Forced into Segregation, Then Abandoned: The Tragedy of Cleveland’s Hough Neighborhood

The story of Hough in Cleveland, a small, predominantly Black neighborhood located on the east side of the city, serves as a prime example of the complex legacy of racist policies in the Ohio city.

One of the oldest neighborhoods in Cleveland, Hough was founded in the late 18th century and was an affluent white neighborhood with subdivisions of large single-family homes and businesses. The neighborhood eventually began to deteriorate, however, due to poor city planning and the advent of the Great Depression. Overcrowding became an issue. The single family homes aged considerably and were converted into multi-family homes to accommodate the influx of new residents. By the 1930s, the population became more working class and Hough had become a neighborhood of renters and tenants.

Between 1954 and 1966, Cleveland instituted six urban renewal programs in the city which were directed primarily at Black neighborhoods. The federal government created a federal program to fund urban renewal projects in cities across the country under the guise of improving the conditions of underdeveloped or blighted areas. What actually transpired across the country is Black residents were forcibly displaced to specific neighborhoods and their homes and businesses destroyed.

Similar to other cities, redlining practices which denied Black Clevelanders access to credit and loans for homes, steering those who were displaced to areas in the eastern part of the city like Hough. Blockbusting or the practice of realtors persuading owners to sell properties cheaply for fear of Black people moving in ensued. Soon white families fled the neighborhood and segregation deepened.

As white families left Hough, so did industry. The neighborhood declined even further. Residents, majority Black, became trapped in a vicious cycle of forced segregation, low paying jobs, poverty, inferior schools, unemployment, lack of transportation, overcrowding, aging housing, declining homeownership and growing racial tensions with white migrants from Appalachia. In 1965, the Cleveland Press reported Hough as being “in crisis”.

Conditions were so fraught that in the spring of 1966, the US Civil Rights Commission held hearings in the city, raising new awareness of the issues plaguing all Black Clevelanders. Civic leaders demanded change to no avail. Frustrations and despair among Black Hough residents intensified, as conditions worsened and violence between Black and white residents increased.

On July 18, 1966, five days of riots erupted after a white bar owner refused a Black patron water, setting off nearly a week of angry protests, vandalism, looting and arson. In the end, four people were killed, 30 were injured, and 300 were arrested. Hough suffered $1-2M in property damage.
Residents fled Hough for decades after the riots. Property values soon sank further. Many businesses vowed to never return to the area. And government policies led to further disinvestment. The city government started multiple recovery plans, but repeatedly failed to finish them. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development even cut off funding due to the city’s inaction. Moderate improvements finally came to Hough in the 1990s.

Today, the systems failures that the uprising had called attention to remain. And Hough is still struggling to reverse the decline that started generations ago.

Through PERC’s coalition building work, our partners in Cleveland are making progress to right wrongs and put the neighborhood on a path to transformation and prosperity where state, local and federal funds are invested in long-term solutions, including:

• Buying land to develop rent-to-own and co-ownership housing properties in Black, Indigenous and Latino neighborhoods
• Using Black, Indigenous and Latino construction companies to develop those properties
• Creating workforce development programs within the skilled construction trade