Despite Objections From City Planning, Councilman Danny Kelly Goes to Bat for Proposed Gas Station on Vacant CVS Property

For the past three years, Jonathan Steirer and some of his neighbors in Cudell have watched a nearby vacant CVS sit as a general eyesore.

It's an easy haven for illegal dumpers. There are squatters. It's a harsh reminder of the blight that dots parts of Madison Avenue.

"It definitely is being vandalized," Steirer, 32, a engineering academic that lives a block south of the vacant CVS, told Scene. "It's filled with trash. Like, the property looks bad."

In January, the building, which sits in between West 100th Street and West Blvd., was sold for a half million dollars to a limited liability company owned by entrepreneur Amean Mohammad. And by the spring, Mohammad had assembled a plan to reanimate the property into something he pushed as beneficial: a gas station.

One of the problems was that Cleveland's current zoning code didn't allow it. The building at 10022 Madison is zoned as Local Retail; Mohammad needed the area expanded as General Retail, as to allow tanks and pumps. He also needed the Planning Commission to remove the block's Pedestrian Retail Overlay, a zoning direction typically used to fashion streets as walk-friendly shopping districts. (Not those for automobile traffic.)

But the build was something . There would be a 3,400-square-foot Shell plaza, with four gas pumps and two electric vehicle stations. There'd be a Papa John's, a bank. Sixteen jobs would be created where none currently existed. On May 6, after a month delay due to resident skepticism in Ward 11, Mohammad's request for a change in code was denied.

"We're going to take a look at revising some of the zoning code—because it is obsolete," Samir Mohammad, a representative for Amean, said at his pitch to the CPC's Board of Zoning Appeals. General Retail should, he said, make room for the obvious. "Current gas stations are really today's corner stores."

"I mean, this has been sitting vacant, with no takers," Mohammad added, "for the past two-and-a-half years."

A pitch for helping to resurrect, and admittedly make money off of, a desolate block in Cleveland's Cudell neighborhood is now, half a year after the purchase, a representation of what's to come as the city further adopts zoning code its administration feels can reverse decades of poor design choices.

That is to say, form-based code—or Smart Code, as it's often nicknamed—that officially began its pilot phase on July 3 in Detroit-Shoreway. The code, already installed in four dozen U.S. cities' law books, uses the philosophy of form before use, meaning that the look and feel of neighborhoods for pedestrians should be dictated by the city, and its inhabitants, before what goes inside those buildings is decided.

Smart Code, as many in city planning are wont to discuss, is a huge shift away from what's often called Euclidean Zoning, which put the separation of uses before form—meaning that city-goers had to own cars in the first place. Nearly a century of such code has, today's planners argue, led to most of Cleveland being shaped by car dependency, not by those who feel a city should be, first and foremost, human-scaled.

But, the question always goes, can a redesign in code convince Clevelanders to detach further from their vehicles? According to the 2020 Census, 73 percent of those who live in the city commute primarily by cars. Not by bike. Not by foot.

Which is one of Steirer's main oppositions. A gas station is primarily a hive for vehicle traffic—what else?

"You're next to the 26 [bus line], you're next to the 25, which is 24 hours," Steirer, who regularly bikes across the city to his work at Case Western Reserve, said. "The 18 bus, which is less frequent, goes right directly past it."

"I mean, it's a pretty uniquely connected location via transit," he added. "And I think it's really what the goal should be: How do you use the site in a way that bolsters that resource and leverages it, as opposed to fully ignoring it and doing nothing to enhance that as an asset for the community?"

On July 9, Ward 11 Councilman Danny Kelly submitted his own workaround for Mohammad's bad luck with BZA. Instead of waiting for an appeal, Kelly put forth an proposed ordinance in City Council that would give Shaker Madison the right to build a Shell through a brute force law called spot-zoning.

But Kelly's reasoning is one centered in urgency. Drug stores are gradually going vacant across the country; resurrecting a former CVS isn't promising. It's why, on March 21, Kelly invited 25 neighbors to the Cudell Recreation Center (just north of the 10022) to discuss what he felt was a necessary decision -- allow the gas station to go forward.

An option better than, he said, a den for drug users. "Homeless people are living there," Kelly told Scene. "You know, there's needles all over the place. It just becomes a problem because you're faced with trying to get the owners to do what's right."

Kelly rejected the idea that 10022 should be held idle until more pedestrian-friendly retail could be pitched. "It's no real animosity or something," he said. "I just want to be able to look at it in a way that I can get somebody to occupy that building.

"And the way it is right now, it's not gonna be occupied."

A representative from Cushman & Wakefield / CRESCO, the broker that orchestrated the sale, didn't respond to a request for comment.

Kelly remained defiant in his political push to see a Shell, and a Papa John's and attached bank, in a space that currently stains his ward.

In such way, he seems to see BZA as a bulwark to progress.

"I don't believe they have the right to tell me what they can allow or not," Kelly said. "And so that's why I'm kicking it back."

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