Efforts are underway to address vacant lots around Cleveland, and the complaints about them

If you spend any time driving around the city of Cleveland, you have surely passed one of the city's nearly 30,000 vacant lots.

They are everywhere across Cleveland, but are concentrated mostly in lower income, predominantly minority communities on the east side.

These vacant lots add to the detrimental environmental and health impacts in those communities; including poor air quality, heat islands, as well as poor soil quality and water runoff.

The sites also often become targets for illegal dumping. They may start as an empty grassy plot of land and wind up as a heap of garbage after not very long.

To address not just the eyesore of these vacant plots, but to the transform them into something beneficial for the community, is one goal of the Western Reserve Land Conservancy.

Since forming in 2006 the land conservancy's tackled vacant lots, reforesting The Forest City, creating parks and preserves, and other projects.

The non-profit journalistic endeavor The Land recently touched on some of the transformational work WRLC has been engaged in here in Cleveland, and we wanted to highlight and discuss those projects during today's show.

Later in the hour we hear from The Land's Editor Lee Chilcote about reporting he's been engaged with regarding nuisance complaints across the city of Cleveland.

Particularly how complaints about things like trash, and vacant lots are piling up with Cleveland City Council members, and what can be done to expedite how those complaints are addressed.

- Matt Zone, Senior Vice President and Director of Thriving Communities, Western Reserve Land Conservancy

- Khalid Ali, Urban Greenspace Coordinator, The Western Reserve Land Conservancy

- Lee Chilcote, Editor, “The Land”