Abstract
Gail Long recalls her early education which eventually led her to Cleveland’s Near West Side. Long worked as a community organizer at the West Side Community House, where she helped organize community block clubs that dealt with various issues in the neighborhood. She focuses on the affordability and gentrification of the Near West Side along with her involvement in Tremont’s Merrick House. Long recollects various initiatives she was a part of like the efforts to stop the privatization of Metro Health along with the Black Lung Disease Project.
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Interviewee
Long, Gail (interviewee)
Interviewer
White, Bali (interviewer)
Project
Near West Side Housing Activism
Date
8-9-2024
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
76 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Gail Long interview, 09 August 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544014.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1337
Transcript
Gail Long [00:00:00] Sure. Alright.
Bali White [00:00:02] Hi, everybody, it’s Bali White here with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. Today we are at the IRTF offices. It is August 9, 2024. I’m here with Gail Long. Gail, how are you?
Gail Long [00:00:17] I’m good.
Bali White [00:00:18] Awesome. Could you introduce yourself, when and where you were born?
Gail Long [00:00:22] Well, as you said, my name is Gail Long, and I’m a resident of the Cleveland area since 2000. Oh, I’m sorry. 1965. And I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Bali White [00:00:39] Nice. So can you kind of talk a little bit about, like, when you came to Cleveland?
Gail Long [00:00:50] I came to Cleveland in 1967 to go to graduate school and social work at Case Western Reserve. And I’ve been here ever since. I had an opportunity to leave. But when you put your roots down in a place, you know, for as long as I had been here, it’s kind of hard to leave. You know, your support system is here. And at that time, I had, I was a single mom and my daughter was in school and she liked where she was going to school, so we didn’t go. So I’m still here today and I’m retired and, you know.
Bali White [00:01:26] Oh, yeah, awesome.
Gail Long [00:01:27] But my daughter’s not here.
Bali White [00:01:28] Oh, no. [both laugh] So could you kind of talk a little bit about your educational background, sort of like your K–12 experience and then a little bit about your higher education?
Gail Long [00:01:43] Well, I went to school in Honolulu, and I went to, really, from the time I went to nursery school to what was called a lab school. It was a public school run by the university. And you were taught by young people training to become teachers. And as a part of that structure, you had a supervising teacher. So if things just blew up, there was somebody that was going to step in. And I graduated in 1961. And during that time, I was heavily influenced by the work that my parents did. They were both union organizers and stayed with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for their whole careers. And so I was influenced heavily by what they did. It was not just an economic union, you know, just dealing only with wages and vacation and benefits. They also did a lot of stuff in the area of equity, civil rights, fair and equal tax legislation, you know, all of that stuff that influences workers’ lives. And so I took from, and my mother was a social worker. My father was, I don’t know, he was like, I guess you could say a Jack or a Jane of all trades and self-taught. I don’t even think he finished high school. And so we, as I was growing older and thinking, what am I going to do? After high school, I decided I wanted to be a social worker, too, but doing organizing. And so I went to college in a small town in Oregon, small liberal arts college. But the reason I went there was because there was a professor there who had gotten to know my parents in Honolulu when he was on sabbatical. He was a real progressive person, and I decided that, okay, let me go there. And obviously, I did not want to stay on the island either. I wanted to leave. So I went to college there, met somebody, had to get married to him, because in those days, unlike the way you have it, you know, you got married and you went to school and you got a job and you had a baby, all, you know, in what, whatever, order. And so we both came to Cleveland, went to graduate school at Case. It was the one school that accepted both of us with money because neither one of us had, you know, more than twenty-five cents to our names. And so we both went to Case. We were in– I was in a two-year program. He was there, I think, for three years. And my first job was at the West Side Community House, my first real job after getting my master’s degree. I had worked for the county welfare department in the summertime between school years, but that experience and getting the job when the Community House was right down the street were really important parts of, you know, who I am today, in addition to the influence of my parents and my college professor. I would say every Saturday when I went to school, it was during the Vietnam War, the early parts of it. And I was at the post office every Saturday, you know, in a demonstration against the war. So it was, even though it was a small town, there were lots of, you know, people who were pretty antiwar at that time. I wouldn’t say they were all progressive, but they were certainly antiwar. So my first job was at the West Side Community House. I was hired as a community organizer at $1,000 less than they offered the male who turned it down because he got more money someplace else. And interestingly enough, the guy that hired me, we stayed in touch with each other for a long time. He had lived in the concentration camps during World War Two that Japanese people were put in. There’s a fairly large, or there was a fairly large community of Japanese Americans in the Cleveland area who had all been in those campsite and who moved to Cleveland when they were released. And several of them were leaders in the reparations movement. So, you know, they got some money for being unjustly, you know, imprisoned for that period of time. So anyway, he and I stayed in touch. And one day when we were both sitting at a meeting, I said, you know, Shig, you offered me $1,000 less than you offered Don. And I said, that was pretty discriminatory. He says, you know what? I know that’s what I did. And I apologize because I realized that that was pretty sexist. Now, he realized it, but– But, you know, he had been through this discriminatory experience himself, and you would have thought that he would have figured that one out. But, you know, that’s pretty ingrained, you know, that stuff. And to this day, I think some of it’s still out there, you know. Anyway, go ahead.
Bali White [00:07:27] So as a community organizer at West Side Community House, can you talk about some of the work you were doing at that time?
Gail Long [00:07:33] Well, I didn’t– A lot of what I did was not totally exciting. I organized block clubs on these three streets, Woodbine, John, and Whitman, and then 52nd and 54th. And the ones on 52nd and 54th were led by real strong working-class people with, and a lot of Hispanics. They had begun to be able to buy homes because they’d been working in the factories and had enough money to put a down payment. This area was mostly people who were white, ethnic, went to this church and were not the most progressive people in the world. I mean, they were very conservative. They didn’t like the priest over here. In fact, they drove him out because he was too– He was too much of a progressive human being who felt that, you know, people should be, regardless of their color of their skin, treated equally. And poor people were not horrible and, you know, etcetera, etcetera. And the last home in that family just sold in the last five years. I think the son maybe was living there, but there were three houses there, two on one side of the street and one on the other. And they all– They were all related, and they were just nasty, nasty people. But they led the– They led the block club. So, you know, my responsibility was to staff it. And I don’t know that a whole lot of good came from it, but they did deal with issues about how does our neighborhood stay safe and clean and a good place for us to live. And in that day and age, safe meant if you’re Black and you live on this street, it’s not going to be safe anymore. You know, that kind of stuff. And clean meant the guy comes out from the city of Cleveland and shows you how to wrap your garbage and how to put your garbage cans on a ledge so that the rats don’t get in them. A lot of that stuff. A lot of that stuff. And. But whereas the block clubs up here, I mean, they were much more into lots of different stuff. How do we get people registered to vote? That kind of stuff. So there were differences. And then the other thing I did there was. I supervised the first group of VISTA volunteers that were on the Near West Side, and there were ten VISTAs that were national kids that came in from, you know, wherever. And then there were ten that were called community VISTAs that were recruited from the community. And most of them were people who were activists who were poor on welfare. And this was an opportunity for them to get a stipend, which didn’t count against their welfare checks. And that was exciting. I mean, the growth of the Plain Press happened from that. It had been a guy named Charlie Butts is who started it. He’s a developer, former state senator. And then it was taken over by the VISTA volunteers, and it really became a valuable tool. And as you know today, it’s just pretty phenomenal. And there were– So there were people doing that. We were organizing welfare rights chapters on the west side. I had. My responsibility was to staff a group up on 65th Street, and they, you know, they basically came the Community House, and said, we want to start a welfare rights chapter, but we need somebody to help us. So it was a lot of this grassroots stuff that, you know, hung around for a while, but there’s no welfare rights movement in the city anymore, which is too bad, because they dealt with a lot of issues, everything from school supplies to, how am I going to pay my rent next month? And so. And then I had a baby, so I didn’t take maternity leave. I just quit. Yeah.
Bali White [00:11:46] How long were you there for?
Gail Long [00:11:49] Almost three years. It was a pretty busy three years. The VISTAs all had a baby shower for me. [laughs] Even the bull guys came in there, like, oh, God. And then I worked. So when I had the baby, I was like, I can’t do this. I can stay home. This is not me. So I had a couple of part-time jobs in the area, and one of them was with Westside Ecumenical Ministry, which does not exist anymore. And they had an affordable housing program. They bought a couple of homes on 44th or 45th, and they renovated them, and they moved in families. And it was my job to work with the families to make sure that things were working out for them and that they understood what their responsibilities were and what WSEM’s responsibilities were. And one of the women that lived there, her name was– Her last name was Serrano. I can’t remember her name now. Her son is now working for the Cleveland Board of Education as a grants writer, resource developer, and he went to Harvard Divinity School. Really smart guy. Former director at the Spanish American Committee. And so I don’t think they own those two homes anymore. But it was the first attempt that I know of to make housing affordable and available to people as renters because there was no, you know, rent-to-own kind of program at that time. And it was very small, but it. As small as it was, it kind of worked, you know. And then after that, I went half time to Merrick House as an organizer. Then I went to Metro Health to work for two years full time with the Black Lung Disease Project to work with former coal miners to, you know, help them get their black lung benefits, because not, you know, what they did at that time was, you know, oh, no, you don’t have black lung. You smoke. So therefore your lung problems are related to smoking. So anyway, but we did that, and we were, you know, at least we did a lot of education work to tell people, no, this is not true. You know, if you have to appeal, this is how we do it, et cetera, et cetera. And I met a lot of interesting people in that program. It wasn’t just a bunch of Appalachian, you know, hillbillies, as people would say, if they were eastern European, they were Italians. And these were a lot of people that worked in the Pittsburgh area and moved to Cleveland. And so this became their home. There’s no mines around here, but there were a ton of them in PA And then, of course, southern Ohio, West Virginia. There’s a lot of people from West Virginia up here. But it was. I learned a lot that experience, as short as it was. And then I went back to Merrick House full time and stayed there the rest of my time before I retired.
Bali White [00:15:15] I guess, about Merrick House now. So that’s located in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, and it was founded in 1919 and for decades has kind of provided services for many of the people in the neighborhood. Could you kind of share how you got involved there and what some of your roles were?
Gail Long [00:15:32] Well, I met the director at the time. His name was Don Pittaway. You would have loved to interview him. And we were meeting, you know, where Le Petit Triangle is? We’re meeting in the basement of that building because it used to be a mental health agency. And we met there trying to form what became Westside Mental Health. And then eventually, Bridgeway doesn’t exist anymore. Unfortunately, it was the best community mental health program in the city. And we met there and we kind of clicked. And he was getting his master’s degree at John Carroll, and he used to wear this big, huge cross, and he was an Episcopalian. And so we just– We would have lunch together. We’d see each other at meetings. He kind of was their organizer, even. Yeah, he was their organizer before he came, became director, and we would just compare notes, work on joint projects. And so then at some point he says, you know, I want an. I need an assistant director or an organizer, rather. First I was an organizer. And he says, I can– I think I got enough money to hire you halftime. Will you come over and do it? I said, sure, I would like that. And, you know, he was the guy that took risks. If he had 25 cents, that was going to grow into $10,000, you know, he took those risks, and, and he always landed on his feet for the most part. So I went over there and became an organizer and did block club organizing in Tremont.
Bali White [00:17:13] Okay.
Gail Long [00:17:14] The first day I came to work, he’s standing on the street talking to a guy named George Davis, big white guy, and they’re talking about vacant, vandalized, burnt out houses, you know, the same thing that Kathy’s talking about. And he says, we have to stop this. We can’t let it continue to happen. And so I staffed about three block clubs, and then I helped work on the establishment of the Tremont Free Clinic, which came after the one up here, the Near West Side Free Clinic. And so we did that. Those were the two major things. Plus, you know, I was always working in coalition representing Merrick House. And one of the things I learned pretty early on was that you’re never going to do it yourself as an agency. You got to do it in partnership with other people. And the other thing I learned, which I have preached for my– Well, I’m 81 now, so I preached it for a long time. You do things with people, you don’t do things for people. If you want people to be empowered, you got to do it with them. You do it for them, ain’t never going to happen. So that’s what our philosophy was there. Whether you were a parent in the daycare center or somebody getting their GED or a kid coming to the gym, you know, it was sort of like, what can we do in partnership with you to make it work? You know, that’s– That was really pretty important, and I know that. And then the other thing that I personally never did, and I remember speaking to a graduating class at Case. I never call somebody a client, that to me is demeaning. You know, if you’re a lawyer, that’s one thing, right? But you’re a social worker and you’re doing things with people. To call them a client or to label them as a client really seems to be to be pretty demeaning. So, you know, I always, that’s another thing that I used to always preach, you know, and I’m not a religious person, but, you know.
Bali White [00:19:28] Yeah, it feels almost transactional when you refer to someone as a client, but.
Gail Long [00:19:33] It just, it just breaks me. Yeah. So then I left for those two years and went to Metro. But let me just backtrack a minute. Mister Davis worked his tail off. He couldn’t read a word, wouldn’t read a word. But he had a good memory. So I would sit and go over the agenda with him, say, okay, George, what are you, what are we doing? He would never accept a paper from me and he– But he knew everything that we had worked on together for that meeting. And it didn’t take me too long to figure it out. This man can’t read, but he has a memory. The custodian at Merrick House, same thing. I mean, he could go and fix that bicycle with no directions at all because somebody showed him how to do it so he could do it. But so anyway, I left for a year and a half, but I stayed on the board. I stayed at Merrick House and stayed on the board. And then in his inevitable fashion, Pittaway says to me, you know what? I need an assistant director. Why don’t you come back? I say, you got the money to pay me? I said, I’m a single parent. I can’t do this on my good look. I don’t have much of that. And he said, you get it, don’t worry about it. What happened, you know, my years at Merrick House were really personally very fulfilling, but I think in terms of what we did at the center in partnership with the people in the neighborhood was pretty good. Where we failed was that we did not have the resources. Go ahead? Okay. We could not raise the resources to buy the empty lots because then we could have developed affordable housing and we couldn’t do it. That’s what you needed. You needed money. Nobody was gonna give you the lot, you know? And these people here gentrified the community here in Tremont, especially here in Tremont, they were buying huge lots for 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 dollars, buying houses to then renovate for $6,000. Well, if you got money and you buy a house for $6,000, you can put easily $100,000 into it. That’s your mortgage, you know? I mean, that’s how they did it in the, in the early days. Now, of course, you can’t touch them for that kind of money, but in the, in the seventies, late sixties, seventies, you could buy stuff for nothing and then renovate it and then change the rent easily.
Bali White [00:22:29] It’s kind of crazy looking at it today. You see, like, some of these houses are very expensive, and the rent prices are only going higher and higher, especially in this neighborhood.
Gail Long [00:22:40] Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the base of these homes, except for the new ones. And I say that the new ones are the slums of the future, because you watch what kind of shit they put in when they build it – take that out – but these are old worker cottages, you know, that they’ve renovated, put new roofs on, put new heating systems in, you know, maybe put new floor, whatever they’ve done. But the core is a worker’s cottage. You know, it’s pretty unbelievable. You know, a lot of them have siding on them now and stuff. You know, you don’t even see what’s underneath the siding, but, and the solidly built places are the churches, you know? But, and there were lots of churches that were heavily involved in attempts to make life affordable and safe and whatever in, in the two communities, because, well, and I’m going to add Clark-Fulton to that because, you know, they knew, based on their own mission, that there was important things to be done and to partner with people on Clark-Fulton got added in to our bailiwick in the, in the sixties. Pittaway’s office was on Clark Avenue, and that’s everybody that got pushed out here and pushed out in Tremont. That’s where they went. Either they went further west or they went south and west, and south and west was Clark-Fulton. And so a lot of the problems that you saw here and in Tremont back then, they’re in Clark-Fulton. You know, they’re trying to build it as a Hispanic village. I think they’ll have some success, maybe business-wise. But in terms of housing and stuff, it’s the same kind of housing stock, smaller homes for the most part, and becoming more expensive because they think that Metro’s gonna do all this stuff and they’re gonna gentrify it, and, well, they’re not gonna gentrify it in that area, in my opinion. The rents will go up, and there’ll be some new apartments and stuff, but I don’t think it’ll be gentrified like this because the sexiness of the homes doesn’t exist over there. So if you drive through Clark-Fulton, you’ll see it right away. And pretty much the gentrification stops at the bridge that goes over Fulton. You know, over to North of Clark is what we call that.
Bali White [00:25:18] But you mentioned displacement. Can you kind of talk about when you started noticing, or I guess, I guess noticing when this area was displacing like different people?
Gail Long [00:25:32] Oh, I’d say it started in the seventies.
Bali White [00:25:35] Sure.
Gail Long [00:25:35] And if people were, and we’re not talking large numbers of people. I mean, there was a, the family that opened Heck’s restaurant and had an apartment on the, on Bridge. On the other side of the street is the old Community House. There was a house over here. There were two or three houses on the block that Heck’s is on. Okay? Yes. And so those, those happened. Those places could have been abandoned already, but maybe not. Maybe they bought them from whoever owned them. And it was renting because there was a lot of rental property and people could take at that time what little they got from buying and getting the property sold. And they could still move and make a down payment. But you can’t do that anymore. You just can’t. So I think I noticed it in the seventies in Tremont. Certainly in the seventies. And as, and you know, landlords were burning their houses now. I mean, we had a huge demonstration with Chris Warren when Chris Warren was the organizer at Tremont West Development Corporation out on Lake? Lake, what was it? Lake. Yeah, Lake Avenue. Because that’s where Mister Nader lived. And we sent him to jail because he was found guilty of intentionally setting fire to his homes and committing insurance fraud. So he went for insurance fraud. And.
Bali White [00:27:09] So would you say that was something that was kind of happening in this area?
Gail Long [00:27:12] Yeah, yeah. And I think it was happening in this area too. I’m not as familiar, but I sure knew about it in Tremont. I mean, there was a fire almost every weekend. And what the city did at that kind was a house would burn down and they would just take all the rubble and put it in the ground. They wouldn’t haul it off, which they do now. And, and so within months, couple years, you had just a big pit. And it was dangerous because kids would play in the empty lot and there were these holes. It was really, really dangerous. And so we, you know, that’s why Mister Davis said, we can’t have these. Number one, we can’t have these abandoned houses. And number two, if they burn down, we can’t have them just like this because it’s not safe. [crosstalk] So. Well, [Wind picks up] you know, if a settlement house has the luxury of having an organizer, the work that you do as a settlement house is much broader. And I’ll give you a couple examples then it’s really kind of limited to service, only service. So Merrick House, when I was there, we had daycare, we had adult education, we had recreation, we had after school programs, we had a senior center. Okay? And all of those things were prevention stuff. You know, let’s make sure that Gail doesn’t have to go to a nursing home. So as an organizing program, we did. I’ll give you a couple examples. We worked in coalition with a lot of different organizations and individuals to make sure that Metro Health did not go private. And we felt pretty strongly that if it went private, it was never going to be the hospital that was open to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. It was no longer going to be a public institution. Okay? And that– And we worked on that for a couple of years. We figured out very early on we only needed two votes of the three county commissioners, and we had those two votes. I mean, they could have done whatever they wanted over there, but the commissioners weren’t going to let them do it. And, you know, they gave them at that time, $24,000 a year as a subsidy. You know, now the 32 million that they get is kind of chicken feed, you know, compared to all the money that they get from insurance companies and all that stuff. So that was one thing. And we involved, as I said, a lot of individuals and a lot of institutions. And the person that set that off was a woman who was a community vista at the Westside Community House. Bright, bright, bright woman. She saw a little article in the Plain Dealer about how the president of Metro wanted to do this. He wrote an op ed piece about how that was the only way that Metro was going to be able to survive the change in the healthcare economic environment. Dorothy saw that. She whipped out her own, was great. And we started forming this coalition immediately. You know, we were just avid. We were like a rabid dog, you know, and, and we won. But we’ve always had to watch carefully. I still go to metro board meetings. I think they dismissed their CEO today. Yeah. And we fought a couple other battles to protect Metro. Mike White wanted to close McCafferty. He wanted to kick Metro out, and we went and we fought it because here was an outpatient clinic for anybody to go to, including STD’s and birth control and all kinds of stuff. And we won that battle. Joe Cimperman was the councilperson at that time. And then there was another one where Metro said, well, in order to cut costs, we’re going to eliminate the outpatient pharmacies. One of the groups in our coalition was the Legal Aid Society. And at that time, they could do stuff, you know, they could do stuff that they can’t do anymore because, you know, the Republicans make sure of that. So we, I’m sorry if you’re a Republican. I don’t think you are. But anyway, he did some research and he came back to us. Oh, and then he wrote a letter to the head of the Health and Human Services Department of the federal government, and they had a civil rights office. All of these various departments have a civil rights office. And he sent it to Chicago, and the guy bought his rationale. Have you ever heard of the Hill-Burton Act? The Hill-Burton Act [Hospital Survey and Construction Act of 1946] is a federal legislation from the fifties, and it gave money in the form of loans to hospitals all over the country to expand. It was, it was bricks-and-mortar money, but they had to, you know, pay back some of that money. But there were certain restrictions. And one of them that we didn’t know about, and I sure Metro didn’t know about, was that if you had Hill-Burton money, you had to provide community service in perpetuity, which is on that sheet of paper I signed. And in one of those community services was an outpatient pharmacy that we won. They couldn’t do it. What?
Bali White [00:33:35] Can you recall, like, the year this was?
Gail Long [00:33:40] That may have been in the nineties, okay, that may have been in the nineties because the privatization was in the mid eighties. And whenever Mike White was in office, that was like the early 2000s, something like that. That was the other one. But so that was one example. And then the other one was peaceful school desegregation. And Kathy talked a lot about that. Merrick House, West Side Community House, and several east side settlements were part of a group called WELCOME [West-East Siders Let’s Come Together]. And we all, I mean, we all got ourselves educated to the ninth degree about what did it mean? And we did that education in the community. We had, you know, community meetings and, you know, parents didn’t want to hear about it. White parents did not want their kids to get on a bus. And I don’t call it busing. I call it transportation because it was part of the remedial order that said, one of the ways you’re going to desegregate is you’re going to transport kids. You’re not going to bus them, you’re going to transport them. And busing is like– It creates all kinds of sparks, you know? And we didn’t want a Boston to happen again in Cleveland. And so we did a lot, a lot of work. I mean, I had more night meetings than I can even count, talking to people about it, about the order, what it meant, giving them examples of the intentional segregation that happened. And you know what? I think some people listen, you know, but if they could move, they moved because they did not want their kids to get on a bus to go to school. Some of it was racist, but some of it was just, you know, I don’t want my kid to get on a bus, go to school. It’s dangerous, you know, because the way they did it was they paired neighborhoods, and Tremont and Clark-Fulton were paired with Glenville. At one time, this was paired with [pauses] maybe Collinwood. I don’t remember. I don’t remember. And so. And then WELCOME was founded by a woman named C.J. Prentiss, who eventually became a legislator, and her husband, Michael Charney, who was a teacher in the system. And we had three bridge walks, one before the kids were desegregated, one the next year, because they were done in phases, and then a third one. And we ultimately got all kinds of important people to do it, you know, to be a part of the march, you know, the leader of the religious communities, the leader of the school board, you know, and I’m sorry, I take that back. The administrative leaders, the school board, led by a guy named Arnold Pinkney, fought it the whole way. They hired a guy to implement. They did that. They were, you know, they were going to go to jail if they didn’t do that. But they still kept appealing and appealing and appealing and spending all the taxpayers money on something that was not going to happen. And then eventually it was dropped. I mean, it was not– It was not a success. I don’t think the schools are all segregated again, although there are many on the west side that are quite big now because the population has changed. And that, I think, in large part was about school desegregation, because Black kids came to the west side schools. You know, they got a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and eventually they got married and they stayed on the west side, or parents moved to the west side so their kids wouldn’t have to get on a bus because you had to go three years on the east side, three years on the west side, three years on the east side. So parents, if it was west side, was their turn or they would move to the west side, west side parents would not move to the east of– That did not happen. That did not happen. That was the racist part. So it was very interesting to watch. I mean, the west side is, I don’t know about necessarily, Ohio City, but it’s totally different now. Black families originally were segregated in the public housing projects, and they– And to a large degree, they still are the low income because they can’t afford to live here. I mean, the Black people you see walking around here, they’re at St. Herman’s. They live in Lakeview [Lakeview Terrace]. I might be more cynical than you want to hear, but you can weed that out. So, to me, those were things. And then, I guess I would give you a third example, when in 2003, in coalition with lots of people, we formed a group called Able, but now it’s called Northern Ohioans for Budget Legislation Equality. And what we do with people who are most impacted by the state budget is help them, work with them to get their voices heard in Columbus, you know, save Medicaid, food stamps, all of the different programs, mostly health and human services and housing, affordable for them or available to them. And. Something going on there?
Bali White [00:39:09] No. Yeah, no, the recorder. I’m just making sure that the sound levels–
Gail Long [00:39:14] Okay.
Bali White [00:39:15] The wind sometimes–
Gail Long [00:39:16] Oh, I–
Bali White [00:39:17] Catches on here.
Gail Long [00:39:18] I gotcha. So they– We’ve been going since that time. We’re still doing it now. We’re preparing for the next budget, and we always deal with a line item on the housing trust fund.
Bali White [00:39:31] Okay.
Gail Long [00:39:31] Because the housing trust fund is what makes dollars available to programs like the Cleveland Housing Partnership, it’s called now, has with the, which is the lease purchase program. So a lot of families are able to get into that program, rent to lease over a 15 year period. And then the network works with them to make sure that they have an affordable mortgage. What does it mean to be a mortgage holder? What does it mean when you have to start paying your own insurance, your own taxes, that kind of stuff. And so one of the big items for us now is, you familiar with kinship care?
Bali White [00:40:09] Little bit.
Gail Long [00:40:11] Kinship care is for foster kids who are fostered by a relative.
Bali White [00:40:16] Okay.
Gail Long [00:40:17] Some of it’s formal, and some of it’s just, you know, I’m gonna move in there with my grandma because my mother’s on drugs, and I don’t know where she is. And mostly it’s situations where something’s going on with somebody’s son or daughter, niece or nephew. But if it’s an official placement, meaning that the juvenile court has gotten involved and said, okay, Gail Long, you are, you now have guardianship of your four grandchildren, minor grandchildren. I am going to get less money than you are as a regular foster care person off the street, because, after all, I’m the relative and I should be doing that. I want to do that, and I don’t need anybody, you know, I mean, I have to feed you, I have to clothe you, I have to send you to school, I have to drive you to the doctor, whatever. But one of the things that we learned early on was that a lot of kinship care providers don’t want to earn the same benefits for one reason, and that is you as a regular foster care provider, you have to make sure your house meets certain standards. And a lot of the kinship care providers have owned their homes for 30 years. They don’t have the money to add on another bedroom, you know, that kind of stuff, or put another bathroom in or whatever the requirements are if you have four children. So we’ve talked to the legislators about that. We’ve given them a lot of information and said, look, Bali and Gail got to get the same amount of money, but Gail, you know, cannot afford to sell her house and still watch these four kids, you know, and I– So we’ll see, we’ll see. I mean, I think we have some traction here. If nothing else. What we want is for Gail to be able to get subsidies for clothing, furniture, that kind of stuff, which the increased money that you get is going to allow you to buy that stuff. We’ll see. So there we go down there to Columbus and we testify. We work with other groups, like, for example, the housing trust fund COHIO, which is an affordable housing group. C-O-H-I-O, they come up with the agenda. You know, they want the housing trust fund to be doubled or whatever. And rather than us try to recreate that wheel, we just go ahead and accept their I position and put it in our platform, you know. And the other, another one is food, emergency food. That’s another big one. So anyway, so that those are other things. And then the other thing with Tremont, I think that’s important to talk about is we spent a lot of time being involved with the development corporation and the various committees that they had around housing. And as I said, we didn’t have the resources to buy the property, but we tried really hard to make sure that when things got built, some of them were affordable. So when CMHA decided to privatize the management of Valleyview, we worked really hard to make sure that, and they made a mixed income place that the majority of those people who wanted to come, that the people who were, well, relocated, they weren’t displaced, relocated could come back if they wanted to, number one. And number two, that you limited the number of upper income people that could live there. And we were somewhat successful. I mean it meant, again, a lot of meetings and stuff like that, but.
Bali White [00:44:23] Could you recall kind of the years this was happening?
Gail Long [00:44:28] This was in the 2000s. Let’s see, I retired in 2008, 2006, so it’s right before that. And they’re doing the same thing now in Woodhill Homes. Yeah, they’ve got them, you know, they’re tearing them down. They’ve built some new places to relocate because the east side did not have the resources to relocate people unless they were willing to put money into rehabbing. And you know, CMHA does not have unending resources like they used to at all, unfortunately.
Bali White [00:45:05] So I guess we’re gonna kind of switch gears a little bit of. So I kind of want to talk about Kentucky Gardens, if that’s okay.
Gail Long [00:45:15] Yeah, I saw that there, I thought, well, that’s a ringer.
Bali White [00:45:18] So you’re involved in the steering committee there, I guess-
Gail Long [00:45:22] That’s coming right from Fiala, right? [both laugh]
Bali White [00:45:26] Well, so the Kentucky Gardens, could you kind of talk about your role in that and what it has in this community?
Gail Long [00:45:40] The Kentucky Garden for most of us is extremely important. I mean, not just because it’s a place for us to go play in the dirt, but it’s a place where, that stayed green, it has not been developed. And the councilman, Cimperman, passed some legislation that says it will remain green space at least until the, whoever, mayor decides that they want to build some more apartment buildings and, for rich people. But it has its limitations and we’re trying to address that. You know, at one time, when I first joined in the mid seventies, from the day we became the current iteration of Kentucky Garden, it was a mostly working class group of people, and people who had been in the neighborhood, worked and or lived in the neighborhood for a long time. There were very few yuppies at that time. We call them now, they’re Gen-X or whatever. But that has changed over the years significantly. So I believe that the majority, pretty close to the majority of the people, there are younger people who come in here or empty nesters who moved back. [wind picks up] And so what we’ve tried to do is develop a program that brings in one that diversifies the garden because it’s mostly white people. I mean, at one time there was myself and two Hispanic guys and maybe one, I mean there were like a handful of us that were not white. And so we, we have this program where we’re working with Stella Maris. What’s it called? Come on, Gail. I mentioned it. St. Herman’s and the nursing home across the street. And we were going to work with one other group, but they decided they couldn’t do it this year. And so they bring people who are receiving their services either as residents and, or treatment and coming back and come one or two times a day, a week, whatever. And we have a mentor that we are giving a stipend to, to work with them because it’s such a transient population, you know, there’s got to be somebody that offers them some continuity. So it’s, I think it’s working out fairly well. And we did. I bring one of those. We have, we take flyers around, like in March before our new gardeners meeting, to the corporation, to the Spanish American Committee, to two or three other places where we know they’re Black or Brown people, Black and Brown people, encouraging them to come. We have gotten a few, I mean, I would say as opposed to five years ago, we’re probably doing better, but not great. But, you know, the important thing is that it stays as a resource, that you get people who are there, regardless of their young or old, to take ownership of it without saying, this is my property. And some of them do that, you know, so that they invest in it, you know, so, I mean, I think it’s an important resource.
Bali White [00:49:26] So kind of back to, like, affordable housing in the Near West Side. So can you kind of define what some of these central issues are involved with affordable housing and housing justice in general in this area?
Gail Long [00:49:45] Economics is clearly one of them. You know, I mean, who can afford the rents here, Tremont? You know, you go where you can afford the rent. I don’t think home ownership is all that it’s cracked out to be. I mean, I’ll never own a home again after I sell my home. Forget it. I think that’s an issue because I think that ends up being economics for people. Just because you now own your home doesn’t mean you can afford everything you got to do to maintain it. I think that family size is another issue, you know, is what around here? Will it accommodate families of two, three and four kids? I think that the segregation that goes on in the public housing estates is another one. And I think just, I mean, you know, you just say it. Gentrification. I mean, it’s a clear problem, you know, I mean, it’s not that this neighborhood is nothing more solid than it was 30 years ago because it is, but at the same time, there’s just something not right about making a community unaccessible to a large portion of the population. And so what you end up doing is you end up ghettoizing people in another neighborhood, you know, and so that’s where, I mean, at some point you’re going to find the abandoned homes, you’re going to find the burnt-out homes. And large portions of the east side are already that way, not because of gentrification, but because landlords just abandoned it. You know, they just abandoned it. And, and there was, there was some affordable rental housing in the inner-ring suburbs, you know, Garfield Heights, Bedford, East Cleveland. And of course, East Cleveland is a disaster. A lot of people who could afford to buy went to Euclid, you know, Bedford, Bedford Heights. So I, you know, I think it’s. I think those are some of the issues, you know, and fortunately, I don’t know if everybody would agree with me on this, but I think that neighborhoods, because so many people have fled to the suburbs, the outer suburbs, that the inner-ring suburbs, the landlords will rent to a broader number of color of people because they want to get their revenue. So, I mean, you see a lot of African American families in Lakewood now. There’s always been a large number of Middle Eastern people there. And, you know, it’s, I think those things are changing slowly but surely, but you’re never quite sure if it’ll remain solid. Will those landlords let their properties, you know, go to go to pot, you know, I don’t know. You know, we hope that they’ll do a good job with it, you know, and that whoever the city, I mean, the city does virtually no housing inspection. I mean, that just didn’t have to happen in this community if they did housing inspection, you know, which made it just ripe for people leaving, you know, I mean, if my landlord’s not going to even make my heater work, you know, you know, and Shaker Square, you see it now in the apartments, you know, it’s just a – Buckeye – a mess. You know, that was a pretty solid neighborhood for a long time. Not anymore.
Bali White [00:53:25] My family came from the Buckeye neighborhood. Moved to the suburbs.
Gail Long [00:53:29] Yeah, I used to live in a Woodhill Homes, you know, when I was in school. And it’s just really different, you know, it’s really different.
Bali White [00:53:42] So kind of back to gentrification. Can you kind of talk about the areas that you see are, that are very, very gentrified and kind of what used to be and what it is now?
Gail Long [00:53:53] Well, we’re sitting in one of them, right?
Bali White [00:53:55] Oh, yeah.
Gail Long [00:53:55] I mean, the Near West Side is, has really, really exploded in that way. And now it’s not so much the individual houses, but the big apartment complexes along Detroit, and every single vacant lot is now one of these, you know, up and down houses with slanted roofs and, you know, whatever. I mean, and there are not very many school children. And if there are schoolchildren, they go to private schools. And I used to always say to myself, can you imagine what the Cleveland Public Schools would be like if everybody that came and moved here did not move out when their kids were school age or when they were school age and they wanted to stay, had sent them to Cleveland Public Schools? They would not be in the mess that they are. Absolutely would not. And one of the reasons that I didn’t, you know, people say to me, well, why do you live east when you always are on the west side? I said, because, first of all, I need a place to go home and sleep because I was one of these stupid people that, you know, never, never went to sleep. And then secondly, I wanted my daughter to go to a public school, but I knew early on that [wind picks up] the Cleveland Public schools were not where I wanted her to go. And I thought to myself later, like, you know, I shouldn’t have stayed here and been a loudmouth parent because maybe, you know, with other loudmouth parents, it would have made a difference. But nobody did that. And I know, I mean, all of the good people, they all sent their kids to Ignatius or Laurel or Urban or wherever they sent them, you know, and it’s, it’s like, that’s educating your child is one of the most important things you’ll ever do. And I understand it, but it was, you know, it’s like, this is a big what if for me, you know, so besides the Near West Side and now, I mean, it’s really, it’s gone out to like 70 something, and it’s gone south to Lorain. And even a little bit further in this area to what, the Monroe, I guess it would be then certainly Tremont, which has now gone south, south of Clark, picked up right in that area. And there’s definitely, there’s some children there, but, you know, they, because they go to Merrick House daycare, but once they hit school age, they’re, they’re somewhere else.
Bali White [00:56:33] Oh yeah. Very rarely do I see, like, a child ever when I’m in those neighborhoods.
Gail Long [00:56:38] Yeah, exactly. And then I would say it’s happening pretty rapidly in Detroit Shoreway. Oh, beyond that, let’s see, there’s some in Shaker Square. Same thing with the kids. You know, Shaker Square is a lot of just empty nesters, too. Tremont has its share of empty nesters, as does the Near West Side. I guess those are the ones that pop up.
Bali White [00:57:17] So how would you describe your role, or roles, in attempting to preserve this neighborhood and other neighborhoods in the Near West Side as an economically diverse area?
Gail Long [00:57:27] Well, I failed miserably. America has failed miserably, I think. I mean, I don’t– I mean, when you don’t control the market, you can’t control whether or not people stay there or not. You encourage them to. You try to find solutions. It’s hard. Yeah, it’s very hard. And that’s why I think what West Side Community House did, they sold the building and they moved out to 92nd and Lorain. You know, it’s a strong, working-class, low-income community. People come to their senior center. People come to their girls’ programs, you know, whatever. Merrick House should do the same thing, but I don’t– They own a valuable piece of property. They could probably get enough money to relocate. And in my opinion, we did move to Clark-Fulton. We made a big– Made a big facility there. But then the director has to stand on the street corner and raise money continually, which is how I describe what I did. It was a woman named Mary Ann Petrie. She’s no longer alive. She used to kid me, she’d say, okay, you’re on my corner. You go over there. That’s your corner. We just used to laugh about it all the time because she understood, you know, you don’t do it on your good looks, you got to go raise the money, hard cash. And we had a beautiful site, multipurpose thing, where you could have moved the entire Merrick House. But the people that followed me didn’t understand that you had to do the work to keep it open. They said, well, you signed a lease. That wasn’t good for Merrick House. Well, yeah, but we weren’t going to be able to move there without assigning that lease. And, you know, that’s why I busted my ass, to make sure we had the money to keep it open. But if you didn’t do that, you weren’t going to be able to keep it open. You know, it meant keeping the senior center open, the youth programming open. And that’s where we had the most successful, youth programming, because we were in an area where there are lots of kids still, Tremont didn’t have them now, they would come back at night because the guys could drive a car and say they would come and they would use the gym at night. It was always packed, you know, [wind picks up] so I think that those are things that at least places like Merrick House, you got to consider. I mean, are you, how long can you maintain your presence in an area where the population isn’t, you know, daycare, if the parents have a car. Yeah, that’s, that’s one thing. And keeping the rec center, the gym open at night. But GED, where most people walk, you know, they’re not gonna have anybody. Yeah.
Bali White [01:00:20] So I guess, looking back, is there anything you would have done differently.
Gail Long [01:00:27] Besides rob a bank? [both laugh]
Bali White [01:00:29] No. [laughs]
Gail Long [01:00:33] Well, I would have pushed the board to look at relocating a little bit more. I would have probably pushed more discussion on a merger. We certainly had one that discussion, but neither boards wanted to do that. It’s real important that people maintain their identity, especially when you’re as old as we were and are rather. And, you know, and you had recognition. You know, I would. Well, you know, when you, when you take yourself out of a situation, you have no right, in my opinion, to come back and say, this is how you ought to do things. You know? I mean, there’s certainly things, I’m glad we did, and I would do it all over again if I could, but I guess those would be the two things. Yeah. And then the housing thing, like I said, you know, I got facetious things that, other than rob a bank, I mean, the model that came out of all of that for affordable housing was the Cleveland Housing Partners model, the lease purchase program. But it seems to me that if people are getting public subsidy to develop, then 10% of the units affordability based on the median income for the greater Cleveland area, that’s crap. That’s a high number, like in the forties, you know, 40,000. Well, how many poor people earn 40,000? They don’t. So there’s got to be be a way that we could have figured out an additional model of, you know, saying to the city, no, you know, we should have organized hundreds of people to go down there and say, no, 10% is not good enough. And it needs to be of that 10% that the median county income, then you got to have at least half of those numbers for people who earn, you know, the poverty level overload. You know, I mean, one of the really good things was the, is the Permanent Supportive Housing Movement. That’s great, but that’s, that’s single adults. You know, there’s no kids in there. I think there might be some couples, but there’s no kids, you know, and a lot of the stuff that’s available is for people who have disabilities. But what about just mom and pop who go to work every day and try to keep a roof over their kids head and they don’t have any obvious disabilities, you know, they’re not receiving a disability check, you know, I mean, so there’s, I just don’t think, I don’t think we, I don’t think we’ve worked hard enough on that, you know, and I don’t know that there’s the energy to do that now, you know, because we got some models and they’re easy to work with.
Bali White [01:03:36] And so I guess, moving forward, what are some things that you believe necessary in the fight for formal housing, overall housing?
Gail Long [01:03:47] You got to recruit them. Oh, yeah, I’m taking a break for him. [recording pauses and restarts] He’s great. He’s great.
Bali White [01:03:53] So I guess back to where we were kind of. What do you believe to be necessary in the fight for affordable housing and overall housing justice?
Gail Long [01:04:03] Well, I sort of gave you a little bit of that, right? Is there a will for the, on the part of the development corporations to want to economically integrate the community? Is there a will? And I don’t know that I see that. I don’t know that I see. I think they give it lip service, but, you know, they are, at the end of the day, working with developers who are going to do whatever they want to do unless there’s some strings attached to it. So, you know, maybe we are talking about the state and the, and the city and whoever gives developers money. Maybe we are talking to them about what demands are you going to make to make sure that a neighborhood that is gentrifying remains affordable?
Bali White [01:05:08] So kind of nearing the end of this interview, I like to ask, what advice do you have for anyone who is hoping or thinking about getting involved in some of the work that you have done throughout the years for future generations?
Gail Long [01:05:27] Well, I think what you’re doing is important because the voices like mine are, you know, we’re moving, we’re dying, we’re whatever we’re doing. And unless you know the background and what has preceded you, I think it’s very difficult to try to recreate the wheel unless you know the background. It serves no purpose. You know, I mean, you’ll be able to find out what didn’t work. You’ll be able to find out, oh, this worked, but why didn’t it continue? You know, that kind of stuff. I think that’s. I think history is very important, and you gotta be able to access it. And because there’s a lot of that. I mean, no matter what goes on, there’s something that preceded it. Right. And what preceded it may be absolutely worthless, but there may be some nuggets that will help you move forward and make it a little bit better.
Bali White [01:06:39] So, I guess, do you have any last thoughts or anything you’d like to share before we end this interview?
Gail Long [01:06:46] Well, you know, some little sidebars to affordability. Westside Community Mental Health center, otherwise known as Bridgeway, no longer exists, but they had a big piece of property on 82nd. [wind picks up] There is an emergency shelter there for people in crisis, but then there are also some units there that they built for people struggling with mental illness but who could live in the community. And that was a little subsection, just like Eden Corporation. That’s another little subsection. [wind picks up] Really good work to make things affordable. But stuff that we have, as I said, the person doesn’t have something that makes them eligible for something affordable. There’s not anything out there in any great degree. There’s limited numbers of units here and there. And then the model of home ownership, I don’t know. I’m not convinced that home ownership is the be all and the end all in trying to find solutions to this. I think it’s a mixture of rental and home ownership. And I think that, you know, the Cleveland Housing Partners at one time did both, but I think theirs is mostly rent to own. Now, I was on the board for a long time, and I haven’t been around it for a while, so I don’t. I couldn’t tell you that for sure. But, I mean, you know, it might be worth your interviewing somebody over there. I’m trying to think. Chris Warren.
Bali White [01:08:39] I will note that.
Gail Long [01:08:41] I have noted he’s the president of the board.
Bali White [01:08:44] Okay. There’s a couple- The woman that you– Holly.
Gail Long [01:08:50] Yeah, but for sure. Talk to Holly.
Bali White [01:08:51] Yes. I actually emailed her, so she’s hopefully on my list.
Gail Long [01:08:56] Well, she put together a coalition of directors, and the thing that we were most concerned about was affordable housing. She organized a trip to go to Pittsburgh. At the time, the YMCA on Prospect was going to be given up to developers. And we– She had heard of a program in Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh, that a settlement house kind of agency with a development focus had done. They rehabbed it. They made units there for men. It was like an SRO, single room occupancy. And then they had two floors in the building for women and on the first floor were county offices, Allegheny County offices. And we were like, why can’t we do that at the Y? But again, we didn’t have the money. Mike White sold it or got them to give it to a guy named John Furchell, who developed it. And it became apartments for students and people who could afford to pay cash money for rent. And then he’s the one that got the development thing for the old board of education building on East 6th Street. And so. And then there was a couple other things, but she did a study on affordable housing on the Near West Side. You need to ask her for that.
Bali White [01:10:34] Absolutely.
Gail Long [01:10:34] Yeah. Yeah. It’s really– I mean, she was, she was the person that really pushed us. And then we went to a couple other cities where we saw what they were doing with affordable housing, because every place in the country is struggling with affordable housing. Everybody. And so. And then a guy named Doug Van Auken. Have you run into Doug? He’s a retired physician at Metro, and He did some stuff on affordable housing for the mentally ill. He did some work in that area, and so they’re there. But again, you know, people who have disabilities, it’s a lot easier for them. Not– Not that it’s easy to get into a program. You know, everybody else is like, you know, there’s no paper to read ads anymore. You got to go online and all that other stuff. There are several subsidized buildings for seniors that exist. So those, in that regard, that’s a good thing. But I don’t know if there are any of them other than Riverview and Lakeview. I don’t know if there’s any more on the Near West Side. There’s one on 13th Street downtown, and there’s a big garden next to it. It’s really kind of cool. But, um. But I guess that’s what I would see if there’s any energy to figure out how we do that, because, I mean, every day there’s this article in the paper about how nobody can find anything that’s affordable. And you listen to the radio. Everybody’s struggling with that in the city of Cleveland. I mean, unless you got money, you know? So we’re talking about Chris Warren. He’s the president of Cleveland Housing Partners board, but he started out as an organizer in Tremont, and he went from Merrick House to the Tremont West Development Corporation to, I believe, from there, the beginning of Cleveland Housing Network, and he went to the city of Cleveland and I think, rose to become director of community development. And then he was a special assistant to the mayor. And he worked for a little bit with. He was mostly with Mike White and worked for a little bit with Frank Jackson, and then he retired. But he’s been on the Near West Side for a long, long time. He comes from maybe Westlake or one of the far western suburbs, and he’s never left and lived in Tremont for a while. And I’m sure he has a perspective that may be close, but a little bit different than he sees it, than mine, but he’s able to see it from a development perspective that. I’ve never been very well versed, let’s put it that way. That’s a nice way of putting it, because I tend to be very negative about developers, but I’m sure they’re not all bad. And the Cleveland Housing Network is seen as a developer, and there’s an interesting partnership there, the Cleveland Housing Partners, Eden Corporation, and the– It was mental health services, but they’ve got another name now, and the three of them work specifically on developing the permanent supportive housing. The network builds it and develops the property. Eden Corporation provides the support services. The mental health services provide the case managers, because anybody who lives there has to have a case manager. So It’s a– I think it’s a great model. You know, I think it’s– They went to Chicago to observe it. A whole huge bunch of people went, and then they came back and started doing it. And there’s several units here that I know of. I mean, there’s at least five or six, seven of them. Okay, there’s the one up on Madison. There’s a one at the old Y on West 25th. There’s one in Slavic Village. No, no, no. Slavic Village. Yeah, Slavic Village. There’s one there on 55th Street. There’s one on Superior in Glenville. There’s one on Buckeye and 116th. So, I mean, they’re great facilities, but anyway.
Bali White [01:15:34] Okay, well, I will definitely note to talk to him or try to reach out to him, because he seems like he has a wealth of knowledge. Thank you.
Gail Long [01:15:40] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you.
Bali White [01:15:43] So we’re at the end of this interview. I am Bali White, here with Gail Long. It is August 9, 2024. I’m with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project at CSU, outside of the IRTF offices, which is the Interreligious Task Force on Central America and Colombia. Thank you very much.
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