Immigrant City

By Brian Barth

The Thomas Jefferson Newcomer Academy on Cleveland's west side bustles with energy. More than 30 languages can be overheard in the schoolyard, among students who hail from nearly as many countries. Since the school opened in 2010 as the Cleveland Metropolitan School District's dedicated English immersion campus for immigrants and refugees, attendance has swelled from 200 to more than 900 today. Meanwhile, the surrounding neighborhoods of Stockyards and Clark-Fulton have continued to endure the blight symptomatic of working class communities throughout the Rust Belt: boarded-over homes and businesses, overgrown lots, and a paucity of economic prospects.

In 2014, a survey from the Metro West Community Development Office, a local nonprofit group working to revitalize the Stockyards and Clark-Fulton neighborhoods, found that within a half-mile radius of the school there were 162 vacant homes, more than half of which had been condemned, and over 90,000 square feet of vacant commercial real estate. Since 2005, 31 percent of homes in the area have been foreclosed on. Organizers wondered: Could the entrepreneurial energy of immigrants and refugees be harnessed to revitalize the neighborhood?

The organization was already working with refugee resettlement agencies to provide housing and social services support for newcomers across its service area, but in 2015 began a coordinated effort to acquire and redevelop abandoned properties around the pre-K–12 school to make them available at affordable rents to refugee families, and empower immigrants to establish small businesses in the neighborhood. Six homes have been renovated and occupied thus far, with seven more under construction and 50 in the pipeline.

Dubbed the International Village, the area is now officially recognized as part of the Connecting Cleveland 2020 Citywide Plan. The new residents receive job training to help place them with local employers. One, Josephine Jukoryan, will open the doors of her own business this spring: Jojo's African Market.

"The reality is that this neighborhood has been a landing spot for generations of immigrants since the founding of the city," says Anthony Bango, an economic development expert at Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization, the parent organization of the Community Development Office. "So projects like the International Village make sense as way for Cleveland, and other Rust Belt cities, to try to turn all those toxic [real estate] assets into positive assets by rebuilding the community from the bottom up." Bango is also the director of the International Village project.

Two resettlement employees from US Together and a neighbor pose with members of a Congolese family on the porch of their new home in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood of Cleveland's International Village. US Together is an Ohio-based refugee resettlement agency that offers initial placement, employment, and medical services to its clients. Photo courtesy Metro West Community Development.

A refugee works in a community garden near International Village. Photo by Evan Chwalek, US Together.

Laying out the welcome mat

Cleveland isn't the only Rust Belt City taking this approach. In 2011, Dayton, Ohio, in the midst of massive immigration boom, became one of the first cities in the nation to complete a "welcoming plan" to address the needs of its immigrant population, which includes strategies to support neighborhoods that were fast becoming hubs for immigrant entrepreneurship, organizing town hall events to improve dialogue between U.S-born and immigrant residents, and recommendations for educating immigrants about social services and ESL courses.

The internet is awash in studies showing how much more immigrants tend to contribute to local economies than the taxpayer dollars required to support them with social services, a fact underscored in the White House's 2011 "Blueprint Building a 21st Century Immigration System" report which noted that "Immigrants started 25 percent of the highest growth companies between 1990–2005, and these companies directly employ an estimated 220,000 people inside the U.S." The report also noted that "a 2007 cost estimate by the Congressional Budget Office found that a path to legalization for unauthorized immigrants would increase federal revenues by $48 billion but would only incur $23 billion in increased costs from public services."

In Dayton, the influx of immigrants has helped reverse several decades of severe population decline and tax revenue losses. Civic leaders there have not been shy about publicizing such numbers to garner support for the welcoming plan: The city's immigrant population increased 40 percent in 2011, leading to $15 million in state and local tax revenue in 2012 and well over $1 billion annually in local business income.

In presenting the plan to the city, Dayton's mayor at the time, Gary Leitzell, acknowledged that not all of his constituents were in favor of branding Dayton as a "welcoming city," criticism he sought to defuse by clarifying the plan goals: "Some extreme conservatives are opposed to the plan because they have entirely set their focus on the issue of illegal Hispanic immigrants and not on the thousands of legal immigrants that are already located here from many different nations," he wrote in a blog post. "This [plan] is not about harboring illegal immigrants or drawing illegal immigrants into Dayton. ... [The] plan is designed to enhance the potential of Dayton as a competitor in the global economy by attracting immigrants who bring new ideas, new perspective, and new talent to our workforce. In order to reverse the decades-long trend of economic decline in this city, we need to think globally and recruit the very best from around the world."

New Affordable Housing Opportunities in Cleveland

In 2015, Cleveland's Stockyards and Clark-Fulton neighborhoods were in decline, with more than 150 vacant and largely condemned homes. The nonprofit Metro West Community Development Office began buying and rehabbing those homes, all within half a mile of Thomas Jefferson International Newcomers Academy, and renting them to immigrants and refugees at affordable rates. Currently, the nonprofit is working on getting more than 50 homes ready in the area now known as International Village.

Sources: City-Data.com, Livecleveland.org; Graphic by David Foster.

Changing times, shifting trends

American civic leaders have long viewed a steady flow of immigrants as fuel for economic development. Historically, the vast majority of first-generation immigrants arrived through the portals of "gateway cities," like New York, Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and tended to cluster around urban manufacturing cores. Most were of European descent. But over the last half century, an increasing percentage of immigrants have arrived from regions other than Europe and far greater numbers take up residence in smaller cities and towns, often working in low-wage service-sector jobs.

After a long period of decline that started during the Great Depression, the immigration rate rose dramatically after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act put an end to national origin quotas. A record 14 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) arrived on American shores between 2000 and 2010, though as a percentage of the population the recent immigration boom is slightly less pronounced than that of the early 20th century, when new immigrants comprised 13 to 14 percent of the population.

The difference today is that immigrants are flocking to parts of the country with historically small immigrant populations. For example, between 1990 and 2010, a period in which the national population of immigrants roughly doubled, the immigrant population grew by 525 percent in North Carolina, 445 percent in Georgia, 430 percent in Arkansas, and 389 percent in Tennessee.

Illegal immigration has declined slightly since 2010, according to a study published in the Journal on Migration and Human Security, though the immigrant share of the total population has risen from 12.9 percent to 13.5 percent over the same time period says the Migration Policy Institute. Nearly three fourths of illegal immigrants hail from Mexico or Central America, and more than half reside in California. While the total numbers of refugees is currently low compared to some periods in the 1980s and 1990s, the number leapt 22 percent between 2015 and 2016, when 84,994 were admitted, as President Obama raised the annual quota in response to crises in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Today, one in four children in the U.S. has at least one foreign-born parent.

"We need urban planners to help communities navigate these changes and guide the conversation about how everyone, including newcomers, can fully participate economically and be civically active," says Rachel Peric, the deputy director of Welcoming America, a nonprofit founded in 2009 to support cities in attracting, embracing, and planning for immigrants and refugees.

Peric says 85 local governments across the U.S. are Welcoming America members, and nearly 30 of these have established welcoming plans in the last several years, often in conjunction with local planning agencies. Indeed, many civic leaders feel they are in competition with other cities to attract immigrant groups they see as essential to economic vitality, a trend that is especially prominent in Rust Belt cities where population has declined.

Politically, such efforts have become highly charged since President Donald J. Trump's election last year, as they run counter to the administration's stance on immigration. Cleveland's Bango says the president's executive order to temporarily halt the flow of refugees coming into the country (which had been suspended by the courts at the time of this writing) has forced him to focus on recruiting immigrants for the International Village, rather than refugees.

And talk of a wall along the southern border and increased deportation efforts seem to have many newcomers questioning the American creed of "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," long ago emblazoned at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.

Steve Tobacman, the director of Global Detroit, one of the 20 Rust Belt region economic development initiatives in Welcoming America's network, has witnessed a rapid shift in attitude among the immigrant entrepreneurs he works with. "I recently spoke with a Pakistani businessman here who is seriously thinking of delaying his company's launch to consider moving to Canada," Tobacman offers as an example, adding that it only reinforces the need for civic leaders in Detroit to make it clear that they value the contributions of immigrant communities. "No American city that I know of has been able to rebound from a population loss without strong immigration growth. It seems to be almost a necessary condition."

Detroit's decades-long population decline has continued in recent years — but not in terms of immigrants, says Tobacman. From 2010 to 2014, the city's U.S.-born population shrank by 5.3 percent, while the immigrant population swelled by 12.3 percent. Tobacman attributes the reversal, at least in part, to the city's efforts to become more immigrant friendly.

In a model similar to the International Village, Global Detroit has worked with a local land trust to buy vacant properties and have them rehabbed for immigrant housing. The properties are selling for $5,000. Current residents don't want them, says Tobacman, "but immigrants are interested in them because they are going to put their sweat equity into it. And they are happy to do it in neighborhoods that are so distressed that most developers won't touch them. So it's a perfect fit."

Planning for immigrants

Immigration planning is not traditionally thought of as a subdiscipline of urban planning, though that may be beginning to change. Anna Kim, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and one of the few planners in the nation whose academic research focuses on immigrant integration, says housing ordinances are one arena where cities may inadvertently discriminate against, or at least appear unwelcoming, to certain foreign-born groups. For example, she says density regulations often prevent extended families from cohabitating — a cultural norm in many non-Western countries.

"Many immigrant groups have different family structures that could in some cases be considered overcrowding in terms of local ordinances," says Kim. "So it's important to look at how policies are written and enforced to ensure there is not a disproportionate impact on a particular [ethnic] community."

Kim, the author of a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Planning Literature, titled "Planning with Unauthorized Immigrant Communities: What Can Cities Do?" says that planners have been slow to join the urban immigration conversation, but are beginning to step up. At least four planning schools around the country now offer courses focused on immigration issues, says Kim, who has personally been involved with such planning efforts in Norcross and Clarkston, two small cities in suburban Atlanta where the majority of the population is foreign born.

Non-citizens, including legally present green card holders, are non-voters, she notes, meaning they need alternative means for their voices to be heard. "How do we reach out to these non-citizen communities with civic engagement mechanisms that are not about voting? I think that's a real question for planners," she says.

Peric says cities that don't make such efforts may find that foreign-born residents "vote with their feet," and seek out more welcoming communities. "When we send the message that people don't belong, it effectively excludes them from civic participation, which means we're leaving that energy and vitality on the table and not getting the most out of our communities," she says.

Brian Barth is a Toronto-based freelance writer with a background in urban planning.

Conceptualizing Untold Stories

Artist Kathryn Clark, a former urban designer, tells local stories of foreclosure through a 14-quilt series. For more of her work, including an embroidery series on Syrian refugees, see kathrynclark.com. Interview by Mary Hammon, Planning's associate editor.

Cleveland Foreclosure Quilt, 2011. 25" x 60" cotton, linen, recycled denim and embroidery thread. Dark areas (holes) represent foreclosed properties; parks are in green.

Tell us about your planning background.

I worked at a small architecture firm in San Francisco after college, working on residential projects, including a master plan for a large parcel of land in Livermore. Peter Calthorpe's The Next American Metropolis was a constant reference. I soon realized my love of map making and preference for conceptual design. So I went to Peter's office in Berkeley and asked for a job. Though I had no experience in urban design, Peter took me under his wing.

What was your inspiration for the quilt series?

After leaving planning in 2004, I kept tabs on real estate trends. I noticed an uptick in foreclosures in places we hadn't seen them before: upscale neighborhoods, second home markets, and suburbia. Seeing statistics instead of maps made the crisis easy for people to ignore. Quilting is an approachable medium that allows me to show the intimacy of the crisis. Showing foreclosures as holes cut into each quilt conveys the harsh loss of security and comfort, something statistics alone can't relay.

What's happening with the series now?

I completed the foreclosure quilts series in 2015 with a large quilt of Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood for the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery. Its preservation as a historical object will hopefully offer a reminder to future generations about this significant housing crisis.