Canton Creates Roadmap for Right-Sizing

The numbers are daunting. Over 5,000 properties struggling with disinvestment. A residential vacancy rate of over 15 percent. A hollowed-out middle class. Infrastructure that is overbuilt and under-maintained. And a price tag to revitalize every section of the city over the next ten years (nearly $500 million) that far exceeds any realistic budget.  

Canton’s new comprehensive plan pulls no punches. Nor do its findings surprise anyone in the northeast Ohio city of 73,000 – a community that once housed nearly 120,000.

But the plan provides a clear path forward: right-size and revitalize the city by carefully targeting public and private sector resources, nurturing the city’s superb assets, and by emphasizing the use of local dollars (not state or federal) to get the job done.

The targeting described in the plan recognizes that different parts of the city require different forms of intervention – and that simply spreading resources across the city is a recipe for failure. In broad terms, it recommends focusing investment in five areas with core city assets in an effort to protect, grow, and connect those assets; carefully managing Canton’s distressed and vacant properties; maintaining the city’s healthy neighborhoods; and stabilizing its transitional, middle market neighborhoods.

While the plan’s recommendations represent emerging best practices in weak-market American cities, the integration of these practices takes a novel form in the Canton plan, particularly in the proposed implementation of the plan.

A new “Comprehensive Plan Implementation Commission” with representatives from the public and private sectors is identified as the entity to oversee the plan’s execution. To meet the plan’s investment goals, the Commission would require $250 million in pledges from local government, foundation, and corporate partners over ten years.

Those pledges will be sought, in part, from the institutions and corporations that anchor the five target areas, which include Hall of Fame Village (around the Pro Football Hall of fame), the neighborhoods surrounding Aultman and Mercy Hospitals, the Lower Shorb neighborhood north of downtown, and downtown itself.   

Downtown was the subject of a master plan completed in 2013 by czbLLC, the Alexandria, VA, planning firm that completed the new comprehensive plan with Boulder-based MIG. The downtown master plan also recommends a right-sizing approach by channeling investment into less than 20 blocks at the downtown core rather than trying to revitalize the more than 100 blocks traditionally defined as downtown Canton.

Two public meetings are scheduled this week to present the plan and gather feedback. The plan will head to City Council later this summer.