A Commitment to Diversity Drives a Cleveland Housing Advocate

I grew up in Cleveland's Detroit Shoreway neighborhood, where I now live and work, but I spent my teens in the suburbs. My mother's family immigrated here from Italy in the 1890s, and my father's parents came from Tennessee after the Second World War to work in the steel mills.

When I was 19 and taking a couple of years off from college, I had a job working for a wholesaler that

JEFFREY M. RAMSEY Age: 47 First professional job: Realtor, Progressive Urban Real Estate, Cleveland Current Job: Executive director, Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization, Cleveland

provided health and beauty supplies to independent, predominantly African-American, inner-city grocery stores. This really was an eye-opener for me. It really gave me an appreciation for diversity and for different points of view, which I didn't have as a white teenager in the suburbs. I'm gay, and being able to understand that I'm different, while being accepting of who I am, really helped me have an appreciation for the beauty of diversity.

Unfortunately, we still tend to be segregated, with the whites in the suburb and minorities, gays, and the poor in the city. But respecting diversity is one of the core values of this organization. At this time, however, I had no idea that I'd end up with a career revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods.

I went back to college, but I never finished my undergraduate degree. Then I came back to Detroit Shoreway, to find a neighborhood that had suffered from white flight and disinvestment since the time I lived there. For a couple of years, I waited tables, but finally, when I was 29, I decided that I'd better get serious about a career. So I got a real-estate license with Progressive Urban Real Estate, serving the Detroit Shoreway, Ohio City, and Tremont neighborhoods. At this time, in the mid-1980s, everyone was leaving the city, but we were selling homes in inner-city neighborhoods for $10,000 or $15,000. I loved it. I was selling homes to young, creative people: the artists, the gays, the bohemians.

However, when it came to home loans, the banks were redlining those neighborhoods. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, banks pulled their funds out of inner-city neighborhoods. They literally put up maps on their walls and drew red lines around areas in which they would not lend.

A lot of the discrimination and steering that used to happen is now illegal. Realtors can't steer people of certain races to a certain neighborhood, and, as a result, realtors today are color-blind. In other words, through such fair housing initiatives the government has made diversity something positive. I could have been a realtor in white-bread America. But I made a conscious decision to work for a young upstart company that was marketing upstart neighborhoods.

At the same time I was looking for something more. I prayed for a year and a half to find the work that I'm doing now, and I really see this as a calling. As a Catholic, I was raised with values that are still important to me -- working for justice and fairness and caring for the poor. Too often we forget that those who are poor are not bad citizens, they're not bad workers, they're not bad parents. They are simply poor, and much of our efforts here are aimed at alleviating poverty.

In 1987, I ended up testifying at a city council hearing on behalf of a Bank on Cleveland ordinance, which was sponsored by then-Councilman Ray Pianka, who was also the founding director of the Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization. The city deposited half-a-billion dollars each year in banks that would agree to lend money for mortgages in these neighborhoods in an effort to revitalize the inner city. After the meeting, Mr. Pianka told me about a job at the community-development organization, which I applied for and got.

Ten years ago I became my organization's assistant director, and nearly two years ago, the executive director. Our annual budget is $1.7-million, and we get about one-third of our money from the city of Cleveland, another third from Neighborhood Progress, which is an intermediary foundation -- one that receives funds from government agencies, corporations, and other grant makers and gives them to nonprofit groups like ours -- and the rest we earn.

The organization dates back to 1973, and has three areas that it focuses on. We do community-involvement work that includes working with residents and merchants to improve the city parks, gardens, and commercial areas; we build and rehab houses and resell them. Finally we do real-estate development, which includes owning and managing rental units.

When I started with the organization, the real-estate market was dead in Detroit Shoreway. If you could only get $16,000 for a house, the bank won't lend you the money to fix it up. One component of our mission was to create a market where people could buy homes and invest, and where private developers would come in and build new houses. Of course, that is a double-edged sword. Rising property values make it harder to provide affordable housing to low-income families.

One of our concerns is what to do about gentrification and how to best maintain diversity. We really want to maintain a mixed community, but we know that it is the homeowners who are the most involved. So we joined the nonprofit Cleveland Housing Network to take advantage of its lease purchase program, which allows families to pay rent for 15 years and then own the property, to enable low-income families to become homeowners and to become more invested in the community.

Still, there aren't enough resources to create affordable housing. Homes that should have been torn down are now selling for $50,000. But we are committed to taking a holistic approach to developing this neighborhood, and the decision-making process here is very different from what one finds in the private sector. We really try to listen to the community. Of course, that can be challenging -- if you have 10 people in a room, there will be 11 opinions about the best way to proceed. Usually we can find enough of a consensus that people can work together, and that's very important for many reasons, including practical ones. I've seen other neighborhoods that have had years and years of conflict between the poor and those who want to gentrify a neighborhood, and as a result they have been far less effective and productive at what they are trying to do.

When I was a young kid, my family lived in public housing. I had no idea that we were poor. I had food and clothes, but knowing now the challenges that low-income families face, it makes me cherish the fact that we had a decent place to live and that awareness had deepened my commitment to provide affordable housing for low-income people.