Brewed Fresh Daily

If you want your neighborhood to be gentrified, what must it have? Proximity to work and entertainment, of course. A pleasing streetscape is nice; so is a mix of building types (bonus points for funky warehouses!). Oh, and the housing itself must be desirable. The houses can be dilapidated, but they must be the kind that, with new kitchens, roomy bathrooms and a fresh coat of paint, you'd be proud to have your friends visit. Which brings us to the problem with many older suburbs. They have proximity and sometimes they have quaint downtowns and tree-lined streets. But the housing often falls into the I-Love-Lucy zone: not old enough to be historic but too dated and small to work for today's homebuyers. Cleveland's inner suburbs (they call themselves the "First Suburbs") have a lot of this kind of housing, and they've banded together to find ways of changing things. Their solution: Buy up a few "up-and-down duplexes," gut them and turn them into fashionable side-by-side townhouses. Definition: Up-and-down duplexes, as the name suggests, are houses where the owner has added a second story and rented it out. This was a popular thing to do in the first half of the 20th century, when the older suburbs were taking shape. Problem is, nobody wants these ungainly houses anymore. So the First Suburbs Development Council, an association of 14 Cleveland suburbs, is showing builders and prospective homeowners how to turn these houses into something desirable by, in a way, tipping them on their sides. The first demonstration house is an 83-year-old up-and-down in Cleveland Heights, which, when renovated, will become a pair of townhouses with three bedrooms, two-and-a-half bathrooms and garages. When the renovation is completed, the First Suburbs group will show it off, sell it and move on to other demonstration projects. The group wants to redo a couple of up-and-downs, then tackle some small bungalows.