This year, Gus Frangos, President and General Counsel of the Cuyahoga Land Bank, was invited to participate in Lakewood Alive’s annual discussion about the state of the community. He joined a discussion panel, along with several other experts in urban affairs.
The context of the public meeting was data from the 2010 U.S. Census, which illuminated two important facts-the city’s young-adult population (ages 20-39) is growing (although Lakewood’s population overall has decreased by about 8 percent since 2000), and the city is increasingly diverse-especially economically.
The panel’s attention eventually turned to the foreclosure crisis and how it affected Lakewood. Nearly 1,600 homes in the city, or about 8 percent of its properties, have been foreclosed, but the number has gotten smaller since 2009 and now has reached its lowest level since 2006-before the economy’s downturn. “The good news is, Lakewood is quite stable,” Frangos says.