Reviving Cleveland's Commercial Corridors: Analyzing the Storefront Renovation Program, 1983-2016

In shrinking cities, commercial district decline has mirrored other patterns ofdepopulation and deindustrialization. Uneven development has emerged asthe prevailing spatial pattern for shrinking cities in recent decades.Cleveland’s Storefront Renovation Program (SRP) is a local historic preservation-based strategy focused on improving commercial corridors. In thispaper, we investigate whether the urban geography of the SRP aligns withtheories of uneven development in shrinking cities. Using address-level dataof projects and investments from 1983 to 2016, we analyze the spatialdistribution using hot spot analysis, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, anda neighborhood typology. Overall, we find the SRP program moderatelycontributed to uneven development, and increasingly so in recent decades,with clear clusters of investment in gentrifying neighborhoods and downtown Cleveland, while also supporting reinvestment in White, working-classareas early in its history.