Steelyard commons An artists rendering of a little bit of Olmsted right downtown.

Earlier this year, Cleveland City Council signed off on a study to determine how neighborhood stores could compete with big-box behemoths like the Wal-Mart that will anchor the coming $120 million Steelyard Commons project. The results are in, and the answer is: Don't bother. Small, independent businesses have no chance against a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Instead they need to innovate and find niches.

If they do, says the report by Michael J. Berne, an expert on national and inner-city retail, then local neighborhood economies can perhaps prosper, generating tax revenue, street vitality and jobs.

But that's far easier said than done in Cleveland, where politicians and government officials somehow seem to have missed or forgotten the conventional wisdom that small businesses are often the engines behind inner-city economies. For years, the city's sole approach to retail development has been large-scale projects and strip malls, with seemingly little interest in developing citywide policies that would save neighborhood retail districts.

When it comes to helping small retail stores, the only city program that most community development corporation (CDC) directors mention is storefront renovation. It's successful, but it's also limited.

"The city has been low-key to small retail development, and been more on big retail development," says Walter Wright, formerly a manager for Tremont West CDC. "[It's] never stepped up to the plate citywide, for any comprehensive measures."

Why? Simply put, a lack of leadership. Mayoral commitments to resuscitating failing neighborhood retail have never reached the levels seen in other comparable cities, says Wendy Sattin, the director of planning and development at Cleveland Neighborhood Development Coalition, the organization that oversaw Berne's report. And City Council members, though involved with their ward CDCs, are not known to work collectively, or think strategically, on macro problems.

BERNE WON THE BID to conduct the big-box impact study because he promised to immerse himself in the city's neighborhoods and find out what they really needed. He traveled Cleveland over a period of six months, ate at almost every restaurant and read all the local newspapers.

He found that the Plain Dealer usually consulted developers who had written off downtown. He learned that two years ago, city officials attended an International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) convention, and connected with big-box retailers. As a result, Cleveland has Steelyard Commons, its first major retail development in five years and an innovation in its own right, the first big-box center in the heart of a city.

But Berne noted that city leaders seemed focused on suburban-style retail developments, and had little or no interest in smaller-scale revival.

"So far, it seems, the city's only action on this [retail development] front has been in partnering with ICSC," Berne says. In his report, Berne writes, "Cleveland definitely needs a fresh approach to retail recruitment." The "received wisdom" in Cleveland, Berne writes, is to build suburban-style strip malls in inner-city neighborhoods so residents don't spend their money in the 'burbs. But this does "little else for the city's neighborhood shopping precincts."

Berne cautions that by relying too heavily on developers and concepts found through the ICSC, Cleveland is only going to get more strip malls, not the kind of retail stores that would move into the traditional urban fabric of abandoned buildings flush against the sidewalk.

"There doesn't seem to be much understanding of what else is possible," Berne says. For example, he suggests marketing rawer neighborhoods like Slavic Village to artists and musicians. Shops that cater to immigrant communities would also work well in Cleveland's existing storefronts, along with "anti-chain" chains like American Apparel that attract progressive new-urbanites (one recently opened on Coventry in Cleveland Heights).

Such plans simply aren't on Cleveland's radar, Berne says. Instead, Cleveland's leaders seem to flop around ideas that were in vogue a decade ago, like a new convention center or casinos.

"I'm not saying that a convention center or a Steelyard Commons are not important," Berne says. "But to make them a priority over everything else?"

A YEAR AGO, the city's planning director, Bob Brown, told the Free Times that "building its own big boxes is the city's best way to fight big boxes in suburbs." In an interview this week, Brown said he agreed with Berne's conclusions that Cleveland must offer alternatives to suburban-style shopping.

"We have to be careful not to overdo that," Brown says, adding that Cleveland should have no more than three Steelyard Commons-style centers. Brown says city officials are now in the middle of putting together an economic development strategy with small retail development as a key component.

Asked if the city dropped the ball by not doing this sooner, Brown equivocates. He cites the 20-year-old storefront renovation program. "There have been ongoing programs," he says, "but we recognize the need to reevaluate them now."

Anyone would agree that retail development has been a difficult nut to crack, says CNDC's Sattin. The ideas in Berne's report have been floating around local CDCs for a long time, she says, but there's never been a formal dialogue with city government.

That changed last week, Sattin suggests. Berne's presentation, meant to be a wake-up call, seems to have worked. At least four Council members asked how they could work together to get better retail programming, and how they could support local neighborhoods better.

"I'm hoping this will be a new approach for Council, even if it's driven by only a few," Sattin says.

Berne tries to avoid doomsday predictions, but it's not easy.

"The time to act is now," he says. "With the way things are going now, there are some very at-risk neighborhoods."

Berne envisions a continued hollowing out of the city's core as people flee to inner- and outer-ring suburbs. "I'm not talking about just tweaking," he says about how Cleveland approaches retail development in neighborhoods. "We really have to be strong about what we're proposing, and not be afraid to take some dramatic steps."

cgupta@freetimes.com