 Thank you for attending this session on social inclusion through advocacy and change to Cleveland case studies. Today's speakers will be Jessica Wobig, Vellison, and Laura Syrocki. Jessica Wobig is an architectural historian with more than a decade of experience. They're based in Cleveland, Ohio and work as a cultural resources consultant. In 2010 their career began as an AmeriCorps member with the Cleveland Landmarks Commission. Today they carry on their service by providing professional volunteer services to underrepresented communities facing urgent preservation needs. Vellison is an advocate for LGBT plus rights and community leader. Vellison has cultivated a burlesque and drug entertainment industry for more than 19 years in Cleveland, Ohio. This year they were recognized as the top 24th performer in the world. Their indigenous Mexican ancestry inspires their creative works as well as their advocacy for heritage conservation. Vellison became aware that club Azteca was proposed to be replaced by new mixed-use construction. They moved to action by providing research, planning, and outreach support to the club Azteca Coalition and are working on further conservation efforts including archiving the club's collection. Laura Syrocki is a Hesler resident for more than 20 years. Laura has applied her expertise in botany as an educator cook and gardener at Hannah Perkins School in Shaker Heights since 2000. In 2021 the first demolition and infill construction was planned for her historic district. She took action by organizing advocacy campaigns for historic preservation along with the Hesler Coalition and brought attention to the urgent need for increased preservation planning in University Circle neighborhood. Today's objectives will be to explore how implicit bias affects the development process and preservation practice. We'll be examining two case studies, the Save Club Azteca and Key Hesler Historic Campaigns. We'll seek to understand how local preservation processes affect social inclusion outcomes. We'll be applying methods for heritage conservation that promote social inclusion and local preservation and the real estate development process. And lastly we'll be discussing next steps organizations to support and sharing out. What you see in front of you is a blue dot. I would like you to spend about 10 seconds exploring and observing and looking and seeing this blue dot. Pay attention to how you feel, things you observe and what you see. Much like history, when you look and see a blue dot and you're told to look and see a blue dot that is all you're observing. Some of you may have spent the last 10 seconds wondering to yourself, why is she asking me to look at a blue dot? Others may have noticed the shade of the blue dot that has a slightly different outline and that is not necessarily within the center of the screen. Heritage is wide and spans a diverse audience. All of us come with our own cultural bias and observations and histories. Much like the blue dot, history asks us to look and see more than just one central idea. To understand that purpose, we have to sit back and ask, what is real estate development? Real estate development is a business process. It builds new buildings, it removes historic buildings, and it often leases existing buildings. Whereas historic preservation is an endeavor that seeks to preserve historical significance. Historic preservation overlaps with real estate development because we try to save and preserve buildings. However, there's a different aspiration when we come to our own implicit bias. An implicit bias is a form of bias that occurs automatically and unintentionally. It's in all of us, we all carry it from different angles. It affects our judgments, decisions, and behaviors. Not only is real estate development and historic preservation activities that we do that require our judgments, decisions, and behaviors, but with that we carry an implicit bias on how those things get done. And today our session asks that we apply social inclusion, which is a process for improving the enhancing opportunities with access to resources of voice and respect for rights of underrepresented groups. When it comes to the practice of historic preservation and our overlapping relationship with real estate development, we must overcome our own implicit bias by acknowledging that exist and then seek to ask within our own communities and in our own endeavors, are there social inclusion processes within what we're doing? Because in order to succeed as historic preservationists, we must ensure that we're connecting underrepresented groups with the same resources that we ourselves as historic preservationists have. Jesse Jackson, a politician and civil rights activist, has been quoted as saying inclusion is not a matter of political correctness. It is the key to growth. And with that idea, we're asking historic preservation that in real estate development we're seeking to grow opportunities and access and improve the quality of lives for our own communities. So it's not an idea of being politically correct or not when we're talking about applying processes like social inclusion to our work. It's how we grow, it's how we thrive, and it's how we ensure that the same opportunities are presented within our own greater communities. Development projects include need, opportunity, resources, and an effective place. That effective place, and our purpose as historic preservationists, is a historic resource. The stakeholders involved may be the developer, the agency, either a funding agency or permitting agency, advocates either for or against the project, and again that silent voice of the affected historic place. Influential factors in these projects include media and public engagement. So not only what's being shared, but how it's being shared and received. The ownership of that property, if it's a private resource, is the owner willing to ensure that social inclusion is being considered as part of this real estate development. The condition and economic surrounding the care of this historic resource are also pivotal in how real estate development is carried out within historic preservation. For underrepresented groups, this means that disinvestment within communities has often presented preservation as a hindrance to progress due to the condition of resources, in many cases beyond the control of the underrepresented groups being affected by these developments. Other influential factors include policy. Are there policies in place that require social inclusion to be considered as part of a development? The intention of the agency or developer, the perception of is it politically correct or not to carry this out, and the support either to save or remove a resource often depends on the voice that is being presented at the table. That's where historic preservation comes in. Historic preservation can lead social inclusion and real estate development. The sphere of influence has been long and laid out since historic preservation has resources and knows how to move agencies and advocates together and how to support developers in preserving historic places. Ultimately historic preservation can help raise up the voice and ensure that social inclusion is applied into real estate development. As this figure presents the city of Cleveland, the gold circles are national register listed properties and the black circles are the local landmarks. As you'll see they're clustered within the center of downtown, which is at the top middle of the screen, and they extend west to east along with a commercial corridor. Many of these designations resulted from the need to apply for federal funds or incentives, such as historic real-buildation tax credit. If it wasn't for federal incentives that helped incentivize historic preservation, many of these designations would not be on this map today. But you'll see that local designations are slightly farther out into the neighborhoods, but they're still largely clustered around this commercial area. So what that shows us is that a large geography of this historic city, which has more than 100 years of development, is absent from designations. In Cleveland, there's 360,000 plus people, of which 34.2 percent identify as white alone in comparison to the 59.3 percent who identify white alone at a national level. 11.9 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino in Cleveland. This is compared to the 18.9 percent who identifies Hispanic or Latino at a national level. Of the more than 90,000 historic properties that are listed in the National Register of Historic Places, less than 8 percent represent Black, Indigenous, and people of color, or other underrepresented groups, including women. In Cleveland, there's currently 345 landmarks that are standing today, of which 29 historic districts also stand. None of those historic designations represent historical Latino heritage in Cleveland, and none of them represent social achievements such as those carried out in the mid-20th century on Hesla Road. This call to action will provide you with two case studies where leaders within the district of Cleveland, and the historic preservation community in Cleveland, have moved social inclusion as part of preservation within real estate development projects. Hola, me llamo Belacine. I became aware of the Ezeca Club project through the Young Latino Network and the Comet de Mexicano. This landmark has been in Cleveland for quite some time, and there was a multitude of people trying to save it, but there seemed to be no unison in voice, and that's where me and Jessica Wobbing came in. The club was located in 5602 Detroit Road, and it also was known as Casa Mexico, which was one of the central locations that organized in the 1920s. Felix Delgado was the first president of the club. When it was purchased, the building was on Detroit Avenue. In 1951, it was rehabilitated and opened its doors in 1957. This put Latino history in the forefront in the city of Cleveland. Not only Mexican American history, but the history of Puerto Ricanos and Cubanos in Cleveland offered. We connected with the Latinos in conservation there to come to find out that we were present as early as the late 1800s in Cleveland as Latinos through farming communities in the Bracero movement, which touched Lorraine. The significant representation of American Latino heritage in the immigrant stories were abundant, and they had a multitude of people involved in our community from oral stories, sharing through different websites online, and also just families sharing stories from both the Puerto Rican and the Mexican community with each other. It created access to heritage conservation in a connection to education, training, and employment opportunities within the field. Also, it grew historic preservation perspectives to include heritage conservation here in Ohio that is looking pretty dim at the moment because we haven't touched on the idea of historic preservation and heritage conservation within one bout. When we got involved with the Osaka project, we knew we were fighting an upheld battle that already was what it was going to become, which was a educational campaign to try to save any piece of the building. Our timeline went from Waverly and Oak Development publicly announced following several years of planning and development of the site on 2421. The community rally happened on 2421. The landmark's conceptual design happened in 22521. The landmark's approval was on 4821. The building documentation was 6121, which when we entered the building documentation, we found a 20-foot Mexican flag that was hand-painted in stone that used to be used for the celebrations of Cinco de Mayo and the Mexican Independence Day. Flag dated circa 1930s and was prepared for proper storage by the Pivot Center Intermuseum Conservation Association, ICA, on 71321. This discovery held for us the meaning of where are these things now and can we start something in conversation with our local governments, councilmen, about social justice and heritage preservation. An anticipated discovery was the sign recovered on 8121, the day of the clean-out for the building for the Casa Mexico sign that once hung at the Ezeca Club. That sign predates into 1930s. Club Esteca demolition happened on 10-14-21. One of our main goals was facadesism, preserving the face of the building and hopefully building around it, but unfortunately we were not so lucky. We received a large amount of support from different groups from the Comité Mexicano, the young Latino network, Nikki Antonio, our state senator, and there were many accounts in the media of trying to save this Mexican landmark. When we pushed forward to try to recognize that we have been here and we will always be here, it put forward the thought process of what other history is here from Mexican individuals. Once diving into this, we come to find that it's more than just the Club Esteca. It was the whole of the Latino community as Club Esteca served as the landing mark for people that needed aid. They were Latino and spoke Spanish. When the Puerto Rican migration started, they were here to help them aid them and help develop their neighborhoods as well as the Cuban migration. More baracedo movement members started coming and staying, and the Mexican community started flourishing even through the 1930s of the Repatriation Act. When we're talking between the 1915s and the 1960s, Latinos exploded in the United States, and Ohio was no different, but nobody was talking about the preservation efforts. The discovery of the flag was something that I can only express into tears as a Mexican national. Finding our flag in foreign cities, especially when it was made by our people, is extremely rare, especially in this size to find something this large. But these things belong in a museum. Now forward, we're moving into the discussion of what this preservation and rediscovery comes through the outcome that we had. So partnerships, we formed partnerships with the Esteca Coalition. Multiple different organizations joined together and merged to be part of each other. So it was Club Esteca, Comita Mexicano, the Mexican American Historical Association of Cleveland was created, and it's currently working on putting forward the Mexican American history in Cleveland. We started talking about preserving projects, including building documentation, Ohio History Marker collection of digitization and archival efforts to not lose our history again. We're trying to work with different agencies on this, but the work is slow, and we're still trying to connect with anybody that will be willing to hear us. A potential of Latino Heritage Museum of Cleveland. This is the ultimate goal. One of the biggest conversations we've been having with people is this is not just something that we donate to our local museums here, because those museums are still buried in institutionized whiteness, and it's not accessible to Latino people. So us being able to also be our own storytellers and our own preservers and our own educators of our own history is incredibly important, especially when we talk about social justice and preservation. This is incredibly important because a lot of people learned that we have been here and we were not trying to just take space here. We were trying to educate people into understanding that Mexican communities have been here for a very long time, and we were sewn into the fabric of the city. We're hoping that continuing to present things like this will have a thinking cap in all the individuals that watch it, and say what can I do to help this be of fruition? What we can access to go ahead and have this become part of our community? The African American Museum exists, and so can a Latino museum exist? We see these in communities like LA and Chicago. Often the pushback is that we don't have that type of community here, but that's where I beg a differ. How we embrace a whole of Cleveland, not just parts of it, because in the end of the day, telling the stories of everybody that took hand into building the city is what we should be doing as historians, not just choosing and picking history from a building that held, once upon a time, a community of people that were challenging everything that was happening to just make the American dream possible. My name is Laura Soraki, and I am not a preservationist. I am a resident in Cleveland's first historic district. I've been living there for 24 years, and it's a quaint little brick and woodblock road in an arts, eds, and meds district, and for 50 years the land has been very desirable to the institutions around it, and we've kind of lived in this little historic district under constant pressure because of that, because of the value of the land. So the historic district I live in is called the Hesler Court and Hesler Road Historic District, and it was designated as Cleveland 1st Landmark District in 1975 by a group of architecture students at the nearby university who saw the value of the district for a couple of reasons, because it represented one of Cleveland's first middle-class neighborhoods in this traditionally very wealthy area called University Circle. Traditionally on Hesler we have a street fair called the Hesler Street Fair, which was started to bring awareness in 1969 to the district, which was being ignored by the city and eventually would probably have been demolished had it not been for this group of students and some committed residents who actually before they even got the district designated a historic district decided that preservation needed to be a priority in Cleveland and work together to get the landmarks department implemented in City Hall, so you could sort of essentially say that the preservation movement in Cleveland started on Hesler Road. Concurrently with preservation work there was a large tenants union movement and affordable housing and safe living condition movement to hold landlords accountable in the district. It sort of became apparent in the 70s that the largest local landlord was who was a representative of the institutions was allowing their properties to go to demolition by neglect and that's when the students and residents living in the district said we have to stop this and ask for a safer living conditions and preservation and so from fast forward from 19 the mid 70s to the present the district has remained largely unchanged. It's been a haven for artists, musicians, students, students, art students and music students and then students at the local university and sort of it's been occupied by a combination of long-term residents who created a housing cooperative in the early 80s in order to maintain affordable housing and students and the housing on Hesler is actually still pretty affordable relative to the rest of the university circle where for the most part all the historic and affordable housing has been demolished for the expansion of institutions so we Hesler is sort of the last remaining affordable housing in the district and Hesler represents a I would say an area that has been able to hold on to its housing. We have linked arms actually with surrounding communities both Little Italy and the Wade Park and Magnolia Historic District just outside of Hesler a traditionally African-American district to try to hold the institutions accountable and ask for responsible expansion and not at the sake of our communities. We became threatened this let's see I'd say a year ago in February of 2021 with a high end market rate housing development a micro unit apartment development in the historic district so in January of 2021 I received an email from the local institution that manages the development in university circle that there would be a development coming to Hesler Road and naturally I panicked because it's a tiny historic district and it's very fragile has a 115 year old infrastructure and getting a taste of the development around university circle I knew that it probably wasn't going to be affordable and likely wouldn't fit within the district and sure enough on February 10th the developers and the CDC the local CDC hosted a Zoom presentation and revealed their plans to build a 26 micro unit apartment building in the backyard of a historic home in the district the meeting was held in webinar format there were 50 or so participants none of whom we could tell who they were we we there were some residents president president on zoom um we knew by the the comments and question or the questions they were answering in and asking in the um q and a but we couldn't see or hear each other and we had no idea who the other there were about 15 residents and property owners um tuned into the meeting and the rest of the people in the meeting we had no idea who they were except the panelists so it was a presented to us as a done deal and naturally we gathered and linked arms we raised a lot of ruckus and we asked our council person to help us out we reached out to the landmarks department we reached out to our city planner um we tried to create some kind of awareness about the fragile nature and the historic um significance of our fight for affordable housing and safe housing on hessler and pushed for more pushed to have a voice in in the development process which was coming at us at a rapid pace um it became clear pretty quickly that there was very little we could do in spite of 1500 petition signatures and 70 letters of opposition to the development um and we felt very isolated in our fight and and misunderstood because of I would say maybe a local urbanist movement to to have development in cleveland at all costs and so we um we were feeling pretty weighed down and not making any headway in in the design review process and in the landmarks commission reviews until on social media we had a couple of preservationists reach out to us and I had no awareness of preservation work really preservation as a career or a preservation movement I lived in a historic district that I cared very deeply about I was able to live there because um you know I'm working class and I would not have been able to afford to live there had it not been for the people before me who fought for the housing cooperative to keep rent affordable there um so I was living and enjoying this very living in and enjoying this very peaceful community um with my other well working class and middle class neighbors and um the bubble sort of popped when when the development was presented to us I would say there was a lot of pressure to get the development approved it was political and though a lot of people behind the scenes told us that they disagreed with the development as it was proposed in our historic district um they couldn't say anything because of their relations within the city and it's the the way it would jeopardize them if they spoke up on our behalf so we were left alone a lot until um Jessica Wobig and Preservation Ohio reached out to us and because they had caught wind of our struggle on social media and when the preservationist reached out to us it was the first time we really felt understood it was for the first time we weren't just being told we were nimbies opposing development and getting in the way of progress um somebody there were preservationists there who understood our social and historical struggle they understood the fragility of the district they understood how jeopardized our um our lifestyle would be they understood the significance of our street fair which it we call it a 50 year old street fair but in the struggle to save and preserve Hasler we found out that it's actually much older than than 50 years old dates back all the way to 1949 and well and maybe further um we also found out through the struggle a lot more history about Hasler we learned that there was a long history of artists designers architects musicians and writers living on the living in in the area um and we had learned that they planned uh development in the late 20s and they were all going to move off of Hasler together so they could have a community an artist community nearby and actually that community did get developed um but the people on Hasler stayed they didn't move off of Hasler together in the 20s um but it was it's been an interesting um journey learning about the history of Hasler and and though it has this sort of identity as being a hippie kind of 1969 counterculture place it's actually a much older counterculture place I guess what we started to do in working with Jessica and working with Preservation Ohio is get some language and figure out ways to get attention for the district and we quickly learned through our struggle that not only was Hasler jeopardized but pretty much all historic districts and historic buildings in Cleveland don't have the kind of protections afforded them by the landmarks ordinance so we linked arms with with preservationists and other his other neighborhoods around Cleveland and have started a sort of city-wide movement to bring awareness to preservation issues throughout Cleveland as they relate to architecture but also to social history and we're in as it stands now the the um on Hasler the developer did not renew his variances for the micro unit apartment building though he's keeping the parcel that he created out of the backyard of a historic home open for development um and we are just asking to be involved in the process to be brought to the table about what goes on in terms of development in and around the district and we're asking for preservation plan and in doing all of this work and connecting with other neighborhoods around the city in historic districts and outside of historic districts we're finding out that there are people who want to preserve their heritage architectural and cultural heritage all over the city and slowly little by little we're trying to get to work with the city and get the planning department and the landmarks department to understand the value of um these pockets of culture and history and Cleveland and why it's important to preserve those um it's uphill battle but I think the thing that we have gained is we have a team we have a kernel of a movement um we have we are giving voice to people who have not ever had a voice we are reaching out to people who for example have a historic buildings and their neighborhoods that want to get preserved um and we're we're trying to you know say to the city and and to the powers that be that um though we are grassroots and and maybe we don't bring the kind of financial resources to the table that developers and large institutions bring to the table we are what makes Cleveland Cleveland and snuffing us out will be to the detriment of the city in the long run um and so you know it's we're working it's it's happening it's it's difficult it's tiring I know I don't have to I know the preservationist all know this work is hard um and um but we have each other we have a lot of diversity and we have passion and once we find each other I think we can shift the way preservation is done in Cleveland now that you've heard the stories of clubba's tecca and hessler road and the fight to preserve Cleveland's heritage in your communities examine social inclusion policies either existing or where needed go ahead and ask your certified local government your city your municipality or even your state historic preservation office what social inclusion policies are available to help you preserve your communities or uplift and encourage the preservation of underrepresented histories we hope you understand from this that local preservation processes are structured and affected by social inclusion outcomes this means that we must take action to ensure that social inclusion is applied to historic preservation we ask that you demand methods for heritage conservation that promote social inclusion and local preservation and the real estate development process these methods are already available through tools that have been practiced in historic preservation for more than 50 years lastly we ask that you monitor available resources and opportunities and share out within your community together network together we're able to do more if you'd like to help support some organizations that are working in Cleveland the Comita Mexicana de Cleveland was founded in 2016 to promote Mexican art and culture identifying services that will help support Mexican residents and support academic and social research related to Mexican community in the greater Cleveland and northeast Ohio area donations are welcome for the Jardin Mexicano a new Mexican cultural garden in the Cleveland cultural gardens young latina network founded in 2002 by a group of hard-working and forward-thinking young latina professionals and powers the latino community through leadership development and civic engagement joining join as a latinx member and ally membership is available if you are interested in learning more about Hesler and the work we're doing to keep Hesler historic you can visit the web at www.heslerstreet.wordpress.com and there's a link to our change.org petition we're still collecting signatures there and you can read a little bit about Hesler and connect with us if you have any questions Dr. Stephanie Ryberg Webster with the Love and College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University stated recently in an article that crafting and inclusive preservation requires understanding and changing the use a distribution of power within the field it means acknowledging the preservationists are not powerless idealist and that through their work they have the power to undermine progress towards a more just society or preferably to uplift and shine a light on the full story of our community's cities and nation