and his brother David will move into two of the apartments, and rent out the third.

“We are making an investment in the center of Cleveland,” says Ken Fleming, Michael's father. “Since we purchased the building, we’ve seen other new developments sprout along Lorain.”

Ken Fleming cited over $16 million in investment on Lorain Avenue, including such projects as the St. Ignatius Performing Arts Facility, Providence House Campus expansion, the D.H. Ellison Company, the Cleveland Environmental Center, and the United Office Building.

The Flemings’ development was financed by Western Reserve Bank in Brecksville, in partnership with Cleveland Action to Support Housing (CASH), a non-profit whose mission is to provide low-interest loans to help spur reinvestment in Cleveland neighborhoods.

“We helped to finance the project at a reduced interest rate,” says Marcia Nolan, Executive Director of CASH. “We made deposits with Western Reserve Bank, and this enabled the borrower to save money.” She added, “Our work helps to make projects like this feasible.”

The developers will spend an additional $275,000 to create apartments in the building. The units will have a contemporary, loft-like feel, and will include such amenities as new kitchens and baths, in-suite laundry, and open floor plans. The third floor – which was originally used as a ballroom in its heyday, and has fourteen foot ceilings – is being transformed into a two bedroom, loft apartment. Michael plans to move into the apartment when it’s finished.

Renovating the building has turned into a family project. “My dad, my brother and I came down on Saturday mornings to tear apart the old plaster and lath from the walls and ceiling,” says Michael Fleming. “We spent about four months doing that before hiring a crew.”

During the redevelopment, the developers have coped with many challenges, including moving walls and reconfiguring electrical and plumbing systems. Michael is determined to restore the cove ceilings in the old ballroom, which were badly damaged by a leaky roof.

“Rehab is like peeling off layers of an onion,” Michael says with a laugh. “It’s a good learning experience.”

The Oddfellows building, which was built in 1870, has a rich, varied history. Over the years, it has housed the Hungarian Men’s Singing Society, the Communist Party of Northeast Ohio, and a hardcore music club called “Speak in Tongues,” among others.

Now that his rehab project is in full swing, Michael has fallen out of love with the building. Yet he still believes that the investment in Lorain Avenue will pay off over time. “One of the reasons I moved back to Cleveland is because it is an affordable place for a young person to invest, and it has great, historic buildings,” he says. “There’s so much opportunity here.”

Michael is already planning future dinner parties in his new home, and he has even talked about starting his own restaurant on the first floor. At the moment, however, refinishing the mahogany bar will have to wait. He’s got a lot of work to do before moving day.

Grand Arcade Completes Assessments - Renovations Now Complete

The Grand Arcade Condominiums, an historic building a West 6th and St. Clair Avenue in Cleveland's Warehouse District, recently completed renovations that spruced up the building and provided a new roof.

The renovations are now complete, and the assessments have been paid for. Owners that purchase units at the Grand Arcade now will be able to enjoy the recent improvements, and feel secure that it is unlikely that any major assessments will be levied in the near term, since this project was recently completed.

For more information about the Grand Arcade and available properties there, please contact Progressive Urban Real Estate at 216/619-9696 or 216/397-5607.

San Francisco and Kansas City Top Forbes List of Vacant Cities

Where Vacancy Rates Are Rising
by Zach O'Malley Greenburg
See the article at forbes.com here

The big news in Kansas City is the Chiefs' off-season acquisition of quarterback Matt Cassel. Filling in for injured superstar Tom Brady in New England last season, Cassel became a starter for the first time since his senior year of high school.

When trading for a backup quarterback is cause for citywide celebration, it's a sign of a metropolis starving for good news--and perhaps an indicator that other troubles are afoot.

Indeed, the Kansas City metro area tops our list of America's Abandoned Cities. In Kansas City, rental vacancy rates rose from 11.9% to 15% over the past year; homeowner vacancy rates nearly doubled, up from 2.1% to 3.8%. Comparatively, the average homeowner vacancy rate in the country's 75 largest metro areas improved slightly from 3% to 2.7%, while the rental vacancy rate edged up to 10.2% from 10% a year ago.

Kansas City isn't the only metro where rental and homeowner vacancy rates are rising in tandem. Second on our list is the San Francisco-Oakland metro, where high prices are pushing Bay Area residents out of the region. Third is Tucson, Ariz., where the aftermath of the housing boom has left a glut of inventory. The pair's predicament illustrates both sides of the vacancy coin.

"There really are two reasons why you'd have vacancies: supply-related and demand-related," says Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. "A number of these places have experienced substantial overbuilding, which would lead you to have supply issues. Others, with troubled local economies, are more demand-related."

Many of the cities on the list are still digging themselves out of the wreckage of the real estate bubble. Miami, which ranks No. 8, owns a whopping 12.7% rental vacancy rate, up from 11.4% a year ago; residential towers built in the final stages of the boom now stand as empty monuments to an over-hyped market downtown. Homeowner vacancy stands at 5.6%, up from 3.8% last year, thanks mostly to a spate of foreclosures. According to Trulia.com, 40% of the homes available in Miami's city limits are foreclosures.

To form our list, we looked at vacancy data from America's 75 largest metropolitan statistical areas and metropolitan divisions (or metros)--geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics.

Our rankings, a combination of rental and homeowner vacancy fluctuation rates for the 75 largest metros, are based on year-over-year changes in the first quarter from the Census Bureau. Each metro was ranked on the year-over-year change in rental vacancy and homeowner vacancy rates; the final ranking is an average of the two.

San Francisco boasts balmy weather, seaside diversions and the best baseball stadium in the country.

But despite the perks, the Bay Area is losing people at an even greater clip than Miami--and ranks second on our list. Rental vacancy rates swelled from 4.7% to 7.1%; homeowner vacancies more than tripled from 1.1% to 3.4%. Why the dramatic change?

"One of the things we're noticing is that rents are still high," says Ken Shuman, a Bay Area-based spokesman for real estate data provider Trulia.com. "What we're also seeing is the economy. San Francisco, of all cities, is the most transient. People flock here when times are good--they don't mind paying high rent as long as pay is high. Now, in many cases, wages are frozen or reduced."

And that's if you're lucky enough to still have a job. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest reports, Bay Area unemployment has more than doubled since last year, up from 4.6% to 9.4% as of April. Many laid-off workers aren't sticking around.

"People are migrating. It happened after the dot-com bust too," says Shuman. "As much as it's a beautiful place to live, you really have to think about lifestyle. There's no point in being here if you can't enjoy it."