Elizabeth Park, at the time Akron’s oldest public housing site, was transformed into Cascade Village in a process that began in 2003.
The $60 million complex was funded in part by a $19.25 million federal HOPE VI grant awarded to the Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority.
AMHA owns the land on which Cascade Village is located and leases it to the Community Builders, a nonprofit development organization that manages the properties.
Cascade Village now is composed of 202 town homes on either side of East North Street and 40 apartments in a four-story building on North Howard Street.
In addition, in a program AMHA runs, there are six private homes, one model home and seven lots available on which single-family homes can be built, that also are part of Cascade Village.
Slightly more than half of the rental units are federally subsidized; the rest are rented at market rates.
Cascade Village got a big boost in 2011 when the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded it a $1.7 million grant to pay for various programs and the staff to implement them.
Established in 1950, the Knight foundation makes national grants in journalism, education and the field of arts and culture. It also supports organizations in 25 communities where the Knight brothers were involved in publishing newspapers, including Akron at the Beacon Journal, but is wholly separate from and independent of those newspapers.
— Jim Carney