In the depths of the Great Depression when urban housing conditions were desperate, Ernest J. Bohn, then in his early thirties, emerged as a champion of housing reform. Bohn, who had come to Cleveland from Hungary with his parents in 1911, was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives just as the stock market collapsed. Dismayed by the effects of poverty and substandard housing on urban social problems and impelled by his deep Catholic faith, Bohn resolved to bring change. By 1933, as a city councilman, he had written and shepherded to passage the first state public housing enabling legislation in the United States, resulting in the formation of the Cleveland (later Cuyahoga) Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA). He drew attention to the plight of the poor by supporting Father Robert B. Navin’s study of Cleveland’s Cedar-Central neighborhood, “The Analysis of a Slum Area in Cleveland,” which exposed the cost to the city of allowing such conditions and became influential in shaping national public housing policy. One of the fruits of his labor was Cedar-Central Apartments, one of the three earliest public housing projects in Cleveland to garner federal funding, and among the first nationwide.

The conditions that led to Cedar-Central Apartments as a first step toward remediating the conditions that Fr. Navins’s study exposed were a product of rampant urban growth and social inequality. Cleveland’s population had doubled to nearly 800,000 in the first twenty years of the 20th century. This increased the housing inequities in the city, with many people being forced to take residence in substandard housing that was technically unfit for human habitation. Nowhere were conditions worse than in Cedar-Central. Cleveland’s answer was to launch a landmark project. As Bohn put it, Cleveland would serve as the U.S.'s “housing laboratory.”

In 1933, the New Deal set aside $150 million for government subsidized housing. Thanks to Bohn’s efforts, the CMHA built the Cedar-Central Apartments on eighteen acres between East 22nd to East 30th streets over a two-year period. The new Cedar-Central apartments would be built after some 200 slum dwellings were razed for the new project. The complex was completed in 1937 at a cost of $10 million, and the apartments reflected that investment. The project opened up some 650 apartments for occupants to vie for. Each unit had a refrigerator, a gas range and steam heat. The complex also housed two playgrounds for children, and featured manicured lawns. The apartments themselves had ceramic tile and chrome fixtures, and they boasted the possibility of a cross breeze.

The reception for what became a massive and decades-long project was mixed and the outcome was much the same. While offering temporary relief to Clevelanders, the Cedar-Central Apartments housing project ultimately cemented a divide in access to and perception of public housing depending on race. Not yet a year into the public housing project, citizen action groups and newspapers were demanding justice for the racial segregation at the coveted Cedar-Central Apartments. Only eight Black families were selected for Cedar-Central versus 650 white families. Many Black families waited months without hearing of their selection or rejection, and when they went to make inquiries about status, it was either said the decision was still in process or that they should consider another of Cleveland’s housing projects, Outhwaite.

At the start, Cleveland offered a lifeline to some low-income families that most needed it in the form of affordable and comfortable housing. But by the start of the 1970s, the slum conditions that public housing was supposed to be ridding America of were now plaguing it, thereby worsening or perpetuating cycles of poverty and poor standards of living. Amid the drying up of federal funding in the Nixon years, new proposed housing projects were put on hold in 1973 and the government instead transitioned to using rent vouchers for low-income families. Those rent vouchers are commonly known today by the name of “Section 8.” Many of those buildings, seen as positive living opportunities in 1973, are still in use today in urban centers and suburbs, including in the City of Cleveland and the Cedar-Central Apartments.

Litigation over the Cedar-Central apartments continued. In 1972, a ruling originally brought forward by the NAACP and the ACLU and Legal Aid Society on behalf of “Negro and non-white tenants” that were denied equal opportunity for public housing in newer and integrated sites within and around Cleveland showcased the gap within Cleveland itself—the east side being predominantly Black and having limited job opportunity and the west side, which was largely white, having easier access to suburbs and jobs. Litigation over where the CMHA was allowed to have buildings continued. In 1982 a landmark ruling over where the CMHA was allowed to put public housing made integrating public housing into the community nearly impossible. Due to the conservative government at the time, funding for HUD and public housing was cut at the federal level, and little was done toward promoting integration of old and new housing, or of the ethnic/racial divide of its tenants.

The future of public housing is a far cry from its first iterations. The social and political climate today is inconducive for creating public housing projects as the carefully and thoughtfully designed spaces they were in the 1930s. When Cleveland built its first housing projects, they were located in neighborhoods that afforded people the opportunity to go easily to work and near opportunity-rich areas. This phenomenon is one possible explanation for the fallen glory for the Cedar-Central apartments and other housing projects in Cleveland. With limited economic opportunities in the city, it can be difficult to position the housing in places that foster economic prosperity for its residents, and ergo, economic growth for Cleveland.

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Irish immigrants flocked to Cleveland after the potato famine in 1848. Along the Cuyahoga River in Ohio City grew a concentrated Irish neighborhood known as Irishtown Bend. It was so named because of the Irish shantytown located along one of the curves of the Cuyahoga River. This neighborhood centered on Riverbed Street, but ranged from West 25th Street eastward to the Cuyahoga River, and between Detroit Avenue southward to Columbus Street.

Irishtown Bend was located in the heart of Cleveland's industrial infrastructure. A significant number of Irish worked in the shipping industry that thrived along the Cuyahoga River as part of the extensive Great Lakes trading network. For Irishtown Bend, the shipping industry came in the form of ore docks used to load and unload the massive freighters that traversed the Great Lakes.

Although essential to Cleveland's industrial well-being, trade, and Irish population, the Cuyahoga River proved to be its own worst enemy. Cuyahoga literally means crooked river, and it earned a sinister reputation because of how treacherous it was to navigate, particularly in a 500-foot freighter. In 1901, Cleveland discussed straightening the Cuyahoga River to alleviate the problems of navigating it. The first detailed study did not begin until 1912, and work did not occur until the mid-1930s, continuing intermittently into the 1950s.

When discussion of altering the Cuyahoga River began at the turn of the 20th century, the fate of the river and those who depended on it became untenable. Proposed plans involved cutting land to make river bends wider, or completely re-rerouting the river. The possibility of eminent domain threatened the homes and livelihoods of those living and working along the river.

The approval of an improvement plan in 1929 called for the widening of the river at Irishtown Bend, which required the demolition of the shanty homes erected on its hillside. Dredging of the river did not occur at Irishtown Bend until 1938, but even after this initial alteration, the Plain Dealer reported that Irishtown Bend was still a nuisance. By the mid-1950s, what was left of Irishtown Bend's residential area was either dilapidated or abandoned, and the area was razed in 1958 to prepare for a second attempt to alter the river.

River improvement was not the only reason for razing the Irishtown Bend slums, however, as a $10 million public housing project had also been approved in an attempt to revitalize the neighborhood. The highlight of the housing project was a pair of 16-story buildings called Riverview Towers, which still prominently stand. Unfortunately, the housing project did not fulfill the proposal's intent to revitalize the neighborhood. While the entire housing project was intended to attract residents of diverse stages in life, young and middle-aged suitors mistook the project as one exclusively for elderly residents.

Local magnate Jeffrey P. Jacobs planned further development of Irishtown Bend in 1989 but a geographical survey revealed the remainder of undeveloped land at Irishtown Bend was too unstable for any further development. In 2019, federal funds enabled the stabilization of the river bank and the transformation of the Bend into a riverside park to proceed.

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In Cleveland, several public housing projects (Cedar-Central, Outhwaite, Lakeview Terrace) preceded the development of Valleyview Homes Estates. However, Valleyview was among the first (along with Woodhill and Carver Park) to actually be built and overseen by the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA). Completed in 1940 on a bluff overlooking the Cuyahoga Valley in southeastern Tremont (then known as South Side), Valleyview was comprised of two-story brick buildings containing a total of 582 apartments . The project cost nearly $3.5 million and featured playgrounds, a community center, and craft shops. Local artists commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) created numerous murals and other pieces of art, which were placed in various spots throughout Valleyview.

Despite the 1949 passage of a city ordinance banning racial discrimination in public housing, Valleyview—like virtually all public housing on the west side of Cleveland—remained segregated for decades. Integration was finally achieved in the early 1970s. By this time, however, federal limits on the percentage of a family's income that could be collected left too little rent revenue to cover the costs of maintenance. CMHA thus became more dependent on federal money; but the government provided only 90 percent of funds required for maintenance and less than half of other expenses. At Valleyview, upkeep faltered, and arson, drug dealing, and physical deterioration increased. More and more residents left. By 1978, police officers refused to enter Valleyview without two-person patrols.

By the 1980s, Valleyview clearly was on its last legs. The death knell was Clark Freeway, the highway that had caused so much controversy two decades earlier when County Engineer Albert Porter sought to route it through Shaker Lakes. That effort failed, but by 1990 the Ohio Department of Transportation had successfully run Clark Freeway—now the Troy Lee James Freeway (I-490)— through South Tremont. The massive Clark Fields park was carved in two and most of the original Valleyview Homes were razed. In 2004, buoyed by a $19.6 million Hope VI grant, the remaining units structures were torn down, and construction began on Tremont Pointe, a mixed public/private development.

Perhaps the greatest living legacy of Valleyview Homes is its collection of WPA art. Several of Valleyview’s sculptures are on display at Tremont Pointe. Also at Tremont Pointe—behind a large wall of glass at the complex's northwest corner—is the terra cotta Valleyview Mural. Designed by Leroy Flint and executed by Henry Olmer, the mural is essentially a topographic roadmap of the old Valleyview neighborhood. Other pieces formerly housed at the site are on view at Cleveland State University and CMHA’s headquarters on Kinsman Road.

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The population of Cleveland rose dramatically during the first two decades of the twentieth century as European immigrants, African Americans, and others came to find work in the city's burgeoning industries. As in other American industrial cities around this time, these impoverished new arrivals and their families often lived in slums and tenements since quality housing was scarce and unaffordable. This concerned reformers, who feared the effects that unhealthy and potentially immoral living conditions were having on the poor.

The energetic and pioneering efforts of city councilman and housing reformer Ernest J. Bohn, who served as head of the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority from its inception in 1933 until the 1960s, ensured that Cleveland would be a leader in public housing projects. Even before the city secured millions of dollars of federal money in the mid-1930s to build three of the first public housing projects in the nation, Bohn and other reformers conducted studies of housing conditions and sought ways - with only mixed success - to form public-private partnerships to encourage new home construction.

Depression-era federal programs spurred the development of public housing in Cleveland, providing the money needed to turn reformers' ideas into reality. The Public Works Administration (PWA) made Cleveland the site of the first federally funded projects in the mid-1930s when it authorized the construction of Lakeview Terrace, Cedar-Central, and the Outhwaite Homes. The city celebrated the completion of the projects in 1937 with festive ceremonies. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was in attendance for the dedication of Lakeview Terrace.

Built into a sloping hillside overlooking Lake Erie and the industry lining the old mouth of the Cuyahoga River, Lakeview Terrace was designed to be an ideal environment for struggling, though not necessarily destitute, families unable to find affordable housing elsewhere in the city. A multi-purpose community center, playgrounds, plenty of green space, and several murals heightened its attractiveness.

Reformers intended Lakeview and the other projects to be temporary stopping off points for upwardly mobile families. In direct opposition to the unhealthy, vice-filled slums, they would engender positive American values and strong, healthy children. Indeed, at their inception, the prospect of moving to public housing was a source of excitement, optimism, and relief. This was the promise of public housing at a time when home ownership had yet to become a realistic option for most working-class Americans.

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The Outhwaite Homes Estates, along with the Cedar Apartments and Lakeview Terrace, were the first three public housing projects to be completed in Cleveland. The three projects were also among the first in the nation to receive approval and funding from the federal government's newly created Public Works Administration in 1935.

Outhwaite's brick Art Deco buildings, grouped around grassy courtyards, originally contained 557 units. Expansion occurred only a few years after Outhwaite's 1937 opening as demand for public housing in Cleveland continued. The need for new housing was particularly great within the African American community, whose growing numbers were leading to overpopulation in the Cedar-Central neighborhood, the city's Black enclave. Initially, African Americans seeking public housing could only live at the Outhwaite Homes – in Cedar-Central – as officials sought to keep each housing project racially homogeneous.

In 1938, brothers Louis and Carl Stokes, who went on to noted political careers, moved to the Outhwaite Homes with their mother, Louise. Louis Stokes was a U.S. Congressional Representative for nearly three decades and his brother Carl became the first African American mayor of Cleveland in 1967. Both brothers credited their time at Outhwaite with having a role in their success.

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