Abstract
Lifelong Clevelander Chuck E. Hoven recollects his early life growing up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood and attending St. Ignatius High School. Hoven attended John Carroll University as an undergraduate and later attended Cleveland State University for graduate school. Hoven shares his involvement as managing editor for Cleveland's Plain Press, which is a vehicle for many people to raise awareness on community issues like affordable housing. Hoven highlights the imbalances of community development corporations in areas like the Near West Side and Tremont.
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Interviewee
Hoven, Chuck E. (interviewee)
Interviewer
White, Bali (interviewer)
Project
Near West Side Housing Activism
Date
12-12-2024
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
134 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Chuck E. Hoven interview, 12 July 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544011.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1340
Transcript
Bali White [00:00:00] All right, so we are live. Hi, everyone. I am Bali White here with Chuck Hoven for the Cleveland Regional History Project at Carnegie West Library. It is July 19, 2024. How are you doing?
Chuck Hoven [00:00:16] Very, very well.
Bali White [00:00:18] Good. I’m glad you’re here. So I guess we’re gonna get right into it. Could you introduce yourself when and where you were born?
Chuck Hoven [00:00:25] Okay. My name is Chuck Hoven. I was born in Cleveland at St. John’s Hospital, which is now St. Augustine nursing home, I guess, on Detroit at about 78th Detroit Avenue. And I was born in 1956. And I’m 67 years old. I’m a widower. My wife died about six years ago. And I’m pretty much a lifelong Clevelander.
Bali White [00:01:00] So can you kind of touch base on your family’s ethnic background?
Chuck Hoven [00:01:05] Okay. Well, my mother’s family is Lebanese, and my father’s German, Dutch, French. Her family is Lebanese Maronite. There’s the St. Marin’s church downtown. But they usually just went there for funerals and weddings and things of that nature. But she was a part of when they were growing up. They went to St. Patrick’s here on the Near West Side and moved further west and went to St. Ignatius, where she met my father when she was in the 7th grade. She started at Ignatius.
Bali White [00:01:48] So what brought your family to Cleveland?
Chuck Hoven [00:01:52] On my mother’s side, I think they came maybe the year she was born in Pennsylvania, in the area around Du Bois and Clarion. And they came to Cleveland a couple years after she was born in 1925, I think because, probably because there were more Lebanese moving to Cleveland or it might have been steel mill job. I don’t know what the exact reason, but I think there was a migration of people moving further west from-
Bali White [00:02:27] And for your father’s side?
Chuck Hoven [00:02:28] My father’s side, I’m not sure what year, but my grandfather was born in Cleveland in 1882. So his father, probably in the 1860s or seventies, was here in Cleveland. And I think his father went briefly to Arizona Territory to try to start a hardware store with a partner. And that went south, and he came back to Cleveland. So I’m not sure when all those things happened, but they were in Cleveland for a long time. On his mother’s side, she came to Cleveland. She sold hats along the Great Lakes. And so she came to Cleveland probably in the, you know, sometime in the early 1910s to 1920 somewhere. And they- I’m not sure what year they married, but my dad’s, like, the third child. He was born in 23, so. But somehow, yeah, they— My grandfather and my father’s side, was a postal worker most of his life, and I think he had a route in this neighborhood. And on my mother’s side, her father had a grocery store in Pennsylvania, and then they made candy there and chocolate. Well, chocolate and ice cream. I think they had a shop there, and he lugged these big marble stones around for years afterwards that he used for the candy making. But they had- They lived, I think, on 38th near Lorain. And then there was a fire in the front furniture store. They moved to Bailey, which is a little south of Lorain. And they were- The kids were all going to St. Pat’s, and then they moved further west, and most of them went to West Tech, except some of the older ones went right to work. And I think my grandfather owned a grocery store on 87th, near West Tech over there. And they- So they moved from the Near West Side, I think from Bailey. They moved over to- I’m trying to think of the name of the street. I think they were the first place they moved, was Tompkins, which is off of 85th, and then they moved from there. They actually bought a house on 85th. I think they were renting on Tompkins, but their store was on 87th and Tompkins, so it was- And then my father’s family, I think they had owned some properties before the Depression, but then lost them because nobody could pay rent. And then they were renters until, I think, in ’40, right when he was going to World War Two. So it was ’41. He was the first group drafted. So I think they bought a new house right as he was leaving. But that’s the house I grew up in on 84th, near Clark. I still own it, but I’m living over on Hessler now because - which is in University Circle - my wife was part of the housing co-op there, so I joined that one. But I still use the West Side house as the Plain Press office right now because we can’t afford to rent anywhere. [laughs]
Bali White [00:06:31] So I guess, do you have any, like, siblings?
Chuck Hoven [00:06:35] Yeah. Well, I have two siblings that are still alive. My younger brother Tom passed away about five years ago, and my older brother, Fran, he lives. He has a house on 93rd, and he’s also living at his wife’s house, which is off of 117th and Brighton. And my sister, she’s been in town for a month helping me out. I had some surgery early, like, late last month. So she lives in New Mexico, so she’s retired now, so she can travel around.
Bali White [00:07:22] Would you say your family was pretty close-knit growing up?
Chuck Hoven [00:07:26] Yeah, we had a lot of cousins in the neighborhood, and my, actually, one cousin still lives a block from where I grew up. He lives on 86th with his wife, and my cousins on my mom’s side lived on 93rd, and then they moved to Lake Avenue. And my dad’s brother, they had seven kids, and they were over on 95th between Madison and Lorain over there. So there were a lot of family. And then my aunts and uncles, who started out on 85th, they moved to Lakewood probably in ’59 or ’60 they moved, but they were three of my aunts and one of my uncles never married. I think that was kind of the World War Two generation. A lot of people died, but they actually, two of my mom’s brothers died in World War Two, too, so they were killed in the South Pacific. But they kind of spoiled us because we had aunts and uncles that were. We went over there every Sunday for dinner and watched tv. We took apart our TV when we were kids, and it never got put back together again. [laughs] So we could go over there and watch TV on Sundays and have dinner with them.
Bali White [00:09:10] So when you were living in this area, would you kind of consider it, like, ethnically or racially diverse at the time? Like growing up?
Chuck Hoven [00:09:20] Pretty ethnically diverse. I think the Near West Side was probably more0 I was in the Mid West Side, and actually, I think mostly Appalachian, White, and ethnic. A lot of ethnic, of different ethnic groups probably, in the area where I grew up. I would say, let me see, Greek and German. And I think we probably had the darkest skin because we were part Lebanese. So we were always playing the Indians when they played Cowboys and Indians. [laughs] But we had the advantage that we made our own bows from lilac. But we- I think probably by the time I was teens, there were more Puerto Rican families in the neighborhood. And then, probably later, there’s a few Black families now, but probably during that time period, it was mostly White ethnics and especially a lot people from Appalachia.
Bali White [00:10:51] So can you touch base on your religious background?
Chuck Hoven [00:10:57] Roman Catholic. I went to St. Ignatius of Antioch, which is on West Boulevard, and Lorain for elementary school, and then I went to St. Ignatius High School for high school. And then during that time period, as the seventies, this neighborhood was probably mostly Appalachian and Puerto Rican and Blacks from- Well, just from covering it, I know that, like, there is McGuffey School, which is now the Catholic social service agency now on 29th near Franklin. And then there was Kentucky School. And I think the Black and Puerto Rican kids went to McGuffey, and the White kids went to, this was before desegregation. They went to Kentucky. But when they were in middle school, they were all at William Dean Howells, which was right next to Kentucky. So that was the first, really the highly, most highly integrated school in the city at that time because you had, you know, Lakeview and Riverview, which were a lot of Blacks and Puerto Ricans and there were Puerto Ricans and the Near West Side and Appalachian, mostly Appalachian Whites. And you can see most of those residents have been displaced. I don’t know how much you talked in interview, but a lot of the change in the housing, we could probably talk about that later. [laughs] But I went to a reunion recently with William Dean Howells and 50-year reunion and very integrated school. And part of the history of The Plain Press was one of the teachers there worked with Plain Press staff in the seventies. This is before I was involved. But they tried to keep peace at that school and the kids were involved. They did a page in Plain Press called “Youth Speak Out.” Yeah. And so they-
Bali White [00:13:31] Yeah. Could you actually talk a little bit about “Youth Speak Out” if you have like any, anything to share about?
Chuck Hoven [00:13:38] Well, largely kids would write about what was on their mind and different issues. You could probably look at the archives and get more information than I. [crosstalk] But that was a time period- I’m trying to think of the name of the teacher, but he was at the reunion and he’s, I think he’s been involved in different, I think he probably has a doctorate now or something, but he’s involved with some research in trying to stem violence in psychology and that kind of thing. But he’s, every once in a while- I’ll try to get you his name. I can’t think of it right now. [crosstalk]
Bali White [00:14:32] So kind of back to high school. You went to Ignatius. Can you kind of like talk about your experience in high school, what it was like going there?
Chuck Hoven [00:14:41] Well, I take the 22 bus down Lorain and once in a while some kids would pick me up on the way down there. And I thought it was a very good experience. At that time there were kids from inner-city parishes that attended. There are a good amount of kids. One kid I, when I was in grade school, this guy, Mister Neisius, taught Saturday Latin at St. Vincent de Paul. So we, we all took Latin to prepare us for going to high school. And one of the kids that was in my Latin class ended up at Ignatius. He went to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, I think. And then there were a few others, I think there’s another one of the girls that was in, Mary Murray, she was from Ignatius too, from my grade school. And she ended up- Well, she went to West Tech. But then I went to John Carroll with her after. So that little Saturday class- And I heard years later that I met someone from- It was a girls’ school that Mister Neisius taught at. And I told her the story and she said, oh, now I feel so bad. We used to really cut up in his class because he was so nice. [laughs] But he just did that Saturday. So that- And then Ignatius. I did pretty well academically. But it’s a school that takes like kids that are like in the top few percent in all the different grade schools. So it’s pretty selective. So it doesn’t make sense to be really competitive there because everybody is. [laughs] But I enjoyed the time there. I got involved in a few after school things and I- During high school I had a paper route that kind of- And then I worked at Red Barn after school. So I didn’t always stick around it. But there it was a good bunch and still get together with some of the people. They have a little get together, you know, maybe every couple months. I don’t always make it, but. Yeah.
Bali White [00:17:17] You mentioned Red Barn. What was Red Barn?
Chuck Hoven [00:17:20] It was a restaurant. Mostly high school kids worked there. [laughs] But we had one old grizzly guy that worked there that he’d say flip burgers faster than a speeding bowl and flipped them through. He trained us. And then- And it was burgers and chicken and fish and so it was kind of- It was on 117th. It’s no longer there. I think they all went out of business. But it was pretty busy in those days. And Cleveland had a much bigger population and people were working. [laughs] Yeah. So it was a different. So there are a lot of- It was, you know, there was a lot of takeout or sit-down, whatever people wanted to do. And my neighbor across the street, she told me about the job. And then she later told me about another job out at the airport. I worked for Sky Chefs. That was when I was in college until last year. And then I got a job in the steel mill for a summer to pollution control after college. [crosstalk] That was my last, probably my last year of college. I still had a few classes that come in. I think I went an extra half year to finish up after that, but had to do a cost-benefit analysis on their pollution control equipment. And we worked in these- They had these big clarifiers that would take the water from the blast furnace. They’d suck the mud out and then send the water back. So that was after the Clean Water Act. They made them. They used to dump it all in the river.[laughs]
Bali White [00:19:13] A lot about that dangerous, dangerous stuff. But you had mentioned you went to John Carroll. When did you attend John Carroll, and what were you studying?
Chuck Hoven [00:19:25] I graduated from high school in ’75, so I went right after that to John Carroll, and my major was political science, but I was the first kid in this interdisciplinary concentration, which was for urban studies. So it was economics and sociology and political science, and Kathy Barber, who was the head of the department there. My last year, I was thinking, I’m not going to be able to complete this. So I just started signing up for film classes and gym classes, just going to take it easy. And she called me over to her office, and she. [laughs] She changed my schedule around. So I did finish it, but I think I took some. I took a little extra time the next year, but I did. So I was the first one through this whole program, so she wanted to make sure. And then I was. After I graduated, I was just, like, doing some roofing jobs and some painting with some friends. And again, she intervened in my life. [laughs] She called Roberta Steinbecker at Cleveland State and told her she wanted me to go to graduate school there. And so Roberta called me at home, and she said, well, come on down. We know you can write. Went to John Carroll. Just take the, what is it? Graduate submission test or something I had to take. And then she signed me up that day, and I was in graduate school. [laughs] That was in the urban studies program at Cleveland State. I went there for a couple years, and actually, that’s where I met my wife. We didn’t marry until years later, but we were part of the same social group and hung out together.
Bali White [00:21:40] So kind of back to the Near West Side. In this neighborhood as a whole, Could you describe what the housing conditions of this area kind of was like growing up?
Chuck Hoven [00:21:52] Well, my dad sold insurance throughout the neighborhood, and he used to tell me stories, like some of these storefronts above Lorain, they were families separated by sheets living above the storefront, and they’d share a bathroom and a kitchen or something, but they have- So it was just- Cleveland had 900,000 some people in the fifties and into the sixties. It wasn’t much less than that. I mean, it started to decline, but so there in, like, my street where I grew up, which I don’t know, in maybe one block, I don’t know how many houses are in a city block, you know, 30 or 40. There are probably well over 100 kids. I mean, everybody had kids, so our family was with four kids and there were, you know, families with seven kids. And I think there was one merged family that had probably 14 kids or something. I don’t know. But they were- I think they- My brother was tuning pianos at one point and the parents just couldn’t take it with all the kids pounding on the piano. So they gave them a piano. I think we moved it on Christmas Day. That was- I was older then, but the neighborhood just had kids galore, but half. Well, some kids went to public school. Most of the kids went to Ignatius, where I went, and some of the kids went to St. Colman’s because we were right on the boundary between the two parish lines. So I guess you had a choice. And so I know there are kids that in for high school. Most of the kids went to West Tech, which is now an apartment building, but that was on 93rd. And some went to trade schools. One of my cousins went to Max Hayes, which was trade school. Actually, a couple of my cousins went there, but it was a neighborhood where- And I think at the time, Cleveland was really kid-focused. Like every elementary school, I think, had a playground. And in the summer they had some college kid working there with kids. He had to sandbox and they’d have to clean out if cats got in there at night or whatever. [laughs] And there are swings and sliding boards and traveling bars and that kind of thing and all that has kind of- But. And then there were, you know, there were scouting troops and sports. Like the grade school I went to, Ignatius, they had their own league because they were in the CYO and they were winning every year. So they kicked them out. So they started their own league. So they had a league with probably a dozen football teams. And then same thing with basketball. I think they still maintain the basketball league. And it’s not just for kids that go there. It was for the whole neighborhood. So they had, you got to know kids that were from. We went to public schools and we used to play at. I think we used to practice at Thrush Field or Halloran Park. And then we play our games at Halloran Park, which is off 117th, which was real close to where I worked when I was in high school, [laughs] but this was in grade school, so I was always riding my bike up that way to either go to football practice or in high school. I would ride up there to work in the Red Barn. So that was- But Yeah, so I don’t know remember which question I’m answering here. [laughs]
Bali White [00:26:11] We were kind of on the housing conditions.
Chuck Hoven [00:26:14] Oh, housing conditions. Okay. So the- Yeah, The houses were, you know, wood frame for the most part, in the Near West Side. You know, I was- I just went to high school here, so I did- I was living maybe a couple miles west. It’s 84th, maybe two miles west, and the housing, I think it’s similar. You probably have a little better housing stock on Detroit. I mean, on Franklin, but similar to what most of the side streets are here. And I think the whole city had just lots of kids.
Bali White [00:27:01] Yeah, that’s kind of something you don’t really notice today.
Chuck Hoven [00:27:04] Oh, no. In the same street where I grew up now, maybe there’s five kids where we had well over 100 kids. And it’s mostly a couple elderly people or people with, you know, young kids may have- There might be a young couple or people with one kid. I think the girl next door to me is- I don’t know where she’s living now, but I heard she was pregnant, young woman. But there not too many people having kids. And if they do have kids, it’s one or two. It’s not, you know, like seven or eight.
Bali White [00:27:45] Right. And it seems like a lot of people are kind of moving out towards the suburbs.
Chuck Hoven [00:27:49] Especially when kids reach school age, especially if people can afford it. And it’s different in different neighborhoods and the different people who can’t afford it, which, you know, brings us again to, well, what’s the, you know. But in those days, Cleveland, the elementary schools, especially Catholic schools, were really good, and you could. And kids from the Catholic schools that went to public high schools still did well enough to go to. Like I was telling you about, the woman I went to grade school with, she went to John Carroll after going to West Tech. So the schools, you could get a good enough education to pretty much go where you wanted to after if you stuck it out. And we, you know, in the seventies, there starting to be drug problems in Cleveland with. So that was a time period when I was in high school, and I was kind of oblivious to it. I was studying so much. [laughs] But some people in the neighborhood got involved with. There was kind of a battle between, I would say it was the Irish mob and the Italian mob, like Carmen Zagaria was heavily involved in our neighborhood. There was like a fish store, which was on the way to my grade school. And I always thought it was a fish store, but I later learned it was like a drug selling place. And I guess my sister told me a story. They went in there and told the guy that one of his fish was dead. And he said half price. I mean, they were not there to sell fish, but that was- And then there is. I don’t know, there are a couple of bars along that, but that whole area really changed. And part of it, you know, the freeway came through the neighborhood when I was a little kid.
Bali White [00:30:01] Yes. Actually, that brings me to the impact that the construction of Interstate 90 had on this area.
Chuck Hoven [00:30:09] Yeah, it just wiped out everything, I remember. But as a little kid, I got my first job because of the freeway, because they knocked down the paper boy’s house. Somebody delivered the Press and my cousin delivered on our street. So he told me about the job. I was technically too young. I was ten, and my brother wasn’t anywhere around, so- And it was like an emergency. So I went and met with the paper guy, and he gave me the route right away. And so he had a route which was from Lorain, it was Grace and Lorain Avenue. Part of Grace isn’t there anymore, but it was Lorain from 73rd to 80th at the time, the first route. And then eventually my brother did get another route which went from 90th on Clark to 73rd and Clark and had Hope. Hope isn’t there anymore, which is kind of fitting for Cleveland, [laughs] but that street got wiped out. But when we were young, they actually built us a ball field on the land that was cleared for the freeway. It was right by where we picked up our newspapers at 80th and Grace. So they had a backstop there, and we played mostly softball, but we. And then they had big, you know, we would lose our customers to the freeway. And some people held out. Like, there was one house on Clark that was on my brother’s route. They had aluminum siding, and they had these nice big sidewalks and everything. And that house held out the longest. But I remember, you know, some of the memories when we tried to build a basketball court, because they were knocking down these houses. So we had this huge sandstone sidewalk that was, I don’t know, it was one that would go up to the front step up, so it was huge. And so we took some of the porch pillars. These houses, they were just going to knock them down and they’d haul away everything, so we took some porch pillars and we were rolling this thing for blocks, you know, it’s really heavy. And so a bunch of little kids probably, you know, ten to twelve years old or something, and we were going to make ourselves a basketball court. [laughs] Some cop stopped us. And we told them, you know, they’re just gonna, they’re just gonna bust us up. And he said, yeah, I know, but I gotta stop you because somebody called. So it was like, wait, so we never learned how to dribble properly. We could shoot, [laughs] but just never- We had a lot of odd-sized stones in the yard, but we had a basketball net on the back of house. But, but that-
Bali White [00:33:23] So you had mentioned, you know, the construction displaced a lot of people.
Chuck Hoven [00:33:28] Oh, yeah.
Bali White [00:33:28] Do you know what happened to any of the people that ended up being displaced by it?
Chuck Hoven [00:33:33] Oh, they’re all over the country, all over the, you know, a lot of them had to move to— The thing was that the amount of money they got for the house was probably not enough if their house was already paid for. And so they, if they moved to the suburbs, if they moved to another neighborhood in Cleveland, they’d be taking on a mortgage and that. So I’m not sure if the immediate displacement- I know, like my parish, the grade school, you know, it used to be the largest in the county and it’s not anymore. So you see, maybe, and I mean, part of it is smaller, but a lot of houses were just pushed out. And then businesses along Lorain, they suffered. So you saw a lot of, you know, right now, if you look along Lorain, in that area from maybe 80th to West Boulevard, it’s a lot of empty, empty storefronts. And it’s just we, when we were growing up, we had a grocery store, which Fisher-Fazio’s, that we could walk to, and that got taken by the freeway. And then there’s Tony’s restaurant that was on Clark and 90th that was taken. So a lot of the- And then I think there was [inaudible] shoe that was somewhere around Lorain in the nineties and that’s gone. [laughs] So you could see like the businesses that we could walk to or, you know, as a short drive. And then it affected the bigger stores too, like Sears eventually. I mean, they stayed around a while longer because their building wasn’t taken, but the population to support that, that was at 110th, you know, where Westown Plaza is today, it was huge. Sears store with, they had everything you could. And then up on Denison, where the Dave’s is, at Ridge and Denison, that was a Zayre’s, which was another big department store. So that we had. And then for years there was also a Kmart at 65th near, between Storer and Clark. That’s a Roses now, I think, but it’s still there. But a lot of the businesses that you just kind of took for granted that we could, you know, and even the pathways where you went, places like we used to go to 82nd and Clark and cross and walk. I can’t even remember it because the streets aren’t there anymore. But I know we went to the library on 83rd and Lorain. So somehow I remember as a little kids, we were crossing Clark because there was a light at 82nd and then we’d go to the library almost. I mean, a couple times a week my mom would take us down when we were little. So I’m too little to remember. A lot of those streets are just gone. And we had like a summer reading program at the library. And just the, I don’t know, just the nature of things changed. And I’m not sure, you know, how many, where people ended up, but I know that some of it was, you know, people were displaced because of jobs, too. I mean, if you had a job, you’re going to probably find, because people worked in the steel mill probably until the early eighties, so they stayed around or they worked in auto. So if you had a job, you’d find a place in the suburbs or something. But, you know, some kids from our grade school, they’re kind of scattered around the country now, so I’m not sure when, when that move occurred.
Bali White [00:38:16] Like when they, a big thing with, like the interstate is we’re not necessarily sure what happened to a lot of people, which is, you know, it’s concerning in a sense. You know, you don’t [know] what happens to the people that—
Chuck Hoven [00:38:29] Yeah.
Bali White [00:38:29] Are pushed out of their homes?
Chuck Hoven [00:38:31] Right? Yeah. When I run into, we’ve had grade school reunions, but we only get maybe a dozen people. [laughs] So there some that are up from out of state and some of them are in the suburbs, but, you know, when they had to move and, you know, I think like I had cousins that were in the neighborhood. Their house didn’t get taken, but, you know, when the, you know, one of them worked in the steel mill and when those layoffs occurred, they went down to Houston. So- And they had, I think he was building pools and then his father worked at Lamson and Sessions, which used to be on 85th in Madison. Then they moved to Lakewood. Then they laid him off. He had one year short of his and pension. They were a nut and screw place. Some of my mom’s sisters worked there, too, but that was, you know, place they lived on 95th. It was on 85th and Madison, so they, he could walk to work, but originally- And then they moved to Lakewood, but, but yeah, when those companies started laying people off, I think there was more movement out of the area because the jobs- And that was mostly in the early eighties with the steel mill. Well, I worked there and I think it was 1980 and the guys I worked with told me, yeah, don’t get stuck here. [laughs] Once you get used to the money, you want to stay, you know, because you get a mortgage, you buy a car or something and you’re stuck. And so they talked me into going back to school too. I mean, it was kind of, they said, yeah, just keep going to school. But they, they’re all characters down there. They’re real- But, you know, I think that precipitated more movement, like out of the whole county and out of state because the jobs weren’t the same as they were. Yeah.
Bali White [00:40:54] Especially in Cleveland. The loss of like just industrial jobs and urban environments really, really took a plummet at one point.
Chuck Hoven [00:41:01] Yeah, yeah. They had pretty massive layoffs and then they automated. So, you know, I think they sold their rolling mill to China. But the steel, they’re making steel with maybe a quarter of what they were. I worked for Republic Steel. I think there were 18,000 employees back in the late seventies, early eighties, and there was J and L, and those two merged. And I think the two companies now, they’re owned by Cleveland Cliffs, I think. But there are probably maybe 5,000 employees where there used to be over 30,000 between the two companies. So it’s a lot more, I mean, a lot less physical, I think, than it was. So they don’t need as many people.
Bali White [00:42:04] Yeah. Back to I-90 again. Was there a lot of resistance in the community towards that?
Chuck Hoven [00:42:12] Oh, yeah. The councilwoman, Mercedes Cotner, actually, my dad ran against her at one point, but he ran on a platform of kids stuff. But she said, the freeway will go through my ward over my dead body. She ended up as council clerk and the freeway went through the ward anyhow. [laughs] But they did stop. They were going to build from, you know, where his own wreck is at 65th and Lorain. There’s that big land there that was freeway land. That was, they’re going to build. That was a hub that was going to go and wipe out the rest of the Near West side, go from there to the Shoreway. So it would have wiped out St. Colman’s and St. Stephen’s and gone right to the Shoreway. But they stopped that. They actually did stop that and then they had that leftover land and became a rec center, which people wanted. So The Plain Press played a role in those protests in that time period. But that, that was all in the seventies when they, they opposed- It was really an extension because the original freeway, they called it the Clark Freeway, the I-90. And that I think, you know, Shaker Heights was able to stop them from going through Shaker Lakes. But they, and I don’t know what, what the reason why it stopped. But they did stop that extension on Near West Side. And I think a lot of it was protest and that, it was a crazy idea too, but they were going to take 71 and cut it across 90 and take it down to the Shoreway. And so they just, in part of it, I think it was all, you know, some of it was people removal and making, you know, trying to push people to buy homes in the suburbs so developers could get rich. I don’t know. I mean, that’s- I’m speculating there, but it seemed like it was like deliberate that they were just wiping out whole neighborhoods.
Bali White [00:44:35] And not even in just the Near West Side, but in other neighborhoods, I-90 had an effect on especially predominantly Black neighborhoods.
Chuck Hoven [00:44:43] Oh, yeah, yeah, they just went right- And, you know, before that. But, you know, growing up, my father had an insurance business and I-90 really affected that because he sold for Nationwide Insurance. And when the freeway came along, people were trying to collect twice because the government was buying their house and there wasn’t really enough money, so there’d be arson or something and they’d try to collect their- And his company decided not to sell in our neighborhood anymore. So they told him either move or, you know, and he didn’t want to move because his house was paid for. So he, he got a dollar a year, dollar a day for a year as a pension. [laughs] And he had been working there like 15 years. So then after that, he worked pretty much blue-collar jobs. He worked Klein Auto Body. He was like a painter’s helper, you know, masking the cars and stuff for the painter. And then he worked for a company putting in gas stations. And then my mom went. She got a job pretty much right away. She used to work with my dad in his insurance business. So she got a job right away with the sheriff’s office as a clerk typist. And she ended up doing, they called them executions, but there’s really foreclosures on the houses, which, you know. There were a lot of foreclosures because everything was falling apart. But so that affected us personally in terms of the freeway, because our life, when we had both parents at home. And my dad spent most of his time playing with us rather than working. [laughs] But he we had a pretty idyllic childhood up until then, because we, you know, when we weren’t in school, we go to the zoo every Tuesday because it was free. Or we, you know, my dad was involved in Boy Scouts and stuff. And my mom would, if we were too young for scouting, my mom would take us on different trips, like these bus trips. She never drove when we were young, but she was pretty good at the bus system, and they had these chartered buses that would take you to the Blue Hole [near Castalia, Ohio] or some site, so she’d take- When we were real young, if we weren’t, my dad was gone with, you know, scouting or something, she’d plan a trip. So that was, you know, in the neighborhood, the same thing. You know, kids were in and out of each other’s house, and we had, you know, backyards, that was pre-freeway. When the freeway came along, and we used to always play in the street, and then when the freeway came along, there’s an entrance at the end of the street, so we couldn’t play. We used to play football in the street, and my neighbors next door, an old Hungarian couple, Kriegers, they used to sit out on the porch and watch us, and they said, this is better than TV. And sometimes we’d have games with the old guys on the street against the kids and stuff like that. But it was not that many cars would come, and if they did, you just step aside. Now, it’s like, you couldn’t. Yeah, it’s just there’s an entrance at the end of the street, and there’s constant cars, so it wouldn’t make sense to play in the street anymore.
Bali White [00:48:39] That’s unfortunate. Seems like you had a lot of fun doing that.
Chuck Hoven [00:48:40] Oh, yeah. When we were kids, we had a pretty- And I don’t know when they completed the freeway. I think it was probably when I was at John Carroll. At some point during that, I was there till about 1980, from ’76 to ’80. So at some point they finished it, but we had those paper routes. My sister substituted for me, and my younger brother substituted for my old brother. So, like, if I had to work another job or do something in school, my sister would take it, but we paid. We were able to pay our high school tuition with the paper route in those days, because I think when I started, it was maybe $600, and it was like 800 when I graduated. And now it’s like, crazy. It’s like 10,000 or something.
Bali White [00:49:46] Scary to think about that, actually, the pricing.
Chuck Hoven [00:49:47] The price of high school. Yeah. And then college. We were real fortunate because there are all kinds of grants when we were- And we were pretty low-income, so my whole college was paid for. And then when I went to graduate school, I got an assistantship. So I never paid a penny for college or high school, I mean, for college or graduate school. In high school, we paid tuition from just the paper route. So it wasn’t-
Bali White [00:50:21] Seems like the paper route was also really beneficial. Just, you really know the area just by riding your bike, delivering newspapers.
Chuck Hoven [00:50:28] Yeah, well, we used to pull the wagon. Yeah, it was real close. It was close to— But it was an area, you know, even though it was close to my house, it wasn’t an area I was familiar with. And when the paper boy left, he just left me a stack of cards because he moved. [laughs] So it’s like he must have worked till the day he moved. And then. So my dad had to help me figure out where to put the papers at first. So it was kind of- But yeah, we did get to know it very well in that area and the businesses. We had a few businesses along Lorain. There was where the Social Security office just moved out of there, but there was, at 73rd and Lorain, there is West End Lumber. So that was one of our route. And now there’s still an auto repair place. I think it’s about 80th and Lorain, and it’s Damper’s now, but it used to be on my route when we were kids, and there was a couple other places that aren’t there anymore. There was a used car lot in the middle of there somewhere. But yeah, we got to know the businesses and the residents and who had a dog that would chase you down the steps. [laughs] There was one dog. It was like you deliver in the back at the top of the steps, and the dog was always at the top. Throw the paper and run down the steps, and the dog would follow. [laughs]
Bali White [00:52:02] Oh no! [laughs] So I guess we’re going to kind of switch gears. You had mentioned The Plain Press a couple of times. Is that the community newspaper that you’re involved with?
Chuck Hoven [00:52:08] Yeah, yeah, I can give you a copy. There’s our latest edition.
Bali White [00:52:14] Yeah, I think I had the one previous to this, Mike Fiala actually handed me it.
Chuck Hoven [00:52:17] Okay.
Bali White [00:52:18] But I saw a little bit of this one online, so I’m familiar with Dan Kerr.
Chuck Hoven [00:52:23] Okay, good.
Bali White [00:52:24] He was at the City Club.
Chuck Hoven [00:52:26] Okay.
Bali White [00:52:27] But I guess, how did you get involved with The Plain Press?
Chuck Hoven [00:52:31] Well, when I was in graduate school, actually. I was riding a bus down Euclid Avenue, going to graduate school, and a friend of mine was going to law school, Jim Reddy. He was someone who went to grade school with me at Ignatius and he had picked up a copy of Point of View. Roldo used to do a little newsletter called Point of View. It was about Cleveland politics. So I said, yeah, I’d like to get involved with something like this. I was involved with the newspaper at John Carroll again, because a kid I knew from the neighborhood used to deliver papers there at John Carroll, and he just hung out at the news office, and they made him editor. So he asked me to deliver papers. So then I hung out at the news office, and, you know, if anybody needed anything like a story to be written real quick, they would ask me. So I got to do, you know, I learned a little bit about- And so I was riding a bus with Jim Reddy, and he told me, I said, I’d like to get involved with something like Point of View, you know? And he said, well, they’re restarting this paper on the Near West Side. The Plain Press had gone under for about a year, and this woman, Lisa Oppenheim, was here because her husband had, was a doctor that he’s doing a- His, what do they call the two years at Metro? [crosstalk] Yeah, he was doing his residency at Metro. And so she was in town, and she got together with another woman, Rosalind Block, who lives on Jay Avenue. And together they wrote a Gund grant because they were hanging out at the bookstore on 25th, which Mike O’Brien ran. Used to be, it was called Six Steps Down, or the Bookstore on 25th. There’s still a bookstore there today, but it’s not, you know, not the same. Yeah. So he had kept old copies of the Plain Press in the back, and he was talking to them about it. So they wrote this grant to Gund, and they got it funded. So they got three years. It was like maybe half a what they asked for, but they got something. So they restarted the paper, and Jim told me about it, and so he gave my number to Lisa, and I was, I think I was tutoring kids at Cleveland State at the time, and so I thought anybody that called me, they wanted to be tutored. So I said, are you a tutee? And she goes, what? [laughs] So that was my introduction. But so she recruited me. And then in those days, you needed a lot of people to put the paper together because you were waxing the back and you’re cutting galleys. You used the typesetting machine. Everything would come out in huge, and you’d have to cut them, and the editor would have to know how many characters per inch, how many words. And so you’d tell the writer so many words, you take your exacto knife. And if they went too long, they cut paragraphs out physically. So it was a lot more work. It was a lot more labor intensive. So I helped with pay stub. And she eventually asked me to be on the board. And so I served on the board and as a volunteer for most of the eighties, probably till ’88. And then our editor there, Regina Stephan, was the editor until August of ’88. And then she left Cleveland. And they needed someone to run the paper. And we had no money. And so I had substituted at times and run the paper. When other editors wanted to take a vacation or something. So they asked me to do it. And I think I started about 200 a month or something. And so we eventually rehab some debt we had to get rid of and stuff. And so we eventually hit, I think we hired another editor. And I was, like, managing editor. And then. And eventually Debbie Sadlon, who was just kind of interested in the paper. She went to the printer with me. Once. I knew her sister from the people’s clinic there. Used to be Near West side People’s Clinic on 45th and Bridge. And I volunteered there. It was, like, for free healthcare. So her sister was a nurse at the time. She’s a doctor now. She was heavily involved. So I knew her through her sister. And she wanted to go to the printer with me. And then she started volunteering. And eventually she’s editor now. So I’m manager editor. But there was just a lot of connections between people. Debbie Webb, who was married to Mike O’Brien, who run the bookstore. She was heavily involved with the People’s Clinic too. And so kind of knew, I think she’s the one who recruited me to write grants for them or something. So we got, you know, got to know some people there. And Lisa’s husband Steve, who was here for his residency, he also volunteered at the People’s Clinic. And then our next editor after Lisa, David Beach. His wife Dina was also a resident at Metro. And Steve introduced or Steve and Lisa introduced David to Dina and they got married. So they had several editors that were married to Doctor’s in the early eighties.[both laugh] That was just from connections and part of what the Plain Press did in the eighties. There was a movement to make Metro Hospital private hospital. And by the staff and Gail Long and some of the people at Westside Community house. She was at Merrick House. They organized citizens to save our Metro hospital. So they used the Plain Press to publish. And we had Richard Thomas, who was our editor at the time, his, I don’t think they were married then, but he was dating Dorothy Charginghawk, and she had the greatest byline, but she was the one that did most of those articles about Metro. And even years later, after, you know, they had kept the hospital public, she called Henry Manning, who was the president of the hospital at the time, and he was not a fan of hers, but she’d call him just to shock him when she was in town. [laughs] They had moved to Minnesota, I guess.
Bali White [01:00:07] What year was this?
Chuck Hoven [01:00:13] Probably in the mid eighties. They had tried to make it a publisher. You can check in the archives, but there are a lot of articles about saving Metro Hospital.
Bali White [01:00:25] Would you say that Plain Press is kind of like this vehicle for, like, people to kind of raise awareness on stuff like that?
Chuck Hoven [01:00:33] Yeah. Yeah. For years, there was a lot of funding for organizing in Cleveland until they kind of attacked- You could read Randy Cunningham’s, not this book, the previous book he wrote about how organizing got defunded in Cleveland. But they kind of beat up on the hand that fed them basically, they did some protests against at one of the country clubs where a lot of the funders congregated. [laughs] They think they’re trying to get energy assistance money out of Ohio at the time. But it was- But yeah, it’s largely advocacy journalism because the people that started it were neighborhood residents, and they started it as an alternative to the Plain Dealer and the Press. That’s why it’s named Plain Press. That came from the two dailies. The Press isn’t around anymore but that was the afternoon daily. That’s where I worked when I was a kid. But the organizers used to do a lot of the writing, so now it’s a little harder. We’re just getting volunteers. But a lot of these organizers, like, from low-income people together or people to save our Metro Hospital, or they would write articles because it was part of their job to organize people and make them aware. There was a lot of welfare rights organizing, I think in the seventies, and then in the eighties, there was a lot, it was a lot around housing and some other issues. You know, like they were basic neighborhood organizers. So I think in the seventies, there’s glue sniffing and trash dumping, and where Tremont is today was the South Side then, but it was- It was, you know, very low-income neighborhood, and people would just dump their trash down the hills and there were rats and things, you know, so that was, you know, so there’s a lot of advocacy against slum lords or, you know, in more recent years, there’s, you know, lead paint problems, and, you know, it should have been solved, like in the seventies. And there’s still- But yeah, there’s always, and some organizers do contact us, but we’re more getting volunteers to write now. And because there’s less prevalence of actual organizers, that was their job, to organize around issues. She got a few now, like Bike Cleveland, or then there’s some total volunteer organizations, like for public transit and things like that. But most of the foundations are not funding actual community organizing. Some of the, and the money has shifted towards the development corporations, which increasingly have become really tools of developers rather than focusing on neighborhood organizing. Some of them had roots in neighborhood organizing, like Tremont West had roots in neighborhood organizing, but they still have a structure where they have block clubs and things. But I think the focus is more on development than it used to be, significantly more.
Bali White [01:04:34] So I guess, could you kind of, I guess, estimate how many readers the Plain Press attracts?
Chuck Hoven [01:04:44] Well, we print 21,000 papers, and I think the industry standard is about 2.1 per paper, and we probably bring back over a thousand each month that are not picked up. So I’d say roughly 40,000 readers. We’re a monthly, and we go from the river to about 140th and from the lake down to the Cleveland border, except Old Brooklyn. We weren’t doing that for a while. And now we have a writer, because they used to have their own newspaper, so we kind of, they had their own territory, but we’re distributing a little bit there now. We have one writer who used to write for Old Brooklyn News, who’s been doing a series. She’s in every issue for about a month, writing. She’s trying to save the corner, a corner where there’s a historic church. So she’s been, I don’t know if her efforts are going to be successful or not, because they already gave the proposal to somebody, wants to knock part of it down and keep part of it. So she’s trying to save all the buildings on that corner.
Bali White [01:06:02] So what, what do you typically- What is your involvement? Like, what do you kind of focus on with this paper?
Chuck Hoven [01:06:09] Well, I mean, my official role is the managing editor to try to keep it afloat and make sure, you know, the different staff people coordinate. We have the photo editor who she used to take photos for us, high school, actually. She’s not officially my goddaughter, but she wanted me to be her father when she was a kid. So I said, well, I can’t do that, but maybe I could be your godfather. And so she- Coriana Close. She is in Belize now, but we send our photos to her and she edits them. She’s really good at Photoshop and all that because she went to, she ended up going to graduate school in photography. And then we have a guy that does our ads and Debbie does editing. So I kind of try to assign the stories and get them in, get them to Debbie, and then we have another guy who proofreads. And so I, I kind of move things from one person to another, like, and then we have an ad salesperson. Actually, it’s Debbie’s husband now. And so, you know, he sends me the ad copy, I send it to our ad guy, and then I end up doing a lot of writing and photography, especially in time- You know, it depends on volunteers. The times when we have lots of volunteers, I don’t have to do as much. And times when there shortage or somebody’s sick that month or, you know, and the volunteers are great. I mean, they like people that like to write. Like Bruce Checefsky right now is our main. And then we’re trying to pass this to another generation. So I’ve got Abe Kurp, used to be an editor at Cleveland State. The problem these days is we don’t have enough money where we can pay somebody to do full-time because housing costs are so much right now. So he’s working full-time job and doing this as part-time, you know, so we have to figure it out, whole thing out, or maybe we can get multiple people to do it part time or something. But it’s so that we’re trying to do this transition, but that’s mainly my role. And then we have a board. It’s a nonprofit, so I’m supposed to have board meetings, but it’s like sometimes putting the paper out by the time you get- Because I delivered papers, too. I have another guy, Ahmed, who helped, helps me deliver. And it takes about a week to get them all out because we have over 500 locations, so it’s all free distribution. So we’re running in and out of stores and restaurants and libraries.
Bali White [01:09:19] Have you noticed any particular locations that the newspaper seems to get picked up a lot at?
Chuck Hoven [01:09:25] Yeah, the grocery stores are the best always. And we used to distribute a lot at- Metro Hospital was our big- But they don’t want papers in their hospital. So we put them in the outpatient clinics, but they don’t want them in the hospital. They got the new Glick Center. They don’t want newspapers all over it, I guess. I don’t know. But so we, years ago, there was handyman there, built boxes for the Plain Press. So we had our own boxes that he engraved and he worked for the hospital. He just made us box. But those disappeared somewhere probably. But so it’s, it’s getting harder. And there’s some places like, especially during the pandemic, they kind of thought newspapers were spreading COVID or something. So they’re placed places that didn’t want the paper for a while. So it got hard to get different places. But some of those places, they come back and some of them other places won’t take it. It depends on the manager sometimes. But the biggest drops now are the Daves, the one on Ohio City and the one on Ridge. Those are probably our best drops right now. And the papers go pretty fast.
Bali White [01:10:53] So one of the overarching, like, themes of these interviews is housing justice. Okay, so would you consider the Plain Press kind of like an outlet for like activism regarding housing justice?
Chuck Hoven [01:11:07] Yeah. Yeah. Over the years we’ve had a lot of, especially when there were organizations that were devoted to housing justice. I mean, low-income people together did a lot of stuff around housing justice. And then so did Near West Neighbors in Action and then Near West Housing that came out of there. And we, you know, cover- And then there’s occasional, like when Ignatius was expanding, Mike Fiala probably told you that, those stories, but there were a lot of issues with that. And I think Bill Merriman wrote a commentary. He was the mailman in the neighborhood and also pretty heavily involved Catholic. And he wrote something about Father Arrupe, which was one of the Jesuit superiors and he was advocate for the poor. And so we blew up a quote from Father Arrupe. And then they, Ignatius started this Arrupe House, [laughs] which served the kids from Dunbar largely, which is a public school, the only one left in Ohio City, I think that’s a Cleveland public school. But they tutored kids there. And I’ve heard lately that there aren’t very many kids from the neighborhood going there anymore because there aren’t very many kids in the neighborhood. [laughs] So I’m not sure. I think Mike Fiala said they moved the tutoring over to Urban Community. I’m not sure. But anyhow, Ignatius kids would tutor kids after school and they’d be involved with some things with Riverview to have low rises. And they, they knocked those down. So there are a lot of families in those. That’s the public housing on 25th. So they just have the tower now. But there used to be all kinds of families in low rises. And then there was a school behind there that they knocked down for the West Side [Market], for the parking lot that’s behind all those businesses. So a lot of kids went to that school. And then there was Kentucky School, which is now the Intergenerational. It’s like a charter school. And then next to that, they do have Gallagher, which is Cleveland public schools, but it’s from 65th. It’s like a swing space right now. So that’s on Woodbine, where the William Dean Howells I used, I told you about. That was the integrated junior high that they’re in that building, which shares a boiler system with Kentucky, which is now intergenerational. So they have these, you know, charter school and a Cleveland public school, sharing of boiler system between the two buildings. So I think they’ll probably sell that building to Intergenerational when they’re done with swing space. But I don’t know, you know, that’s, but yeah, the, what was your question?
Bali White [01:14:47] So I guess kind of in what ways are you involved in, like housing justice yourself?
Chuck Hoven [01:14:54] In housing justice? Well, I like to write about what’s happening in terms of, I mean, right now the big thing is they just did these tax evaluations and people are getting these notices. And if you’re in a neighborhood like Ohio City or Tremont and you’re one of the low-income people that managed to stay there because maybe weren’t as low-income as some of the other people that got put out, your property taxes could triple. Because if somebody builds a new house, it’s the way the county figures it. They figure it based on the latest sale. So if you got a hundred-year-old house and somebody builds a new house or substantially rehabs a house on your street, and suddenly it’s worth a half a million and you haven’t done anything to your house and it’s still the same old house, but now your property tax, your house is valued three times what it was last year. And, you know, somewhere down the road, the property tax is going to skyrocket when, you know, right now, I think the current levy that the school district is already proposed it. So it’ll be based on the current value. It won’t be based- So that’ll help for, if they pass it, if they don’t pass and they come back after the evaluation and you weren’t successful in challenging it. The problem is if you’re low-income, it’s hard to challenge it because you need an appraisal, which would cost you money and you need all this documentation you need. And it’s not, not that easy to, you have to go to the Board of Revision and make your case. So if you’re in, you know that it’s just an unfair way to figure property tax based on some sale of some new property, or, and on top of that, they’re abating every new and rehabbed house, and they tweak the law a little bit, but it’s still, it still really hurts the school system. It hurts and it hurts— If somebody gets an abated house, they’re paying zero taxes in most neighborhoods, and some now they’re going to pay 85% of what they would pay in the hot neighborhoods. It’s just better than what it was last year. They changed it, but that’s just kicking in now. And then over 300, I think it’s over 350,000. But that whole abatement process is something that needs to be challenged, because I think there’s something, some obscure court cases in Ohio history where the evaluations are supposed to be equitable. So it might be a way to challenge it. But those are the kinds of things we’re trying to- And especially with the school system, you know, it’s kind of my, I do a lot of school coverage, which is kind of related to housing, because the money that’s abated should be going to the schools. And I think, like these property owners, every developer or council I’ve to talked to said, oh, well, it won’t be built if they don’t get an abatement, and there’s no proof of that. And so they continue to give these abatements. And I think what happens is they market the house once it’s built or rehabbed as having 15-year tax abatement so they can charge more. And I think people just get a loan based on what their income is. So that’s the house they can afford. And so they’ll get a loan based on what their payments are without the property tax, but then they’ll get that property tax down instead of buying a house with the paying the property tax and figuring out what you can afford long term. They get surprised at the end of 15 years and suddenly they’re paying property tax and they might want to move or something. But I don’t think it makes a big difference for the person buying the house and what they’re paying, but it makes a huge difference to the school system. And so they’ll tell you, well, after 15 years, they’re going to start paying the school system, but in that time period, Cleveland usually loses 20,000 people. And so there’s abandoned houses, abandoned apartment buildings, and the actual increase, if you look at the school budget, it’s less than 1%, and there’s houses coming off of abatements all the time, so they’re not getting that property tax increase. And there’s all kinds of other injustices, but that nothing. Giving the kids the best education that could be afforded, that has long-term implications on property. So why are houses still being abandoned? Because kids aren’t getting the best jobs in the world or not getting the best education that they could. I mean, kids still, you know, percentage of kids still do well and go to elite colleges and things, but it’s not as a high a percentage as it could be if you had smaller class sizes, you had extracurricular activities. Like, I know my mother in law lived in Willoughby, so I know that the schools there have javelin throwing and everything, you know, every sport under the sun, and kids in Cleveland don’t have. And those are the things that make kids want to go to school. You got all those extracurricular activities. And so if kids are dropping out or they don’t have as much to keep them in school and keep them interested and all the social interactions that take place because of that, and I see that as the biggest impact of housing. The other thing of housing policy is after a long time, it just makes you think it’s deliberate, you know, and you hear, like Matt Zone, I heard him say it when they had a new couple move in the neighborhood and they were professionals of some sort, said, well, these are the kind of people we want in the neighborhood. Well, what about the people that are already here? Are you doing anything? He was a council person in Detroit Shoreway And I don’t, you know, maybe not his philosophy, but he said that at a public, you know, ribbon cutting, and you get that sense that this is deliberate, that they’re displacing people deliberately.
Bali White [01:22:30] The overall gentrification of the area has really increased.
Chuck Hoven [01:22:34] Right, that it is deliberate that people want- You know, we had, you know, the Near West Side was- A lot of people moved here from the Catholic left or from, you know, college students were involved in Students for Democratic Society and all this stuff that happened in the seventies. And the church, you know, Bob Begin and the church, the Ecumenical movement and all these churches, their social services were incredible, and there’s still remnants of that, but people that benefited from those services got pushed out of the neighborhood because of the gentrification. And, you know, they- I think one of the guys used to be involved in Near West Housing, Tony Coyne, he said that once there was a guy in his backyard roaming around. He asked the guy if he was lost. He said, no. They gave me a bus ticket from the VA and told me to go to the Near West Side and somebody there would help you. And so he took him over to St. Herman’s, and he got fed and a place to live. So it was true, but that’s what the federal government was doing, was giving veterans, when they released from the hospital, a bus ticket and telling them to go to the Near West Side because there were so many social services there. So the neighborhood was just filled with social services and a lot of people that moved there. But, you know, over time, a lot of these city housing programs that were meant for- Initially, there were federal programs that were meant to help poor people, but somehow they were based on geographic areas. So poor people’s houses were purchased, or if they were a landlord-owned, you know, somebody, they would get pushed out, and they would use these city programs like Cash Cleveland Action to save housing, or some of the federal grants for rehab or loans got used by much wealthier people. And they- So basically, the whole- And that was policy. You know, they wanted to fix the housing stock, but they weren’t thinking about, how do you keep the people that are already there in those houses? So those people moved to different neighborhoods, and so the whole social network that they grew up with is gone now, the grocery store or where they knew people. And so that’s- They got pushed to another neighborhood, and, you know, they’ve developed new networks. But in the same thing with- You’re not dealing with Tremont, but, like Valleyview, they made that a special housing project. It’s called Tremont Pointe now. So they knocked down the public housing, and all those people got displaced. They’re all over the city. But that was a real community. And then they said, well, when we finish, you’ll have first dibs on moving back in. But it took them years to finish, and these people were already scattered. And I think some of them might have moved back, but it wasn’t- It’s not the same community. So that’s how community gets disrupted. And maybe these grants are well-meaning, but they’re just targeted inappropriately. Like, I think there’s something in the early- When Kucinich was mayor, I think they had a debate whether the block grant money should be targeted or spread. And, of course, city council wanted to spread it so every ward would get a certain amount. And they ended up for years spending that money on sidewalks. This is money that was supposed to help communities lift themselves out of poverty. So developers that built sidewalks got the money, and there was little benefit for anybody else. So they did that for years. And the initial argument was you needed to target it to the poorest neighborhoods and lift people out of poverty, but they never did that. The people that wanted to make sure each council person got so much that they could spread around their ward, and that’s still the case today, but they spend it more to organizations. But even programs like the house painting program. If you’re a poor person and you can’t hire a contractor giving you money for paint, they give you money for paint, but you got to paint the house in one year. So if you’re working and with Cleveland’s weather, there’s no way you can paint a house in one year by yourself unless you have a huge family, like 20 people or something. So they expect you to finish it in a certain time period where, you know, they’re not going reimburse you or whatever, however it works. But so there’s programs like that that force people. People that can hire a contractor can do it, but if you can’t, if you got rotten boards and things like that, you might be able to do one side a year by yourself. If you’re working another job, you know, it just becomes an impossible thing. So a lot of these- And then, I don’t know, the lease purchase program, I think some people benefited from that. But at the same time, I think some of them lost their homes, too, because if they’re in a neighborhood that became upscale, then you have the whole property tax issue again. Or so it’s- They haven’t really figured out a housing program that works. I mean, that- My wife, Margie Bray, she is involved in the housing co-op where I live now. And that’s a model that works. It’s a no-equity housing co-op. So we’re in the middle of University Circle, but what we call carrying charges. They had paid off the mortgage years ago, but it was a fortuitous time because University Circle was their landlord, and they were a terrible landlord. So they went on a rent strike, and they kind of forced the sale of the houses to them, to the occupants. And they were bunch of, you know, young people just out of college. So they got together and formed a co-op. And so it’s non-equity. So people move out, they don’t take anything with them, but the price stays affordable.
Bali White [01:29:55] And then the Near West Side doesn’t have anything equivalent to that?
Chuck Hoven [01:29:58] Nothing. No, no, no. There’s some land trust property, which keeps the price of the land down, but it doesn’t keep the house. I think maybe the Catholic Worker House might be sort of like that but - where we had that meeting - but nothing that’s formed structurally like that. And there’s some young people, I think Case campus has one for international students. They have, have a cooperative. I think they have 17 people living in there, but they stay for a couple years while they’re in graduate school, and it keeps the price down. And then I think there’s some young people that rent, that live cooperatively, but it’s not- They don’t own the thing. And we were just lucky the time period because, Lou Stokes was the head of the banking subcommittee or something when they formed the National Cooperative Bank. And we were in his district. I wasn’t involved then, but they got a loan from the National Cooperative Bank, I think in the early eighties because of that, because they wanted something in his district.[ laughs] And nowadays, I think they, all the loans they make are for much bigger operations then. I mean, this is, they don’t, they own like seven units, two double houses and three row houses. So on the co-op. So it was just, it was just the time period. I don’t know if you could do that today because housing prices are crazy right now.
Bali White [01:31:45] So I guess that brings me to the question about housing today in the Near West Side. From what it seems, it’s not, it’s not really affordable. Most housing.
Chuck Hoven [01:31:55] Well, in, you know, what they call- It used to be the Near West Side. Now they’re calling it Ohio City. It’s especially north of Lorain. It’s gotten really high. And now south of Lorain too. And then you can see, see similar things happen in, well already happened in Tremont. A lot of people, we used to have some writers in Tremont that volunteered for us. They got pushed out and, or their houses got, you know, it’s a combination of code enforcement and property tax increases and just general harassment or people that, you know, have personal difficulties and they can’t pay the property tax and they get foreclosed on. I think there was a recent case where somebody won against the county was taking, like, if you owed 2,000 on your property tax and you got foreclosed on and the county sold your house for 150,000, they were keeping the money. So somebody challenged them in court and said they had to reimburse the homeowner. And that was very recent, I think. I don’t know if you saw that, [crosstalk] but it was just maybe a few months ago. But so that, that will help some people who are going to lose their property to taxes because some people, you know, they may have personal health problems, or may have addictions or whatever because they’re [in] poverty. You know, there’s some things that fall and they may lose their house because they’re not, they decided they’re eating or they’re using for drugs or whatever and they’re not paying their property tax. And so it builds up and then there’s fines on that and pretty soon it’s way out of control. And then they lose their house. And if their houses and the property taxes are more than they would have been if they hadn’t based their house on some sale down the street. But so it builds up faster than they think and then they lose their house. And now it may help if that house gets sold for a high price. They may get some money where they could actually afford to rent someplace or maybe buy another, put a down payment. And before, the county was just taking that money. So that’s one thing that may be helpful, but it’s just, you wonder about things like Metro Hospital building stuff for their residents and new housing. How long will that take before, if that becomes a hot neighborhood and people actually get pushed out? Because, I mean, you’ve seen that happen in Ohio City and you’ve seen it happen in Tremont and now it’s happening in Detroit Shoreway, where actually people are getting displaced because especially if they’re renting and the landlords thinks, well, I can make twice as much in rent, but homeowners are getting displaced, too, because they can’t afford or they fall behind in their taxes, so they getting pushed out. I mean, you can make an argument that the housing stock is getting saved, but there’s other ways. Like if you had people actually pay their property tax and put money into, you know, training people to do home repairs or something, [laughs] you could, you could- And they used to have a place on the Near West Side that used to help people. There’s still one place, Cleveland Housing Solutions, I think. But there was, there was actually a model house that, that Jim LaRue and Al Wasco did. And they would, so you’ve heard about that. They would actually, people come in and they’d show, give them workshops, so those kind of things, or maybe some rent stabilization of some kind. But there’s other solutions that if you had, I think if you collected that property tax instead of giving it away, you could put resources into programs that would actually help people stay in their houses rather than this pattern of- But I think it’s deliberate with the city. They make their money on payroll tax, so they want high earners, and they’re building houses like crazy to try to attract high earners. Of course, the developers want [it] because they can get a better price if that’s the market. And same thing with landlords. And then you have a lot of buildings that are just completely abandoned and empty because landlords can’t get enough rent or so. I don’t know. I mean, it’s a dilemma. When they tried to get a higher minimum wage in Cleveland, our mayor went downstate, and they passed the law to prevent cities from having their own minimum wage. So, you know, things that would help people to be able to afford housing get shot down. So there’s like a deliberate. And I’ve seen some of the small businesses probably pressured that, so, I mean, there’s a trade off there, but it’s hard to figure out, well, how is there a solution that’s going to keep people in their houses? And it’s- But I think at the very least, they need to stop giving away the money so the kids can get an education and maybe they’ll have a chance to build the neighborhoods again if they get educational opportunities or like Max Hayes is a trade school. It’s in the neighborhood. Those kids are learning skills to repair houses. But how do you sustain housing for the low-income people that, you know, the city doesn’t seem to have a policy that works. Even their lead abatement policy was— [It’s] been a terrible failure. And they had to give back millions of dollars to the federal government that were supposed to help make houses lead safe. And they just, I don’t know if it’s incompetence or what, but they just don’t, they don’t focus on those programs. But if, you know, like, Progressive Field needs something or the Browns need something, they’re right on it. And they pass laws. They even, you know, they pass laws to give— When the Browns Stadium was built, they were promising that they would create these new taxes and that the schools would be held harmless. And so they passed all these taxes. And then for about ten years, they were given 2 million a year to Cleveland schools from these taxes that could also be used to repair the Browns Stadium. So. And then after ten years, they quietly moved it down to 1 million to the schools and increased the amount going to the stadium. So you see these kind of inequities that could help the school. Kids are just in— There was a teacher who, he passed away last year, but he was down at every school board meeting protesting that drop in funds, and he just got completely ignored. He wrote to all the council people and they still haven’t done anything. They bumped it up. I think it’s 1.125 million. And then they took some money from that to do some other programs. So it’s back under a million right now. I think in the actual amount the schools get. I think there’s some other after school thing they’re doing with, with. So it’s really 1.125 for after schools now, but it, it’s way less than, that stadium is worth more than it was. So I don’t know. I mean, it’s, it’s these kind of things. You think about housing, but I think you have to think about them in relationship to the schools because of the tax abatement policy. And it’s when you deprive kids, they’re only kids once, and you can’t fix it. If you go 18 years or whatever without the resources, they can’t wait, they’re that age at a certain time, and that’s it. If you don’t have the resources, then it’s going to. Their life is going to be much more difficult.
Bali White [01:41:49] I think investing in schools is very crucial, especially, like inner-city schools.
Chuck Hoven [01:41:54] Right.
Bali White [01:41:54] You know, it’s a different case for suburban schools, sure but.
Chuck Hoven [01:41:57] Right.
Bali White [01:41:58] You know, there’s always someone arguing against passing levies or stuff of that sort.
Chuck Hoven [01:42:06] Well, it’ll be the same here. I mean, people are going to, I mean, they’re going to think, well, if my property tax goes up, I may lose my house, but I want the kids to get an education. And maybe they don’t realize that it could get worse after the evaluation if they don’t pass the levy now. But, but it’s, it’s a dilemma for people because in the deficits that the school system runs, you can see when they have money, the kids test scores go up, everything, and then they reach a point where they start running deficits and they’re laying off people, and the opposite happens. The kids- And it’s hard to compete with charter schools or people that want to move out of the city. So you concentrate poverty that way because those that can move out, they see the schools as something they don’t want to continue to be part of. So they’ll move to a better school system if they don’t have, like, a private school option or something like that. So you concentrate poverty more. And the city, you know, they’re moving in new residents that are largely childless, either retirees or single adults. And then they come to that decision point if they end up getting married or having kids, and a lot of times they’re moving out. So you’re not sustaining this population. And then the housing stock suffers, too. And in some neighborhoods, I mean, it’s, if you go down like in Stockyards or in Clark-Fulton, you’ll see empty houses. And, you know, in my neighborhood where I grew up, too, there’s empty houses, houses on almost every street, and there’s vacant lots. And some people have taken over. They have a bigger yard. They’re able to get the house, you know, but that’s happening because people are moving out that have kids. You know, that- I mean, Cleveland keeps talking about how they want to be this 15 minutes city and they want this dense population, but they’re building high-rises for single people. That’s not how you grow a population. You got to be attractive to families and you have to have resources for kids. And we have all this unused infrastructure that is probably more than the city can handle. All these pools. They can’t even staff the outdoor pools right now because they can’t get lifeguards. But you have all this huge infrastructure made for when we were close to a million people and the city can’t maintain it. And same thing, you know, that the population is kind of spread out, so you don’t have the intensive resources for kids in a targeted area because they’re spread out too. Everybody’s- So it’s hard to separate, for me, to separate the housing policy from the schools just because the way they take money from the schools. [crosstalk] Yeah. What about the housing stock? I mean, they’ve saved a lot of houses with these programs, but they’ve also displaced whole populations and neighborhoods and the lifestyle that people had and their communities. So I. And it’s a policy that they’re not looking at close enough. The decision makers are city council, basically, and the mayor and their cabinet, and they’re continuing this. The planning efforts are all based on density, and developers are controlling the show. Council just increased their donations to 3,000 from 1,500. So they’re looking- And the people that make those donations are largely developers or people involved in development, like real estate lawyers and architects. And if you look at the donation list, and it’s hard because you just get a name, you don’t get like, what firm they work for. [laughs] So you gotta, you know, one woman sends me all the newspaper articles about developers so I can glean the names, like who’s- And then you look at the campaign donations and of course, the biggest ones are like the Haslams. Both of them give the maximum amount, and the Council Leadership Fund is where they give. So Blaine Griffin controls that. But they can give- I think it would- You- It was like over 11,000. So it’s more than the 3,000. I think it’s- Maybe it’s 13,000, I’m not sure. But they give the like, Jimmy and Dee Haslam each gives the maximum, so they don’t give it as a couple. They each- So they’re given like 20,000 or something to the Council Leadership Fund. And that you wonder, well, why does the Browns Stadium get so much attention? And they’re taking all this money from that TIF [tax increment financing] that they built for downtown? Every- All the property taxes, except the school tax, which thankfully, they exempt it. But any growth goes to this fund, which will provide infrastructure for the lakefront and the riverfront. And who are the big developers that want to do the lakefront and the riverfront? The Haslams on the lakefront and Gilberts on the riverfront. So they’re billionaires already. But you just see the disparity of resources. Like, if our playgrounds aren’t, don’t have staff, but they can build a playground for the Browns or the Cavaliers along the- And, you know, it’s just- So that, that’s related to housing in terms of you need city resources for people to want to stay in those neighborhoods, or you need school, decent school, you need city services, you need all this basic stuff. And they’re giving away the tax base for that, because the city gets a portion of the property tax, and so does the county, so that the Metroparks and the schools in, well, Tri-C is part of the county allocation. And in the libraries, so all those entities are getting deprived. So you see, like one, the library passed the levy, they promised. All these extra hours they’ve already had to cut back. It used to be 7:00, I think at 6:00 in some cases. And they were, you know, it was all longer hours. They are doing the building plan, which is nice for some of the libraries they’re building, but it’s taking them forever. Like for Walz, it’s still an empty field over on Detroit and 80th. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, all that, those amenities. I think the city’s goal should be for every new property, is to collect as much tax as you can and put that into services. So instead they give it away. And then all these entities, that dependence, most of which are more competent at spending money than the city is, are deprived and the city is hoping for payroll tax from any new residents and sometimes those are retired people that are moving into. So there’s, you know, it doesn’t make sense, but at the same time it’s hurting, hurting any chance, you know, and then, you know, the things like freeways going through neighborhoods and, you know, all these things seem to be policies of the federal or state or local government. I mean the tax abatement is a state creation. State of Ohio created it, cities using it, they don’t have to use it, but they do. And they pit cities against each other too. But yeah.
Bali White [01:51:30] So I guess, moving forward, what do you believe is like necessary in the fight for like affordable housing, just overall housing justice in this community?
Chuck Hoven [01:51:40] Well, I think squatting would be a good, good start to change the squatting laws. I think it’s 20 years now, but there are so many empty houses wherever. If the city wanted us and the county wanted to assist that they could foreclose on houses and make them available for a song to anybody that wanted to move in and start working on it. The whole idea of people being able to afford to purchase a house or to rent a house is not workable when people- Well, you’re not just talking about people below the poverty line, you’re talking about people that are way below the poverty line. And how do you resolve that? And I don’t know if you- It could be a free for all, it could be a mess for the neighborhood, but you could have some orderly way to allow people to take over abandoned houses or have the city or county have- That may be one another way would be cooperative housing. And people get, especially young people that are just starting their careers and they could help jointly purchase houses and keep them as non-equity co-ops because I think that over the long run, but the problem is you have the initial cost. I think you would want to couple that with like the county or the city helping with the initial purchase. And especially, I don’t know if you’ve been down like East 123rd and Parkway, there’s like three huge apartment buildings that the owners just walked away from. And Glenville lost like I think 5,000 people between the last census and this census. So that’s like the highest loss of population. But you know, we have neighborhoods here where the same thing has happened in Stockyards or Clark-Fulton. There’s some areas that you, just streets with abandoned houses and the city services are terrible. Like on Lorain, there was a fire where some developer wanted to build a building at I think 40-something, 44th, between 44th and 41st, there was an old funeral home that burned, and they knocked it down, like, within a week. There’s a house over in Stockyard. We showed a picture of it. It’s been burned for months. It’s been sitting there. Nobody’s knocked it down. Nobody’s done anything. It’s just like a burned-out shell just sitting there in the middle of the neighborhood. So there’s different resources depending on the wealth of your neighborhood. And so those kind of things. I mean, how do you address not having the same city services? So if a bunch of young people wanted to move into one of these neighborhoods where there’s abandoned housing, you’re talking about a risk of lack of city services. So you gotta couple- You got to couple all those things together, but you got to put resources in there so people feel safe and to feel like there’s some amenities in that neighborhood that they can take advantage of or increase the bus system so they can move around. All these kind of things have to be coordinated. And if your city is simply focused on building new housing and attracting high-income people, they don’t put the resources into that. So you’re- And they don’t have these creative programs even. What was her name? Tanisha Jackson, who was the economic development director in Cleveland. She was trying to call back some of these loans to developers that, that didn’t do what they said they were going to do. They said they were going to create so many jobs or they’re going to do so much. They made all these promises, and then they took the money and they weren’t paying these loans back. The city was. So she tried to collect on them in developers protests, and she got fired. So that’s how the city, Cleveland operates. And this was a woman that [Mayor Justin] Bibb brought from New Orleans as one of his first appointments. She was very competent and tried to change the direction of how we do business. But the developers have more sway. And I think the rumor is, I think K & D, which is a big property owner, had some say in that maybe some other people along that she was calling in loans from. So I don’t know. You have to probably take the money out of Cleveland. Instead of increasing it to 3,000, you need to decrease it to $20 or something. And they shouldn’t be allowed to have donations from, that are giving more say to developers than to- And that’s, you know, the council people get reelected based on how much money they have and how much. That’s the way they think, I think. So we’re getting our politics corrupted. So the policy decisions aren’t in the best interest of the people who- There’s not a preferential option for the poor in Cleveland, [laughs] and there should be. And it’s- Instead, it’s a preferential option for the developers. And they’re controlling- They’re controlling the agenda, and they’re pushing a policy that policymakers seem to bought into. It’s this density and high-income, track as many high-income people as you can, and they’re going to make more money, and then they’ll give bigger donations to the council people and the cycle will continue. And I don’t know if you can, if there’s any way to stop it, but people keep trying. There’s people that are protesting, people that are- You had what? We had a few things this past year with the people’s budget group and then the speaking at council meetings. Council’s already clung back at that, so they, you know, for generations, Clevelanders couldn’t speak at the council meetings, and now they can. But their council is trying to claw back some of that. [crosstalk] Yeah, but I think part of it became a lot of protest. But people need an outlet to speak. [crosstalk] The school board for a while was doing just a short period. They were doing better because they were actually responding to every public comment. In the Next Minute, they would send a letter. Every person that made a public comment got a letter from the CEO responding to their question, and then they would publish that letter in the next minutes, next meeting. But then they started making it. So you had to go online to register, and they would limit it to ten people. So they’re doing the same thing the city’s doing. So now it’s the old timers that just went down and filled out a form at the beginning of the meeting. Now you got to sign up in the middle of the month. Know what you’re going to talk about. The meetings are on fourth Tuesday, I think. So it’s like- And it might be filled up. So. And they don’t have a computer at home, so they got to go to the library or friend’s house. So it’s disrupted that. That comment. But that’s, I mean, it’s important in a democracy to get people to participate. And if the people that are on those boards don’t want to hear it, you know, they just want to- They’re all volunteers, like the school board, but city council, they’re getting paid. They should stay the 4 hours and listen to everybody. [laughs] But I don’t know. I mean, it’s how do you change policy when your policymakers are listening more to their donors than to their constituents? So that’s part of it. And that’s the role of Plain Press ideally would play. I mean, we aren’t always able to respond to every issue, but because we’re trying to put pictures in there and put some articles of other things that are happening. But the major issues of the day are trying to address the needs of people in poverty that received by policymakers in the sense that they want to develop policies to address that because their energy, I don’t know, after, usually if you interview a council person, when they first come in, they’re all enthusiastic they’re going to save the world. They’re going to answer their phone and they’re going to call you back in 24 hours. But after a few years down there, they’re meeting more with developers. It becomes a pattern. And a lot of them come out of the development corporations. Actually, some of the good ones come out of, but after a time period they’re falling into, well, the administration says this and all the developers that are taking me to lunch say that. [laughs] And how does a constituent that’s concerned about keeping their house because they’re going in a foreclosure and there’s no policy to help them or, you know, where is that person on their agenda?
Bali White [02:03:16] Exactly.
Chuck Hoven [02:03:17] Yeah. So, yeah, and I don’t know. These housing advocacy groups pretty much have lost their funding over the years. There’s nothing very much left.
Bali White [02:03:28] I can only hope, you know, that future generations will focus on this and perhaps there will be change.
Chuck Hoven [02:03:36] Yeah, well, it does give you hope to see the amount of young people that are involved in issues like, I think there’s a group in Cleveland Heights that I’m hoping to meet with that is very interested in cooperatives. So they invited people from our co-op to talk to them and meet with them. And then there’s, you know, young people that are working for like, Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless and they’re very involved in these kind of issues. And, you know, some of the transit advocates. So there’s, there’s good, but they’re not receiving the kind of resources that these development corporations are receiving. And the, well, some of the staff pay is outrageous. It used to be those jobs were like just above minimum wage and now they’re like making over, you know, 80,000 or something. I don’t know what they make, but it’s gotten out of hand. So you don’t have- They’ve more professionalized it and made it so they can grease the wheels for development and they’re getting paid. I think part of their income is sometimes based on projects as consultant fees or however they arrange it. And so it’s hard to say that you have a neighborhood advocate. And people used to turn to those organizations to help them deal with city hall or help them facilitate things with their council person. And I don’t think that they’re always on the side of the residents right now because they’re, the way their income is structured. And so it’s, you know, we used to cover all those organizations, too. I just like, I mean, they give awards to the neighbor of the year and this kind of thing. But their main focus is not, not what it used to be. And especially when you’ve lost counter organizations like Near West Neighbors in Action was definitely a block club-based organization and issue-oriented. Same thing with Low Income People Together or even Near West Housing when it started out, before it merged with Ohio City. And then you had Tremont West when they started out with more grassroots organizing group, started out Merrick House with actually some of the people that were involved with the Plain Press. Chris Warren and Larry Bresler were working for Merrick House, Orlando organizers. And then Chris became the first director of Tremont West. And Larry is still involved with Organize Ohio, which is another advocacy group. I don’t know how he manages to raise money, but he seems to still keep that alive. But they do Northern Ohioans for Budget Legislation Equality. So that’s the group they, and that they’re largely involved with statewide, the state budget and how it impacts low-income people. But, so there’s some remnants of organizing going on, but it’s hard and it’s not. And you don’t really want to become dependent on the foundations because they’ll pull the rug out from under you if, you know, it’s, traditionally they fund things for about three years and then go on to the next thing. So it’s, I mean, you wish things were being funded, but at the same time you don’t. And their agenda of the foundation is like Neighborhood Progress. They fund that. I mean, that’s to control- They don’t want protests like you see, like Greater Cleveland Congregations a few years back did this big campaign to get, when they were going to put a shell around progressive. What is it, the basketball Gund arena or whatever. Yeah, [crosstalk] they were the basketball- Yeah, it’s the Q [Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse] now, they were going to put a big shell around it so they could sell more, have more amenities inside and sell more products to people. Came and so they wanted public money for that. So the idea was to get a match that would go to mental health services and some other things that would benefit residents. And they got beat up so bad. But the congresspersons were calling them, and they were threatening. Members of their congregations were threatening not to make donations, and all this pressure was coming on, and so they dropped the ballot. There was going to be a ballot initiative. They dropped it. And so that in all the- There was no support from city council or from any elected. I don’t think any elected officials. But, yeah, I think Brian Cummings was initially holding out, and there are a few others. I think they needed his vote, so they gave all kinds of things to Ward 14, and he finally caved in. And now Jasmine Santana is the councilwoman there. But they were doing pressure at every point. Foundations, they were just threatening their budgets, and these churches just backed out. You’d think the churches would be insulated, but they’re not. So there’s just this old network of very wealthy money in Cleveland that wants to fund these kind of things.
Bali White [02:11:06] Well we are nearing the two hour and ten minute mark [crosstalk]. Do you have any last thoughts before we wrap this interview up?
Chuck Hoven [02:11:09] No, I just- If you know any young people who want to get involved with newspapers, send them our way.
Bali White [02:11:15] I’m sure there are quite a bit of journalist majors at CSU that would actually be really interested in it.
Chuck Hoven [02:11:21] Okay.
Bali White [02:11:23] One thing I’m hoping with these interviews is, you know, someone will listen to it and perhaps get involved in one way or another.
Chuck Hoven [02:11:30] Okay.
Bali White [02:11:31] So, thank you.
Chuck Hoven [02:11:32] Thank you very much.
Bali White [02:11:35] Awesome. Today is July 19, 2024. I’m wrapping up this interview with Chuck Hoven. I am Bali White with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. Thank you.
Chuck Hoven [02:11:45] Okay. Thank you, Bali.
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