Marge Misak interview, 27 September 2024

Abstract

Marge Misak recollects her early life growing up in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and attending Northwestern University where she received a degree in Journalism and met her husband, Jim. The young family then moved to Clinton, North Carolina, for four years where Misak got involved in a migrant ministry programs. The Misaks eventually decided to move to the Near West Side where they found a sense of community through Cleveland's Catholic Worker. While living on the Near West Side, Misak was involved with the Ohio City Near West Development Corporation. She highlights her experience in developing the Cuyahoga Community Land Trust to provide affordable housing in the community.

Interviewee

Misak, Marge (interviewee)

Interviewer

White, Bali (interviewer)

Project

Near West Side Housing Activism

Date

9-27-2024

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

84 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Marge Misak interview, 27 September 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544016.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1346

Related Resources

Near West Side @ Cleveland Voices

Transcript

Bali White [00:00:00] So I’m going to hit record. Hi, everybody. My name is Bali White with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. Today I’m here with Marge Misak. We are at Carnegie West Library in the bridge room. It is September 27, 2024, and 1:07 p.m. How are you?

Marge Misak [00:00:21] I’m good, thank you.

Bali White [00:00:22] Good. So could you introduce yourself, kind of when and where you were born?

Marge Misak [00:00:27] Yes. So Marge Misak. I was born, actually in Arlington Heights, Illinois, in 1957. So I’m in my mid-sixties now and living in Cleveland, Ohio, at this point, have been for about 34 years now. So most of my adult life actually has been spent in Cleveland.

Bali White [00:00:48] Sure. So was Arlington Heights–

Marge Misak [00:00:52] Arlington Heights.

Bali White [00:00:52] Was that a suburban area?

Marge Misak [00:00:54] Yeah, it’s a suburb of Chicago, really very white suburb, growing up, very kind of close-knit. Well, this was the 1960s that, you know, growing up, and I come from a large Catholic family, a lot of Catholic families around us, kind of very, very parochial in a lot of ways, close to the Catholic church, close to a park. We had just very close-knit family, not a lot of extended family around us, but a lot of neighbors and the kind of neighborhood where, you know, you could go out your door and find a bunch of kids and hang out from, you know, sun up till sundown in the summer and go and play until dark in the winter. So, but so kind of a, you know, I would say for my family, middle-class kind of growing up, my dad was in his own business, so we did not have a lot of cash growing up, but we had plenty of everything we needed, the kind of professional class around us. But my dad was in his own business, so we were kind of a little, probably less cash wise, but, you know, a neighborhood where we had plenty of food, we had a park down the street, we had a library down the street, just kind of all of those suburban amenities that, that you take for granted when, you know, your parents could get their first house with help from their parents. This was, you know, they bought their first house soon after they got married with help from their parents. And all those things that I learned about housing and the kind of advantages of white people that I learned once I was an adult that were advantages to, you know, white privilege that I had growing up, even when we didn’t have a lot of cash money around.

Bali White [00:02:57] So you had mentioned you were raised Catholic, correct?

Marge Misak [00:03:02] Yes.

Bali White [00:03:02] Would you say that had, like, a big role in your life growing up?

Marge Misak [00:03:06] Yeah, probably because I went to Catholic schools for grade school and high school, and that was very important to my parents. And then probably for me then, too, as well, I went to Northwestern University and was involved in the Catholic church there, met my husband there. But for us then, I think the turn that I took probably once I was in college, was much more to a sort of Catholic social teachings bent. And Jim and I met, well, we’ve been married over 40 years now, and we met in college. So kind of peace and justice kinds of things from a Catholic social teaching. So think about the 1980s, and those were very important kinds of things to us. I joked with my daughter that she went to her first Peace March when she was in the womb. [laughs] So those were real important to us with being involved with our church and then larger kind of, you know, peace marches and peace movements, anti-nuclear at the time in Chicago and then in the church that we were in in Chicago. Well, we moved to Chicago, the city, after school. When we got married, Jim was, Jim’s a family physician, and he did his residency at the public hospital in Chicago. We lived there. And the other thing, in addition to sort of was I thinking in addition to sort of anti-nuclear kinds of things, those were important to us. The church that we were in was also down the street from the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, which was a sanctuary church for Central American refugees. Those refugees were Catholic, so they came to our church, actually. So just kind of an immersion in that kind of milieu, I guess, was a part of my early adulthood and who we knew and the kinds of friends that we had.

Bali White [00:05:26] So when did you attend Northwestern University?

Marge Misak [00:05:31] Yeah, in the late seventies. Graduated in 1979. I have a degree in journalism from Medill there. And then– So I just, I went through– I don’t have a graduate degree. And then, yeah, and then Jim went on to medical school there and residency at, very different, went to medical school at Northwestern and then did his residency at the public hospital, which was Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Very, very, very different experience from. [laughs] [crosstalk} Probably, yeah. So from ’79 to ’86, I guess. And then we moved to rural North Carolina. Jim had gone through medical school on a government scholarship and owed four years of service in an underserved area. So he decided to. He had learned Spanish for his residency, and so he decided to look at migrant health centers for his kind of service time. So we looked at a lot of different places and ended up in- He ended up at a migrant health center in North Carolina that was in a town called Clinton, which is southeast of Raleigh, and in Samson County, which is geographically the largest county in North Carolina, but very, very rural. One of the, I don’t know. Now it’s probably larger but more population wise. But at the time, Clinton was a town of 9,000 people if you counted the people who lived sort of outside of town in a couple of housing developments. And we knew people who had never been out of side of the county in their lives. So it was a different experience. [laughs]

Bali White [00:07:25] So how long were you living in Clinton?

Marge Misak [00:07:29] We were there for. We spent four years there. Yeah. Yeah. And it was totally eye-opening for us because I, you know, I got involved at that time. We had one child, our daughter and our son was born there. So I was home with the kids. Jim was working crazy hours. And I got involved with like, the migrant ministry programs. Both the Catholic and Episcopal churches had migrant ministry programs. So I was doing things like, you know, driving people from migrant camps to the clinic for appointments or working with the moms, you know, doing like a sewing class or that kind of thing. And then, and then kind of being home with my kids, which involved me in town and getting to know people so very, in so many ways, very alienating and very shocking for us coming from the North. It was like, wow, the racism here, the poverty, people can just live next door to people who are so much poorer than them. When you look at, like, farms and farm workers and the conditions that they live in, and then you say, wait a minute. You know, we, from the north, we put, you know, we manage to live far away from poor people. We just isolate poor people. We just isolate black and white problems and, you know, we ignore the racism in the North because we don’t have to live next door to it. And so it was very, in that way, it was very eye-opening for us. I think the kind of sense of white privilege that, that we realized was really a part of who we were and experienced, but still in many ways very alienating. I think for us, a lot of what really came home to us was the sense of this is not how we want to live our lives. We made friends there. We made a lot of friends there. People are very, this is a small town. People are very welcoming, very nice. And, you know, you come in as a doctor and they, their family and people are very nice to you. And so in some ways, we meet a lot of friends. But there was also just this culture about child raising that was just things like, just the things that people didn’t even consider violent child raising, like slapping their kid’s hands for any little thing. And it’s like, wow, I don’t slap my kid around, you know, or attitudes towards, like, Santa Claus. Like Santa Claus, you better watch out, you know, Santa and be good, because Santa comes to those who are good, which means Santa doesn’t come to you who are poor because you’ve been bad? And I had to confront that with my children who knew, you know, kids who were, whose families were migrants, you know? And it’s like- You mean, it’s like talking to Ann about José. Why doesn’t Santa come to bring José toys? Because he’s been bad, was her answer at three years old. And those kinds of things that Jim’s statement at that time was, if it’s us as a nuclear family versus American culture, culture’s gonna win. And so we knew we couldn’t live like that. We just couldn’t raise our kids in that kind of, not so much southern culture, but alone. And so I think we did have some really good kinds of experiences of connecting with people in particular. One, ironically, one big experience for me, was when the Ku Klux Klan was going to march through our town, I having felt very alienated and ended up thinking, they cannot march through my town, and I don’t do anything. It was like all of a sudden, it was my town and got involved in a number of things, just figuring out with a friend how we were gonna - that’s another whole long story [laughs] - how we were gonna do something about that and ended up doing some good things, I think, and feeling connected to people in the community through some organizing through the churches. That really, for me, ended up feeling some connection to people in town around that experience. But in the end, we decided we weren’t staying in this small town. It was not going to be where we were going to raise our kids. [laughs]

Bali White [00:12:14] So that actually leads to my next question. What brought you and your family to the Near West Side?

Marge Misak [00:12:19] Yeah. So Jim was at the end of his four years, and we were from the Midwest originally, both of us. He grew up near Chicago, in a city in Joliet, near Chicago. And we didn’t necessarily feel we wanted to go back to Chicago because it’s a big area. And so where were we going to put together kind of work? He knew what he would be doing as a family physician. I wasn’t really sure where I was heading work-wise, but we wanted some sense of community. We had visited a Catholic Worker community in Washington, DC, a number of times and done a number of things with that community up there. But we also knew that we had visited families who lived in that community. And we’re like, this is really chaotic to move into a Catholic Worker community with small children that we didn’t see ourselves doing that, but we didn’t really see ourselves going back to Chicago because it’s like, well, how do you put together church, work, where you live, family life, school? Our daughter would be entering school and all of that without driving, you know, 30, 40 miles for every different thing. So we started looking around at towns in the Midwest, in places, writing to Catholic Worker communities, to a couple of other kinds of intentional communities, and saying, what is life like for you? What do you have? This is who we are. And Joe Lehner from the Cleveland Catholic Worker wrote back to— He was actually the first one who wrote back to us. And this is the days of snail mail. [laughs] There was no email. This was like the late eighties, 1989. And he’s like, well, you know, there are a lot of families who live in the neighborhood kind of intentionally, and why don’t you come visit? So Jim arranged an interview with the Metro Health system, the public hospital system here. And we came up together, he and I went to visit the Catholic Worker and then met a couple of people in the neighborhood who took me on a tour. And then I was like, well, what are schools like? And went to visit a couple of schools. And there’s a whole story about Urban Community School and a connection with our small town across the street from us. But I don’t have to get into that. Our small town in North Carolina, where one of the Ursulines had spent a summer there, but visited Urban Community School, where our daughter ended up going to school. So met a couple people, and then we visited a couple of other places, some places in Chicago, Cincinnati, I don’t know where else. We, we corresponded with a couple other places, but Jim had a great interview at Metro Health. I mean, that was the piece of it. Just the work there potentially, where he would be working in a community clinic based clinic in a hospital system that was going to be- I mean, Metro Health is really a special place. I mean, I have to say that as a family physician, for him to be able to see patients and who could not, he would not just see his patients, but they would have a whole system of care where he could refer them to a specialist and they could have access. That, for him was just the clincher for why he wanted to go work there. So that was very important for us, moving here. And then we loved the idea that there were families who had intentionally been living on the Near West Side, raising their kids here with a sense of social justice commitments, some connected to the Catholic Worker, but others who had been here for, you know, all kinds of other reasons. Maybe they had been Jesuit volunteers or Marianist volunteers, or they were all the way back from, you know, the 1960s and seventies, part of the anti-war movement and had stayed or moved into the neighborhood because of that. Lots and lots of reasons that families sort of intentionally lived on the Near West Side that were close to our values. And so we came back then for a second visit with our family and the Schlechts, Jim and Patty Schlecht who were married at that time, had a potluck for us, and we met like 75 people on the Near West Side. So, I mean, it is a, you know, I tell people this story and it’s like, well, I moved into the neighborhood and I knew 75 people, and within a mile, [laughs] there are not a lot of neighborhoods in this entire country where you could do, say that.

Bali White [00:17:10] Right, Especially in an urban environment.

Marge Misak [00:17:12] Yes, yes, right. A small town you might meet that many people in- I mean, that’s probably so. I’ve always thought of Cleveland as a small town in a big city in some of the negative ways it is as well, a lot of parochial attitudes in the city as well. But so we just made that. And Ann met friends, although she has some, our daughter, she has different experiences, recollections of that potluck.

Bali White [00:17:46] But that’s definitely something I’ve noticed is that sense of community almost like everybody knows everybody a little bit.

Marge Misak [00:17:54] Yeah.

Bali White [00:17:55] Through reading, like Inherit the Earth, like the Catholic Worker newspaper, some of the older ones with Joe Lehner him writing about, like, the families in the newspaper, I thought that was really interesting, just seeing the different families in the community and how everybody kind of, like I said, knew each other.

Marge Misak [00:18:12] Yes.

Bali White [00:18:13] Especially in the Near West Side, in a neighborhood in Cleveland.

Marge Misak [00:18:17] Yeah, I think that that’s very true, that in those in, to some extent, it’s in a lot of ways, there are those kinds of connections still. But in the, well, for us, moving in 1990 was when we moved, certainly in the nineties, and I’m sure before that as well, because the stories that we hear of things like the food co-op then and the people’s furniture co-op and the meals programs that people started, that they just individually started things. I mean, people could just start things. It wasn’t like, you know, there’s this big institution, you know, nonprofit institution that came in and started some big program. It was individuals who got together and said, this is a need, and we’re going to meet that need. And a lot of the institutions on the Near West Side started with individuals saying sort of that Dorothy Day thing of, well, we’re just sitting around the table and we saw this need and we did that. And that is very much a Catholic Worker kind of attitude. And it’s very much, I think, how a lot of things happened on the Near West Side. Absolutely. And, yeah. And it comes from people just knowing each other and then knowing, oh, well, do you know so and so? Well, you should talk to them because that’s, you know, they’re interested in that, or I’ve heard that about them.

Bali White [00:19:44] So could you kind of describe what this area looked like in 1990?

Marge Misak [00:19:49] Yeah, it was really pretty rundown. It was. We, we found our apartment that we first moved into through neighbors, through our mailman, Bill Merriman, who you’ve probably heard about. I don’t know if you’ve interviewed him, but, as part of this, but so we, and it was, we lived next to, he just knew of someone who had, I guess, had probably just moved out of their apartment or something. And so he talked to them and, and, in fact, came in with some people and painted half the apartment because it was really kind of not in such great condition, but it was okay. Everything worked. And then it was next door to some people who are very good friends who had a daughter our daughter’s age, and they ended up being about 10 feet away. Their bedroom window. [laughs] Spent many, many a night talking to each other outside through their windows. And that was how we actually found our apartment because I don’t know how you would. There was no real estate market in the neighborhood at the time, and there certainly wasn’t anyone you could call and say, I looking for rental apartments. It just was all word of mouth at that time. So the neighborhood was pretty rundown, I would say. It was also very, I couldn’t really tell you the demographics of it. It felt pretty diverse at that time. There were certainly the, you know, the public housing, the big public housing estates, Riverview and Lakeview estates. And Riverview at that time had the low-rise apartments. So there were family estates and significant numbers of families that lived at Riverview in addition to the high-rise senior estate there. And then throughout the neighborhood, there were, you know, the sort of, excuse me, gentrifying sort of, you know, the parts. It was probably most of the houses that were renovated, people did on their own. So that was kind of the, you know, the Development Corporation by then. No, I don’t know the whole history of the mergers of the development corporations. Like was Ohio City Near West? No, it hadn’t merged yet because that happened after we were here, pretty soon after we were here. But the first Ohio, the first development corporation that was more related to kind of redevelopment. It was people doing that on their own and trying to get loans and fixing up themselves and hiring contractors for their own living situation. It wasn’t developers coming in and redeveloping homes. There was no. There was no mark there. Not that there wasn’t a market for it. There was. You couldn’t get loans for it, I’m sure, was the situation much more than. And so people, you know, scrambled for getting to get a loan, and they were probably going to places like Near West or Neighborhood Housing Services to get, you know, nonprofit loans and going to development banks. Like, when we bought our house, we got a purchase rehab loan from Ameritrust Development, which is no longer there. But we, you know, was an experience [laughs] to try to get a loan that you could then fix up a house because you weren’t buying a house that someone else renovated. And so it was. Yeah. And, you know, it was interesting too. I mean, just one quick story on that. A lot of- But what’s, but what’s also interesting is that it’s not like people weren’t making money off the neighborhood. And I’m not enough of a scholar on this to know the numbers related to it, but, like, one anecdote around that our house was that we were renting when we first moved here. I don’t remember what we were paying. Maybe $400 a month or something like that. It was a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen and a living room and a dining room. And it was, everything functioned, and everything worked. Yucky looking carpeting. Like I said, Bill came in with friends and painted it, so it was okay. And I remember some kids from around the corner coming to the door, some black kids coming to the door selling candy for their school. So I invited them into the foyer, and they’re like, oh, my gosh, this is so nice your house. It’s so nice. And I’m thinking, well, there aren’t holes in the wall. You know, it’s okay. It’s. Yeah. Thank you. And they were just, they were like, how much are you paying in rent? And I’m telling them, and they’re like, you’re kidding because they knew how much their parents were paying in rent for a slum. It was so clear that very similar to or more than what we were paying in rent. And they were living in slum conditions. And so what happens in urban neighborhoods and I had heard other stories of a- Well, but is not that, you know, there is no money. There is money. It’s just that people pay rent for slums instead, and they’re paying the same kind of rent in those neighborhoods like ours at that time. It’s just they can get away with it. So slum landlords make money on people’s poverty. It’s not- And then, and then the conditions start to change, and then they can, I mean, you know, obviously now the rents are much, much higher, but I think that that’s very true. And, you know, when I was talking to someone at one point about sort of the history of what were they trying to do? They were trying to develop- I’m not going to be able to tell this whole story because I’m going to forget what they were trying to develop. And they were trying to develop co-ops in the city, but they were finding that while they had some funds to be able to purchase, slum landlords weren’t willing to sell and. Well, why wasn’t that? Because they were making money on slums in the city. It isn’t true that there is no money there, that it’s just that there’s no conditions where they’re being forced to improve their conditions. So it was really, I think that’s about what was kind of the conditions. And those who were individually improving things on their own were actually doing it more as individuals, [crosstalk].

Bali White [00:27:05] So I guess that leads me to the next question. How did you get involved in housing justice? Affordable housing work on Cleveland’s Near West Side.

Marge Misak [00:27:14] Yeah. So from the time we moved to Cleveland, I didn’t know that housing was the thing. I mean, I sort of had this sense coming from, you know, Arlington Heights, Illinois, is the home of exclusionary housing. The Supreme Court case that relates to exclusionary housing where the Supreme Court justified exclusionary housing was in Arlington Heights, and it was happening when I was growing up, there was a housing group that wanted to build affordable housing in our town, and the zoning was for single-family housing. And it was the Catholic boy’s high school who was willing to sell the land to this group from Chicago to build multifamily housing. And the town said, no, it’s not in our plan. Our zoning plan doesn’t allow for that. And the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was discriminatory but did not require them to change that zoning. It said, you have to build, but you don’t have to build there. And it had a big impact on me because, you know, I was just this, I was like in 7th grade. And I remember just in this practical, sort of my down to earth practical thinkers said, wait a minute, I knew where the school was because my brothers went to school where. So I knew where the land was and I knew, and I, a friend and I did this project at that time, we had to do some kind of social studies project on our town. And we interviewed people about zoning issues because her dad was on the planning commission. And that was one of the things we interviewed people I remember interviewing the town, the town manager’s wife. And she’s like, oh, those poor kids. They just won’t have, it won’t be fair to the kids moving in if we do this, they won’t have bikes, and they won’t be able to get to the park, to shopping, and the library. And I remember thinking, this person’s lying. You know, it’s like that one of those times when kids know an adult is lying to them, it’s like, wait a minute, I walk to the library and I walk a heck a lot further than those kids are going to walk. I walk to the park all the time. They have parks near them. It’s like you just knew this was not the reason. This was because black kids would be moving into our town. And so it just had a big impact on me in terms of just like, well, what is this really about? And I think that that’s in kept, you know, that’s a piece of where my sort of sense of housing justice probably percolated in the back of my mind. But it was never really going to be housing for me until we moved to the Near West Side. And then all anybody talked about was, do you know what that house went for? The next house and the next house. And I remember the first hundred thousand dollars in house price. I could tell you where it was on the Near West Side. And people just kept talking in like these shocked terms about, you know, how prices were rising. But it was like, well, what do you do about that? A lot of it was on the private market. So, you know, again, at the early times, I think it was, well, people pay what they pay. It’s all private market stuff. But then you start to realize what happens in terms of public subsidy. And that was where for me, the concerns came in and where I really wanted to see some changes. Because when you start to look at how is the city encouraging market, so called market rate development, what are they, what’s being incentivized by public investment and what isn’t. And that is where there was a lot of issues around the development corporation then, and the two development corporations merging into one to become Ohio City Near West. We weren’t super involved with that. I mean, I went to meetings around that and had people, and friends who cared a lot about that, but I was probably more involved with my kids in their school and school issues at that time. And so sort of like, you know, someone tells you to come to a meeting, you come to a meeting. You know, that was the neighborhood very much. [laughs] But I guess as I started to kind of think about some of those issues, what ended up happening then with the Ohio City Near West as a development corporation was people started to organize around the elections, and it was a membership organization, and there were board elections. So the members voted on the board, and people started running for the board specifically on an affordable housing agenda. And then what was that agenda going to be? What were you going to work on? And so for me, as I started thinking about it, what bothered me was the sources of funding for development were that there are two main sources of funding in the city. The city didn’t really raise, and it still doesn’t raise its own money. It doesn’t have a source of funding for affordable or for anything in terms of housing, like its own housing trust fund and its own source, it uses federal funding. So those sources of funding are the community development block grant funding, which was quite prevalent in the 1990s, and 2000s, much less now and then, federal home funds. Well, community development block club funding was being used consistently to subsidize market rate housing. So if you ever want to think about market rate housing, so called, in this town, you have to always say publicly subsidized market rate housing, there is not a thing that’s built in this town that is market rate, allegedly, that is not subsidized by tax abatement, by tax increment financing. At that time, it was usually CDBG funds. And so the idea that they were thinking about was always building up the middle class. Building up the middle class, because the city, the incentives are all, I’m going to just go on rant. The incentives are all misaligned. They are. The city gets its money from income taxes, not property taxes. And so it’s totally incentivized to siphon away those property taxes, which go to other things, and let those be used for development and then bring in higher income people to the housing that gets built, instead of focusing on how do we build housing for the people that are already there. And that just seems wrong, and continues to seem wrong to me. It did at the time, and that was probably my biggest incentive to getting involved in. So I ran for the board as one of those tickets in 1998. Getting back to your question. [laughs]

Bali White [00:35:00] You mentioned you ran for the board in 1998, the Ohio City Near West Corporation. Correct?

Marge Misak [00:35:06] Right.

Bali White [00:35:07] So can you kind of talk a little bit about that? Kind of, what was the outcome like, did you become a board member?

Marge Misak [00:35:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we were pretty effective in at least a couple of cycles in sort of getting our slate of board members elected. And so I was in the sort of second wave, if you will. And so by that time, then we sort of had, I guess, a majority. But the question then was, what’s our platform? What’s our agenda besides saying, well, we want affordable housing? What does that mean? And so one of the, so we, there were a couple of things we looked at, and, well, one of the very first meetings that I went, the first meeting I went to, [laughs] there was a project on the agenda that it was the Orchard Park development in the neighborhood. It was single-family homes that were going to be built at, again, I would call it so called market rate development. They were going to be sold on the open market to people at a certain price point. But they were going to be heavily subsidized with CDBG funds. And so there was an item on the agenda to accept those funds. Well, we voted against it. And people were so mad at us. They called us crazy. They were so angry. I mean, I don’t even think we had a majority. I think it still passed. But they were very, very mad because we were not accepting public funds for a project in our neighborhood that was going to beautify the neighborhood, that was going to bring up housing standards. Why would we say no to this? It’s like, well, there’s no affordable element in this. You don’t have any affordable housing. You’re going to build like 20 some units in a neighborhood that’s going to directly, really impact this. It was south of Lorain. It was really a neighborhood that had a lot of disinvestment, and a lot of poverty. You are going to really impact that neighborhood with this really fairly large project, and there’s no affordability built into it at all. No, [laughs] is what we were saying was no. You have to think about some affordable element to it. And for me, I had actually gone, when I first got elected, my next-door neighbor, who happened to be the housing court judge at the time, Bill Corrigan, brought me to lunch with Norm Krumholtz, who was sort of the guru of equity planning at Cleveland State at the time. Right. And one of the questions I asked him was, why is it so difficult anymore? It seems like it’s harder now, you know, to do affordable housing. And we had a long conversation, but when I asked him that question, I said, is it the funding? Is it the resources? What is it? And he just looked at me and he said, it’s political will. It’s about political will. And I just decided I would take that as my mantra [laughs] in everything I did. And I- So we had this vote. We said, and maybe we did win, maybe it was a no. And they had to go back to the drawing board, because a week later, after that vote, when we said no, I get this call or not a call, but there was this announcement that there was going to be this meeting with the director of OCNW and the council person. It was going to be like on the tree lawn of this project, the Orchard Park development. I’m like, what’s this about? We go, and here the council person and the director are announcing that seven of these units are going to be lease purchase units. Affordable lease purchase units that Cleveland Housing Network would build. That would be affordable units. And I just stood there thinking, political will. This is what- It’s not that the resources aren’t there. It’s not that this can’t be done. It’s not that if your imagination is- If you imagine a different outcome, this is not possible. It is about political will. You have to think about it. You have to think about a different outcome before that outcome will ever present itself. And when they first envision the project, they’re just thinking, how do we do a market-rate project? CDBG funds, that’s how we’re going to do this. And until someone said no, it’s going to. And of course, it took the council person at that time, Nelson Cintron to also say, we’re going to have a different outcome. Wasn’t just us.

Bali White [00:39:52] So ultimately, those apartments were built?

Marge Misak [00:39:54] Yes. The houses, there were seven of those were built as lease purchase out of, I think, 20, I want to say 21, maybe a third. But I could be wrong on my numbers. But. So maybe a third of them were built as affordable homes. Yeah.

Bali White [00:40:11] Are they still around today?

Marge Misak [00:40:12] Correct. So lease purchase homes would be- They would be rent to own for 15 years, and then they would be sold to, and then not be affordable. So they would be long past that, 15 years now. So they would not necessarily be affordable at this point, they would be market rate at this point, which is one of the downsides of the lease purchase program. It doesn’t necessarily stay affordable for the long term, but it would have been at that time.

Bali White [00:40:42] Okay, so I guess that kind of also leads me to another question, is how you got involved with the Cuyahoga Community Land Trust?

Marge Misak [00:40:50] Yeah. So as being on the board, there was that question of, so we had, you know, we had these two big public housing units or estates in the neighborhood, which were obviously all affordable housing rental. Affordable housing. We’re going to affordable housing because they’re owned by the Public Housing Authority. We had a little bit of other affordable rental mixed into the neighborhood, and we were successful in a couple of other projects as affordable rentals. But there wasn’t, isn’t a ton of, there aren’t a ton of apartment buildings in the Ohio City neighborhood. It’s not like Chicago, where there’s kind of single or double units kind of in the blocks, and then the ends of the blocks are apartments. And you could say, well, let’s work. Or even Detroit Shoreway is a little bit more like that, where you can say there’s apartments. I mean, now there are because they built a lot of luxury apartments in the neighborhood. But at the time, it’s not like there was that kind of, you know, configuration where there were these, you know, apartment blocks or some, but not a lot of apartment units. So a lot of the neighborhood was single-family homes or doubles, one of the two. So you kind of say, well, how do you end up, if your goal is a mixed-income neighborhood, how do you get that with single-family and doubles and a lot of single-family homes in the neighborhood? And so community land trusts are a way to do that, or houses that are going to be sold and owned. I mean, you don’t probably with apartments, you want an affordable rental with single-family homes, and a lot of what you probably want to end up with are owner-occupants. A little bit more than a lot of scatter-type rental housing is hard to manage. Hard to manage well. And so you probably, if you want affordable units, you want to think about can they be sold? And the community land trust is a way to do that. And I knew about it coming to Cleveland. I knew about it, ironically, from reading Sojourners Magazine, which was this radical Christian magazine, a leftist magazine, had heard of them before I came to Cleveland. And so I guess so at one point, I, we had friends who were visiting from, had lived on the Near West Side, were visiting from Durham, and they were talking at sitting our dining room tables talking about the Durham Community Land Trust. And I was like, ah, community land trust, that’s what we need on the Near West Side. And they’re like, you’re the second person who said that today. And I’m like, who’s the first? Who else on the Near West Side has heard of a community land trust? And they’re like, well, Tony Vento has said it. So I was like, oh, I sort of know Tony. He, you know, like you said, everyone sort of knows everybody else. He was the director of the InterReligious Task Force. And I think I went and I might have gone and looked him up, I don’t really remember. But he, it turns out, had, through some other stuff he had done, had gone to a community land trust conference in Minneapolis and I was on the board at that time at Ohio City Near West. And so he had a friend from college that lived in Philadelphia and was working with I think he was working with OFN, the Opportunity Finance Network. And anyhow, Joe Kahacki came to town, brought some sleep slides with him about community land trust and we just did a little gathering at the Catholic Worker storefront, as I recall, and about community land trust. And that, I think was how we kind of got started right in the neighborhood with, well, what is this? Would this be? And it was funny because Tony’s friend Joe, who knew a lot about city financing and I mean, he was working with a community development bank at the time and in community development and basically said, your neighborhood’s too far gone. You shouldn’t even think about this. Which at that time we were still in this sort of gentrifying sort of not really that far gone, I don’t think. But anyhow, we didn’t really take no for an answer.[laughs] [crosstalk] So this would have been 19. So I got elected in 1998. So this was probably 1999. And so we. Yeah, it probably was because we then started talking about it in the housing committee at the development corporation at Ohio City Near West. So. And what the biggest things, I think that really impacted it. There were two things. One was at that time there was a national intermediary that related to community land trust. The name will come to me because it wasn’t even the National Community Land Trust Network. It was the- It wasn’t equity trust. It was- It’ll come to me. But anyhow, so. But the biggest thing was that at that time there was HUD-funded technical assistance available. So the Department of House, and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development was funding groups to pay for technical assistance. So first we applied and had someone who came out to do a feasibility assessment with us so the development corporation could apply. And this consultant, John Davis, came and did a feasibility analysis with us, so that, and then that led to us being able to apply for technical assistance funding. And then the board had to accept that. So there was a board vote, and there were two people on the board who were sort of, you know, not in that cohort of affordable housing advocates who really came to believe Jim Hicks and Roy Pagales. And it was really John Wilbur, the director, who I think really worked with Jim and Roy, and they just came to believe in it. And they worked with a lot of their cohorts on the board, and John did as well. And so it ended up being a unanimous vote to say, yes, we’re going to go for this. And I think it was because this was an idea that was single-family home ownership for people who were of modest means. So you could look at, you know, I mean, it’s sort of the classic teachers and firefighters kind of thing, but it was people in the neighborhood who were of modest means but were going to own homes. It wasn’t going to be this rental project. It was going to be a way to potentially fix up housing in the neighborhood that the development corporation could either if you did rehab or new construction, that they would have a say in how it looked, and it would be home ownership from day one, which, which was very appealing to board members. There were a lot of other people in the neighborhood who ended up not liking it. But I think for the board, it was like, no, this fits our values in terms of what we’re looking for. And we would say we believe in economic diversity. You know, I mean, there was no one who was going to say we don’t like economic diversity, [laughs] and this was a way for them to say, we can build this into the infrastructure of the neighborhood. So there was a lot of appeal for it. So we brought in this technical assistance consultant, and we’re able to really figure out how, because it’s a long, it’s a long, a big lift to get a land trust. It usually takes a few years. I do consulting on it now, and it’s a big lift to get it going. And so that’s— that is how we got started.

Bali White [00:49:14] So you had mentioned that it was a unanimous vote, correct?

Marge Misak [00:49:19] Yes.

Bali White [00:49:19] And then you said that there were some people in the community who might not have been for it. Do you know possibly why they weren’t for it?

Marge Misak [00:49:29] Yeah, a little bit of it, yeah. You know, you don’t always- Sometimes you hear more rumors and stuff, but, I mean, yeah, we were called, well, a lot. It was- Yeah, we were called, like, you know, the Cleveland Communist Land Trust and - at times - and things like that. Some of it, I think, was that people thought that we were gonna, you know, we were gonna build inferior houses. So some of it was that it was gonna be- They were- One of the big worries was, you build this next to me and it’s going to bring down my property values. That was a big concern. So, you know, so whenever we would build, because we were building new construction homes, we would, you know, do neighborhood meetings, and there’s a lot. It’s a lot of education around, you know. No, actually, You don’t have- I mean, actually, the property values are- They’re not comparables. The value of a land trust house, even if you’re selling it for less than the neighborhood house, it is not a comparable. Any appraiser who knows anything about appraisals is not going to use that as a comparable for, in determining the value of your house if you’re going to sell. So. But, you know, that’s a whole education thing. And so do you have the opportunity to educate people or do rumors, you know, take over? So that’s always a piece of it, worrying about the quality of homes. The Neighborhood Development Corporation worries a lot about the quality of homes that they’re building, but still. And then who is going to move in? So I’m sure there’s a racial element to it because we don’t discriminate. And so, you know, we definitely were, had, you know, Black homeowners, and I don’t know. You can never know if that’s a piece of what people are worrying about. So, yeah, so what are, you know, some of the other. I’m not sure. Yeah, those are some of the things, I think, that were probably issues for people.

Bali White [00:51:38] So, about how many land trust homes do you think were built?

Marge Misak [00:51:42] Well, we did. We did. I think we did seven in the Ohio City neighborhood. And then we- And then, well, and then, and then the board shifted dramatically in, and, in fact, so dramatically that we were building in the middle. Were nothing in the middle. We were at the end of construction of one of our homes for when we were co-located, we started the land trust and incorporated it as a separate entity, thinking that it might expand to other neighborhoods. And so it’d be good to have it separately incorporated rather than a program of Ohio City Near West. But we were co-located. We’re, you know, in, and I became the director. It was kind of touchy. I resigned from, you know, I debated. We had a little bit of money for a part-time director. I was like, do I do this or not do this? I wasn’t sure and decided to apply. So I resigned from the board, resigned from the housing committee or the steering committee of the land trust. And it was a little touchy because I think there were people who felt like I shouldn’t be qualified to do, you know, shouldn’t do that. And it was like, up to you. I’m not a part of those discussions. But, so I, but I did become the first director, and then, but we were co-located at Ohio City Near West, and they, for one, told us. So this board shifted dramatically in terms of who was on the board and the board. John Wilbur had left the organization as director. A new director was in, and he. I wouldn’t, I don’t ever like to say what people’s motives were, but he did not stand up for the land trust in the face of his board president’s absolute opposition. I don’t know what he felt about it, but he would never, he simply would not stand up for it in any way, shape, or form. So his board president certainly, and, you know, boards are funny things about what power any board member and that, you know, maybe you heard about some of this from when you were interviewing Mike Fiala, who was on the board at the time, but they, individual board members don’t have a lot of power if the board doesn’t really follow its [laughs] mission or its obligations. I mean, so the board president was, they frankly, were nagged on a memorandum of understanding that they had with us. You know, because we had a house that was not just under construction. It was, we had a signed purchase agreement with a family, a household that was ready to buy. The Cleveland Housing Network built these homes. So we had an agreement with them, and we had an MOU with Ohio City Near West. And our money, they were our fiscal agent, we had foundation money with them that they were holding. And they wanted to say that there was some language in the MOU about substantially, whether things were substantially complete or started or whatever. And I don’t remember the language, but they wanted to say, we hadn’t started this home. It’s like we’re about ready to put the locks, give the hand the keys over. I mean, it was done anyhow. It was just, I mean, it wasn’t that painful because it was so clear that they, we had a lot of other forces. I mean, the builder, the foundation were all like, they’re finishing this house and it’s going to be done. [laughs] But that ended our relationship with them. And then we had to get some foundation money turned over to us. That was ours. And so then it was like we were on our own at that point. And that was a very hard place to be for a very small organization. Part-time director. We maybe had a Vista member, you know, at that time. What do we do? So we started working in another neighborhood, developed another project, got one house built. And then the housing crisis hit, and we had, we were pre-selling those houses before we. Before we built them, which was a good thing. But it was in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood in the Eco-Village, and that was good because we had one house built and sold and occupied. But then by the time. So 2010, 2009— ten the, we had funding from the state and the city with three other houses planned to be built. But housing values in that neighborhood has tanked. And so they weren’t even worth as much as we needed to sell houses for. So, you know, there was no one who was going to come to our rescue and say, we’ll put more money subsidy into these houses so you can build them, which is what we would have needed. We just unwound the whole project and the money went back to the state, went back to the city. Fortunately, we didn’t have houses sitting in the ground, unsold and, you know, built, but unsold and deteriorating. And at that point, then we kind of were looking at, what do we do? Do we stay a very, very small nonprofit on our own? And for me, as director, I was like, well, we could probably. We have. What do we have seven, eight houses at that point? And we could, we could manage these, but I’m not sure how we’re going to develop more, at least in the near term. And I just don’t have this. I don’t have the wherewithal to continue being the director of that. So I think we either need to look for a merger partner or we need to, or we can stay a small organization, but I think then I probably won’t be the director, and that’s okay, too. So our board really looked at that and said, and at that time, we were then co-locating with. We had moved to the offices of Near West Housing and they were very interested in talking about a merger with us. And so I will say that was my, certainly was my preferred conversation to have. And I obviously, as a director, I influence the board quite a bit. I mean, you always do there’s no question. So the board, but I also believe very firmly that the board, especially, again, an executive, the executive committee, you know, is we had a great board and especially a great executive committee. They were very involved. So I look back and say, well, was that a good move? In the end, Neighborhood Housing Services really collapsed. So I don’t know if it was a good move. And again, it had some issues in relation to the land trust, but it was a very deliberative process and decision-making that happened around merging with Neighborhood Housing Services. And that certainly wasn’t my decision. It was the board that was part of that process and made that decision.

Bali White [00:59:37] And this was after the housing crisis?

Marge Misak [00:59:40] Yeah. So that was 2010–11 that we merged with them. So kind of as kind of the emergence, I suppose, from the house, just as they were. Just as we were emerging maybe from the housing crisis. Yeah.

Bali White [00:59:55] So did those houses ever get built?

Marge Misak [00:59:58] No. No. So we turned the land over to Detroit Shoreway, and they, and so they ended up, I don’t know what, they ended up building tiny homes for a lot of money on two of the lots, and I don’t know what got built on the other. So definitely not affordable. [laughs] Yeah.

Bali White [01:00:18] I mean, that’s something that I’ve noticed just in this area, too, is that I mean, the lack of affordable housing is really relevant.

Marge Misak [01:00:26] Yes. Yeah.

Bali White [01:00:28] I just, I look online just to see what prices some of the houses go for here, and it’s actually mind-boggling.

Marge Misak [01:00:34] Yes. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and it’s really, I mean, there it, again, I think that it’s, that there is no city policy that relates to mixed-income neighborhoods. And, in fact, policies are misaligned. They are directly countervailing to it because of the way that funding happens. So we put money into affordable housing in the city in some ways. But if you look at tax abatement, and especially, I think, tax increment financing, which is in Ohio City, especially if you look at all of these high-rise apartment buildings, those are built, they get tax abatement for the residential units, but more importantly, they get tax increment financing because they are putting retail on their first floor. And what happens with that tax increment financing is that that is where what they would normally pay in property taxes for that, usually the schools are made whole, but the libraries, the Metroparks, Tri-C, the health and human services, all those county services that would usually get those taxes, do not get those taxes, and instead, those property taxes get diverted back to the developer in order to pay off their loans. Their construction loans over 30, 40 years. That’s going to go on for a long time. And what we allegedly get in return is jobs. It’s economic development, allegedly. So where are those jobs coming from? Not just the construction, but allegedly from that retail space. Well, look around Ohio City and look at how many empty retail spaces are sitting in those buildings that have tiffs. So not only are their residential units getting tax abatement, they’re getting their developer loans paid off through tiffs, through diversion of tax. And so what that is doing is switching the that is, we are becoming, and this happens not just in Cleveland, but it happens in municipalities all over the county. We are moving the burden of taxes, of property taxes from corporations to individuals. And so every time you vote on a levee, we all love our parks, our Metroparks, we love our libraries, and we all vote for those levies. Sometimes they’re replacement levies, but often they’re new levies. Well, why do we all keep voting for them? Because we love them. Okay, but what’s happening continuously is that there’s been this big diversion. You know, if you look at the federal level, in the diversion of the burden of taxes from corporations to individuals, that’s happening. Well, that’s happening in a local level, too, in Cuyahoga County big time, from corporations to individuals. And individuals are more and more bearing the burden of property taxes, and we have no relief. So we have people who are, and so will we ever get mixed-income neighborhoods in the city of Cleveland. It’s not a policy goal. In fact, Our policies are working against that. It’s an incentive for the city to have these neighborhoods where wealthy people want to live. And we promote high-income people living and being comfortable and not having to worry about poor people around them because the city gets its income from income taxes. And if all those economic studies around property tax abatement, you don’t need to do those ever. We do these studies every time property tax abatement comes up for renewal. It’s like, why are you paying for that? Because it is absolutely clear from the very beginning that there will be an economic return on investment of property tax abatement because the higher the cost of that housing, the more return there will be on property tax abatement simply because you’re raising the value of that property. And so the more you’re going to say in 15 years, we’re going to get a great return on that investment of abating that property, bringing in someone, we’re going to get their income tax in the meantime, and in what, 15 years, we’re going to get, we’re going to have a high-end property and it’s going to pay more in property taxes. Why do you bother to do a study? There is no reason, we’ve paid a lot of money for a study that the outcome is absolutely predetermined. So we sort of, on the one hand, crumble, you know, throw these crumbs around for affordable housing. And on the other hand, we have this incredible incentive in neighborhoods that are not mixed-income, we do not have any policies that incentivize mixed-income neighborhoods. So that’s where, you know, when I look at sort of some of the stuff that we’ve done, I mean, sort of your, you know, some of your fundamental questions about this, of housing justice and what’s the end? It’s like you can’t, you can’t do this stuff at the local level. We don’t have policies. We don’t have policies at the city level that, and in fact, we have countervailing policies at the city level to being able to really create this kind of neighborhood that I would like to live in, that I would like to live in a neighborhood that has people of all income levels living together, enjoying each other’s company and where people of lower incomes get the kind of amenities and get to live with the kind of amenities that everyone should be able to enjoy instead of feeling like, you know, the people who are on fixed incomes now, neighbors of ours who are on fixed incomes feel like, I can’t stay here. My property, and property taxes are going up, I’m not going to be able to live here anymore for very much longer, or I can’t stay here. I used to have this great rent, but I’m not going to be able to live here anymore. Just as, you know, we’re doing the recreation leaks just as the parks are being fixed up, I’m not going to be able to stay here anymore. So that to me, is, the frustration is that as a city, we are not recognizing, that not just are we not working to create mixed-income neighborhoods with, you know, amenities for everybody, but our policies are actually working against that.

Bali White [01:07:53] And that kind of brings up, like, gentrification as a whole. Gentrification, it pushes people out, people who have lived here for who knows, honestly? So it’s, you think about like, the businesses that are coming into Ohio City or the near west side and how it just, you know, it’s supposed to bring in these young professionals. It’s cool, it’s hip. So I guess, in what ways have you seen this area really gentrified? Like, what areas would you say or really peak with gentrification?

Marge Misak [01:08:29] Well, I think, well, certainly Ohio City is, although there are those who would study it and say that it isn’t. And I don’t know why because I think people’s lived experience is that it is. And maybe they would look at that and say, well, you have the public housing estates to sort of keep it down. Well, okay, but people’s rents are rising much faster than incomes in this whole area. So I don’t really look at it sort of block by block. And I’m not a person who looks, I mean, I don’t study that. I wouldn’t claim to know even. But certainly what I know of are people who, friends who have been here a long time, who are now in fixed incomes, who own houses, and are worried about property taxes. So that certainly, and their property taxes are going up because of their neighbors, not because they have done this luxury redevelopment of their home. [laughs] They fix things when they’re broken, but they can’t afford to stay because there’s a luxury townhome two doors down. And the disingenuousness of people saying, well, your property values are rising. And it’s like, people are like, I don’t care. I have to sell in order to gain that. And that is not my goal in life. My goal in life is to live where I have been, and this is my neighborhood and we have nothing right now. There’s a potential. We do everything backwards often. We often do things backwards in this city. You know, there’s this potential state legislation. But people have been talking about this for decades, not even just years, but decades. And we still haven’t done anything about it. So it’s so, yeah, the gentrification in the neighborhood, it’s a loaded term that people hate to hear. And partly, I think they hate to hear it because. Are you talking about me? You could be talking about me. I mean, a white person who moved into the neighborhood 30 years ago and has fixed up a house, you know, I could be part of that. And I will recognize that you could. I don’t like that term in the sense that it is potentially, it’s potentially talking about, you know, kind of othering people and [crosstalk] Yeah. Pointing fingers at individuals who make decisions. But on the other hand, there are people who are, you know, very proudly do talk about, you know, the people that they don’t like in the neighborhood and really are very negative about, you know, I mean, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t want to, I don’t accept crime in the neighborhood either. But, but they’re, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s all depends. You know, it’s annoying when someone kind of comes into the neighborhood and expects it to be something that it isn’t and then, and then really gets upset that you know.

Bali White [01:11:55] Absolutely. So, excuse me. What do you believe to be, like, your successes in helping preserve this neighborhood as economically diverse?

Marge Misak [01:12:04] Well, so, well, my success is, I don’t know. [laughs] I mean, there are a couple of projects that we’ve had that have, you know, that have a couple of apartment buildings that are affordable because, you know, we worked on those. When now will they stay affordable? I mean, unfortunately, you know, some of the lengths of, but some of the problems is that with even federal funding, some of the funding, it doesn’t last that long if you think about where need is, unless it’s permanent. So far, years, 15, 20, 25, 30 years is not very long in the life of need. And so some of those things, I think, will potentially go away. But we have had some success there. I think the land trust is being, has been reborn here. There is the nearest land trust, and they actually just got a $600,000 grant from the city to do some more houses in the neighborhood. They’re going to do them in Tremont, Ohio City, and Detroit Shoreway. So. And some of the houses that we built are still, you know, they took over. So I think those. And I, you know, I waffle always between being, I was saying this last night at the forum that I facilitated at Cleveland Owns on Community Land Trust, but I am a never say never person, [laughs] which is, and at the same time, I can very easily say, oh, well, there’s a lot of things that didn’t work. And the forces against mixed-income, mixed-income neighborhoods, and housing justice are so strong. I think developers in many ways rule this town. They, you know, developers spend their whole day, that’s their job. They spend their whole day trying to get city hall’s attention. And they have a lot of attention at city hall, a lot of attention. And, you know, and I mean, the things that, that, so in so many ways, we get crumbs and, you know, they get loaves of bread over and over and over. So that can be very, very frustrating. And at the same, same time, I am kind of a never say never kind of person. You know, that I can see little seeds sometimes of, you know, our assistant planning director is going to a community land trust conference in Minneapolis in October. We’re talking about a green space community land trust and developing that. Like I said, the Near West Land Trust is happening again. And I suspect that there are people who would, there are some people who would say, oh, its time has finally come. And I think a lot of us think if we had been doing this for the last 20 years, how many houses would we have if we could have kept going in this neighborhood? But what might we have in the next 20 years?

Bali White [01:15:26] So, I guess looking back with, like, the knowledge and experience that you have now, what would you have liked to have done differently?

Marge Misak [01:15:35] Yeah. So it’s really hard, you know, I don’t have a, I’m not a good person for knowing that, having that perspective. I wonder if, you know, if we maybe should have done more organizing kind of east and west. You know, this is such an east and west town. If we had had, you know, I think we worked hard to build a multiracial organization in terms of our board, but if we had had more of a multiracial coalition east and west on both sides of town that would have helped. But I also think that, you know, the push against neighborhood organizing in this town was very strong after the 1980s. And so that’s not my fault. [laughs] You know, I mean, the sort of forces arrayed against us have been very strong in terms of, you know, not the kind of the funding organizations that really didn’t like neighborhood organizers and, you know, pushed for CDCs to have a certain kind of funding, but not an organizing funding. You know, you could organize around, around what I would call flowers and fences, like having, beautifying a neighborhood and doing a neighborhood cleanup, but not necessarily organizing neighborhoods for housing justice. And always the question in Cleveland, everywhere, the question is who gets to stay in a neighborhood? And if you can’t organize around that, then it doesn’t really matter how many flowers you plant or how clean your neighborhood is. The real question is who gets to be there in the end? And we have never been. Not, no, in my time here 30 years, we have not funded organizers who in any serious way other than, you know, places like NEOCH, around the question of who’s going to get to stay in a neighborhood when it starts to come back. So, you know, I think we- So what might we have done differently? You know, maybe I would have turned it over to someone with more housing development capacity. I don’t know, someone who was pushing harder. But it’s- Yeah, I mean, I could look at individual things and wonder, but I’d be wondering. Exactly. Yeah.

Bali White [01:18:04] So I guess nearing the end of the interview, moving forward, what are some things that you believe to be necessary in the fight for affordable housing, housing justice in this community, and communities like the Near West Side?

Marge Misak [01:18:17] Yeah. I really think that there somehow needs to be much more of a citywide coalition around housing justice, and we need to look more at, I would like to see us look more at a policy level that, you know, you can’t fight things on a, on a neighborhood basis. You can’t have a lot of influence because decisions are made, at least at the city hall level. And then, of course, you know, even in the city hall level, you know, we live in Ohio. I mean, we live in this really retrograde, this really, you know, Republican state. And so, you know, even things like tax changes and so on, that property tax changes are at a state level. And it’s very difficult. So it’s always difficult to figure out which, you know, which, where do you try and change, which levers do you try and pull, and at what level. But I think that you know, some more of a, we probably have to get out of our neighborhoods and see if there was a way to do things. And I don’t think I’m not going to lead that fight. I mean, I’m actually not an organizer at heart. I would love for there to be more organizers at heart who are leading things more on a citywide basis. On the other hand, I’m encouraged by groups like Cleveland Owns, whose really, that really are looking at things like co-ops and a solidarity economy that think in terms of incubating and creating kind of an infrastructure of different kinds of organizations or co-ops or kinds of activities that then you start to create a bit of an infrastructure. And so there is that what starts to percolate from the bottom up. So there are a couple different ways to think about it. And I’m mostly looking for folks who have good ideas and can join in on. [laughs]

Bali White [01:20:36] And then this is kind of a question I’m curious about. What advice do you have for the younger generations who are curious about or interested in getting involved in this kind of work?

Marge Misak [01:20:49] Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think it’s, you know, plug in where you feel like you’re excited that that’s the most, to me, the most important thing to do is to find a place that you can plug in and do the work that you feel excited about because there’s so much good work to do. And it’s very hard in this- What’s very hard about it I think, is that you still got to make a living, and you still got to pay rent, and you still have family and you still have friends you want to see, and so you got to live your life. But at the same time, you know, a lot of work is important. There’s a lot of different kinds of work that’s important. And so I don’t think people should have a lot of “shoulds” around, [laughs] you know, what they ought to do with their lives and in their lives. If they can see a path, an inroad, a group of people that makes them feel like they’re contributing, that feels like this is- This is- And find a group, you know, that we are not alone, that we have. There are people out there who are going to think like, you are going to have similar values and try it out. And if it doesn’t work, that’s the way I’m thinking about retirement, is a sense of I get to try things out again, and if it doesn’t resonate and it doesn’t fit, I can say no, I can stop, and I can go look again to another group. And I think that’s the same thing that young people can feel that you know, you can find a group, but look for a group and don’t feel alone and feel like I can go find a group. I can try them out, and if it isn’t the right group, then I can find another group but don’t try and do it alone and find. And, I mean, it’s the, you know, it’s the listen to, like, you know, I mean, I’m a Tim Walz and, you know, Kamala Harris fan, but the Tim Walz, let’s go find joy. And I’m like, yeah, do that. That’s the way that if you don’t aren’t finding joy in it, it should not feel like a slog. It should feel like. It should feel like it’s something that really is life giving. And if it is, then you’re probably on the right track.

Bali White [01:23:14] Thank you very much. Do you have any last thoughts before I end the interview?

Marge Misak [01:23:18] I do not. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I appreciate it.

Bali White [01:23:22] Thank you for your time. I’m Bali White here with Marge Misak with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project on September 27, 2024. It is 2:31pm, Thank you.

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