Cleveland has poured more than $156 million in projected financial assistance into developments worth upward of $959 million since 2023, and nearly every one of those deals came with a promise: hire local, hire minority- and women-owned firms, invest in the surrounding neighborhood. But a review of the city's own project records shows that tracking whether those promises actually get kept remains spotty at best.
Cleveland has executed 33 community benefits agreements since September 2023, according to a review by Cleveland.com, which examined 19 listed projects tied to the city's Community Benefits Ordinance. Of those 19 projects, 17 disclose dollar figures totaling about $43.6 million in projected opportunities for city-certified contractors, while two provide no projected dollar value at all. Developers overall have committed to more than $147 million in projected contracting opportunities for certified firms through June 2025, per the outlet's reporting, though the report is careful to note that these figures represent contractual commitments rather than proof that all benefits were actually delivered.
How the Ordinance Works
Cleveland City Council enacted the Community Benefits Ordinance, Ordinance No. 297-2023, on June 5, 2023, creating Chapter 191A of the city's codified ordinances and taking effect that September, according to Kohrman Jackson & Krantz. The law governs community benefits agreements for any project receiving more than $250,000 in city financial assistance, which can take the form of grants, loans, tax-increment financing, multifamily tax abatements, below-market land transfers or city-funded infrastructure, per Cleveland.com's reporting. The ordinance sets the same baseline requirements regardless of how large or small the subsidy is, and developers receiving at least $250,000 must make commitments involving certified businesses, resident employment, mentoring, apprenticeships or internships, and community meetings.
Bigger projects come with bigger asks. Cleveland.com reports that developments costing at least $20 million must add project-specific negotiated benefits on top of the baseline package, and multifamily residential developments receiving tax abatements must negotiate additional benefits once project costs hit $75 million. Many of the agreements reviewed set participation goals of 15% for minority business enterprises, 7% for female business enterprises and 8% for Cleveland small businesses, alongside a requirement that Cleveland residents perform 20% of construction-worker hours on the job.
The Scorecard and the Legal Backstory
Before any agreement gets signed, the city's Economic Development Department runs proposed commercial, mixed-use and residential developments through a pilot Community Benefit Scorecard that ranks projects on a point scale up to 117 before TIFs, commercial abatements or grants exceeding $250,000 get awarded, according to Kohrman Jackson & Krantz. The scorecard approach reflects a broader legal pivot for Cleveland: in September 2019, the Supreme Court of Ohio invalidated the city's 2003 Fannie Lewis Law, which had mandated that 20% of construction hours on public projects over $100,000 go to local residents. The court held that a 2016 state statute banning municipal residency quotas took precedence over the city's ordinance, forcing Cleveland to shift from mandatory hiring quotas toward incentive-tied community benefit agreements instead.
The stakes behind that shift were laid out at a June 2023 City Hall briefing, where city economic data showed minority- and women-owned businesses had lost roughly $14 million in wealth creation opportunities over the prior four years due to exclusion from city-subsidized projects, plus $14.4 million in lost resident wages, according to the Cleveland Building and Construction Trades Council. Those figures helped drive the push for the contracting targets now baked into the ordinance.
Individual Projects Show the Range of Commitments
The specific deals reviewed by Cleveland.com illustrate how differently the benefits can be structured project to project. Erieview Towers, which carries $18.6 million in projected city assistance, comes with the standard 15%, 7% and 8% business-participation goals plus the 20% Cleveland-resident worker-hours requirement. Oasis in the City, a far smaller deal at $300,000 in projected city assistance, carries the identical set of goals and requirements. The Shaker Square agreement requires a city-certified real estate management firm along with capital injections to at least three certified contractors, while the Cleveland Cold Storage agreement calls for a community equity fund contribution and support for local nonprofits, entrepreneurs and businesses.
At the neighborhood-infrastructure level, a March 2026 city council docket for Ordinance No. 117-2026 detailed commitments from a Near West Side developer, who agreed to fund four speed tables along West 58th Street, public bike racks, streetscape beautification and improvements to Herman Park Trail, according to Cleveland City Council. It's the kind of hyper-local physical payoff the ordinance is designed to produce when negotiations go beyond raw contracting dollars.
Tracking the Follow-Through Remains Difficult
Once an agreement is signed, developers must submit quarterly reports until it closes out, and the city's Office of Equal Opportunity is required to provide council with quarterly compliance data and maintain a public dashboard. But Cleveland.com's review found that public project pages show inconsistently how much work ultimately went to each business category, and incompletely whether every hiring, contracting, apprenticeship, internship or neighborhood commitment has actually been fulfilled. The city's project directory, the outlet notes, covers only part of the overall subsidy program, leaving gaps in the public record even as the dollar figures attached to these deals keep climbing.
The ordinance does give the city recourse when developers fall short. Noncompliance can result in termination of city assistance, recovery of a proportional share of assistance already provided, or stipulated damages, according to Cleveland.com's reporting. Whether that enforcement tool gets used in practice is a separate question from whether the benefits get delivered in the first place — a distinction the newspaper's review suggests the public dashboard doesn't yet fully resolve.
A Persistent Workforce Hurdle
Meeting those local-hiring and diversity targets runs into a structural problem that predates any single Cleveland ordinance. Nationally, Black workers represent only 5.1% of the construction industry workforce and women account for roughly 11%, according to U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by Signal Cleveland. Those national demographics create practical recruitment hurdles for developers trying to hit Cleveland's contracting and workforce goals, even when they're negotiating in good faith.
Part of a Wider Regional Push
Cleveland's approach is no longer unique to City Hall. Cuyahoga County Council unanimously enacted Ordinance No. O2026-0009 on August 11, creating Chapter 810 of the county code to require developers seeking more than $1 million in county loans, grants or bonding to submit formal community benefit plans to a newly established advisory committee, as Hoodline reported in its piece on the county's new subsidy payback rules. The city has layered on parallel policies of its own: Mayor Justin Bibb's Executive Order 2024-02 set standards for evaluating Project Labor Agreements on major city building projects, and council's Ordinance No. 104-2025, which took effect in October 2025, now requires employers with 15 or more workers to disclose salary ranges on job postings. Together, the measures reflect a city and county still working out how to prove that public subsidies are actually producing the local benefits they promise.
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