Slavic Village

Cleveland is one of the cities that was hit hardest in the country by the recent mortgage crisis, with more people fleeing Cuyahoga County in the last few years than any other county besides Orleans County (Katrina, ya know?). One of the neighborhoods in Cleveland most affected is Slavic Village. Right now an estimated 2,000 properties stand vacant out of a total of around 8,000. Most of these are residential, and while some have been leveled by the city, hundreds of homes stand boarded up and abandoned. I took some time this fall to get to know the area, and photographed over a hundred of the vacant homes and vacant lots that pepper the area. Here are some of those photographs.

Special thanks to Jim Rokakis, the treasurer of Cuyahoga County, Anthony Zajac, a member of the Slavic Village Development Corporation, and William Rybak for making this possible.