Akron residents shared their thoughts on what they hope will replace the city’s decommissioned Innerbelt at an open house Tuesday.
Ideas they suggested be considered for a master plan for redevelopment of the decommissioned highway included affordable housing, accessible retail and access to healthy food options.
Construction of the highway in the 1970’s displaced thousands of Black residents.
Akron resident Peggy Holmes lives off of West Bartges Street near the Innerbelt. She says she witnessed the toll the highway took on local Black-owned businesses.
"This was a really black business metropolis area," Akron resident Peggy Holmes said. "Most of the businesses in the area and the activities in the area were minorities, and of course, that changed so much after they put the innerbelt in."
Prior to the innerbelt's construction, Black residents could find much of their daily needs within walking distance, said Beverly Woolridge, former Akron resident and Sergeant at Arms for local nonprofit Akron Rites of Passage Institute.
"Everything that we needed was in this area," she said. "We had our food, we had our businesses, we had our record shops, we had clothing stores, we had barber shops, we had beauty shops, we had meat markets."
As the city works on its redesign plan, reestablishing accessible retail should be a priority, Holmes said.
"We do not have a gas station, we do not have a drug store, we don't have a major grocery store," she said. "Those are some of the type of businesses that need to be here so that we don't have to travel out of our community to get what we need."
Holmes is working alongside Woolridge and the Akron Rites of Passage Institute to create an African American history museum as part of what replaces the Innerbelt to help commemorate what was lost.
Accessible, affordable housing is also a major need in the community, Wooldrige said.
"Affordable senior housing and affordable multifamily housing," she said. "In this area, we don't need to be priced out. If they build new homes, we don't want to be priced out of the market again."
There may also be room to include greenhouses and solar energy production along the Innerbelt, said Daniel Van Epps, executive director of Canton-based nonprofit Northeast Ohio Regional Improvement Corporation.
Solar panels could be placed on top of green houses, he said, providing clean energy to residents along with fresh local produce.
"Anything that you're doing in a greenhouse could probably be grown there, and then be available to area residents, businesses, so that cut down on the transportation costs of getting produce from way out of market, hopefully cheaper, fresher, and more available."
Sasaki, the urban design firm leading the project, will use information gathered from Tuesday's meeting to develop options for the land by May, Associate Principal Siqi Zhu said. Additional public engagement sessions will be held in April.
Though the team can't reestablish the neighborhoods that were demolished by the Innerbelt, more than 50 years ago, Zhu said they will continue to engage with residents what they want to see along the highway in the future.
"We can perhaps never finish the conversation of what we owe to history," he said. "We can never rebuild things as they were before. It just won't happen, but I think there is a way to honor that past."
Though public engagement will continue, concerns remain around federal funding the city got at the beginning of the year from the Biden administration.
Access to the city’s $10 million federal grant for the project is uncertain, Zhu said. Still, the team is charging ahead.
"There are other ways to pay for parts of this plan that does not involve federal funding," he said. "That's the thing we're working really hard to figure out, like what are some of the other funding mechanisms to make some of these wonderful ideas happen?"
