Most mornings, I walk from my home on East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue toward my office in the Warehouse District. I cross Superior Avenue near the Cleveland Public Library Eastman Reading Garden and the Old Arcade, often with remarkably little traffic for the center of a city with this much history, infrastructure, and ambition.
Global Cleveland's Global Rising Leader Program.The quiet is not merely a downtown problem. It raises a larger economic question: Does Greater Cleveland have enough people to sustain the businesses, neighborhoods, and institutions it has already built?

The recent closing of Heinen’s downtown store, after more than 11 years in the historic 1908 Cleveland Trust Company rotunda, brought that question into sharper focus.

One store’s closing is not a verdict on downtown Cleveland. It is, however, a reminder that businesses need more than beautiful buildings, civic enthusiasm, and public incentives to survive.

They need residents, workers, visitors, and customers. A city cannot subsidize its way around a shortage of people.

The declining population challenge
Cleveland’s demographic problem did not begin with the COVID-19 pandemic or the trend of working remotely. In 1950, Cleveland was America’s seventh-largest city, with 914,808 residents. In 2026, the city has roughly 364,000 residents—approximately a 60% decline from its peak.

That loss is not simply a historical curiosity. It shapes the city’s daily economics. Fewer people means fewer workers, customers, taxpayers, renters, homeowners, entrepreneurs, and prospective buyers for established businesses whose owners are ready to retire.

Cleveland has understood this danger for years.

In 2010, journalist Becky Gaylord prepared the strategy report, “Cleveland Needs Immigrants: Why and How to Welcome More Foreign-Born Residents.” The report argues that attracting and retaining immigrants should become a central component of Greater Cleveland’s population and economic-development strategy.

Around the same time as Gaylord’s report, I helped found Global Cleveland in 2011 and advised on the launch of Global Detroit—both built on the same premise: Immigrants are not merely attracted to economic growth. They help create it.

Same but different?
Sixteen years after Gaylord’s report, that premise has been validated. What remains unfinished is implementation on a scale commensurate with Cleveland’s demographic challenge.

Preserving Cleveland's existing businesses is a viable option to sustaining and growing the corporate base..Cleveland has developed valuable welcoming, integration, and workforce programs. But immigrant attraction and retention still are not treated as core economic infrastructure in the same way the region treats business recruitment, workforce development, tax incentives, major construction projects, or lakefront development.

That is not a criticism of Global Cleveland or the other organizations doing this work. No single nonprofit can carry an entire region’s population-growth strategy.

The economic case is substantial. A regional study conducted with Global Cleveland found that immigrants in Northeast Ohio held approximately $3.9 billion in spending power in 2019 and paid more than $1.5 billion in combined federal, state, and local taxes. Between 2014 and 2019, the region’s overall population declined while its immigrant population grew.

Cleveland now faces an additional demographic challenge that makes Gaylord’s strategy even more urgent: Who will own the region’s established businesses when their current owners retire?

The businesses Cleveland could quietly lose
By 2035, approximately six million small and midsize American businesses will face ownership transitions as baby-boomer owners retire, according to research from the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility.

Behind those national numbers are Northeast Ohio machine shops, restaurants, dry cleaners, contractors, repair companies, medical practices, logistics firms, small manufacturers, and neighborhood retailers.

Some owners will transfer their companies to children. Others will sell to employees, competitors, or larger corporations.

But many owners have no family members who want the business, while employees who understand the operation may lack the financing necessary to purchase it.

Without a prepared buyer, even a viable business can disappear when its owner retires. The community then loses far more than one proprietor.

Employees lose jobs. Customers lose services. Vendors lose accounts. Commercial districts lose activity. Decades of technical knowledge, professional relationships, and local reputation can vanish at once.

Economic-development organizations devote substantial resources to helping people launch companies. That work is essential. But Cleveland should make acquiring a healthy existing business as visible and accessible as starting one.

An established company may already have employees, customers, equipment, cash flow, and a trusted place in the community. Preserving it can be less risky—and more economically valuable—than attempting to recreate it after it closes.

Look to Cleveland’s next generation of owners

Greater Cleveland should establish a business-succession initiative that would connect current owners preparing to retire with qualified immigrant, Black, and first-generation entrepreneurs interested in acquiring established companies.Immigrant and first-generation entrepreneurs should be central to this preservation strategy.

Immigrants account for approximately 27% of America’s Main Street business owners. They are especially prominent among the restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners, transportation companies, and service businesses that give commercial corridors their identity.

FreshWater Cleveland has documented this entrepreneurial tradition for years, including stories about immigrants and refugees rebuilding Rust Belt communities.

Many newcomers arrive with professional experience, technical expertise, family-business backgrounds, and strong entrepreneurial ambitions. Others have spent years working in local restaurants, factories, construction companies, health-care businesses, and service firms.

They may understand an operation intimately but have never been shown a realistic pathway to ownership.

Cleveland should build that pathway.

Building a pipeline
Greater Cleveland should establish a business-succession initiative that would connect current owners preparing to retire with qualified immigrant, Black, and first-generation entrepreneurs interested in acquiring established companies.

The first step would be to identify owners who expect to retire within the next five to 10 years and lack a clear succession plan.

Participation could remain confidential while owners receive help valuing their companies, organizing financial records, addressing legal and tax questions, and preparing for a gradual transition rather than an emergency sale.

At the same time, the initiative should help recruit and prepare prospective buyers. Participants would learn how to evaluate a company, interpret financial statements, conduct due diligence, negotiate a purchase, manage an existing workforce, and assemble financing.

The program could then match prepared buyers with willing sellers. Lawyers, accountants, business brokers, and lenders could be identified to assist with the transaction, while retiring owners could remain involved during a structured transition period to transfer customer relationships, vendor contacts, and institutional knowledge.

The initiative should not be an immigrants-only program, nor should every immigrant be encouraged to purchase a business.

The program should be an inclusive regional initiative that makes a deliberate effort to introduce overlooked pools of potential owners to opportunities that might otherwise disappear.

Cleveland does not have to create the supporting infrastructure from nothing. Organizations like Global Cleveland, ECDI, JumpStart, COSE and Team NEO should work with local banks, community development financial institutions, neighborhood Community Development Corporations (CDCs), business brokers, and professional advisers. These organizations already possess many of the necessary components to implement a successful plan.

What is missing, however, is a coordinated pipeline that connects retiring owners and prepared buyers to affordable capital, and transition assistance.

A pilot program should focus on several Northeast Ohio business sectors that have both experienced owners approaching retirement and prospective purchasers interested in acquisition.

These industries include light manufacturing, food businesses, home services, transportation, health-related services, and neighborhood retail.

Success should be measured with data on businesses transferred, jobs preserved, financing secured, storefronts kept occupied, and new owners still operating successfully after three to five years.

Revive Cleveland’s Heartland Visa campaign
A local succession initiative would help immigrants and aspiring entrepreneurs who already live here. But Cleveland also needs a lawful mechanism for recruiting additional workers, innovators, and business owners.

That idea is neither new nor fringe.

The Great Lakes Metro Chambers Coalition, which includes the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP), has long made federal immigration reform part of its regional economic agenda.

Global Detroit family.In 2019, the coalition produced a policy paper titled “Supporting Place-Based Immigration in the Great Lakes Region.” The report notes that regions confronting population loss and workforce shortages should have a greater role in attracting immigrants suited to their economic needs.

The coalition’s concept was further developed by the Economic Innovation Group—a bipartisan public policy organization dedicated to forging a more dynamic and inclusive American economy—which created Heartland Visa proposal.

Under Heaterland Visa the model, counties experiencing population or working-age decline could voluntarily join a new immigration program. Qualified workers and entrepreneurs could select participating communities, live and work there, and eventually obtain permanent residence after meeting the program’s residency and earnings requirements.

In December 2024, Republican U.S. Senator Todd Young of Indiana and then-Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia introduced the bipartisan Heartland Visa Act of 2024.

The bill would have authorized up to 50,000 principal Heartland Visas annually for qualified applicants living in participating counties. Visa holders would have been permitted to work for any employer, rather than being tied permanently to one sponsoring company.

Organizations like Global Cleveland hold the premise that immigrants are not only attracted to economic growth, they help create it.The legislation also expressly included self-employed professionals, remote workers, and entrepreneurs starting or relocating businesses.

Participants would have received an initial three-year visa, renewable for another three years, with an opportunity to apply for permanent residence after completing the second term and satisfying the program’s requirements. Counties would decide whether to participate, while federal agencies would retain responsibility for admissions, background checks and immigration enforcement.

The bill was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, but did not advance before the 118th Congress ended, therefore requiring reintroduction to be considered.

Ohio’s congressional delegation and Greater Cleveland’s business community should help lead that effort.

A Heartland Visa would not solve every small-business succession problem. Many neighborhood businesses will be acquired by immigrants, Black entrepreneurs, employees and other buyers who already live here.

But a place-based visa could help Cleveland recruit international graduates, engineers, experienced managers, remote professionals and entrepreneurs capable of acquiring, modernizing or expanding higher-value manufacturing, technology, health-care and professional-service companies.

More fundamentally, it would recognize that Cleveland’s demographic needs are not the same as those of cities like Miami, Dallas, or Phoenix. Yet every American community currently competes under essentially the same national immigration system.

Shrinking regions should have a controlled, lawful way to recruit people willing to work, invest and establish lasting roots there.

Preserve what Cleveland has already built
For decades, economic development has largely been framed as a competition to attract companies from somewhere else. The coming ownership transition requires a complementary strategy: preserve the good businesses we already have and place them in the hands of people prepared to carry them forward.

Some of those future owners are already living in Cleveland. They work in our hospitals, factories, restaurants, universities and neighborhood businesses. Others are international students, skilled professionals and entrepreneurs deciding whether Northeast Ohio offers enough opportunity to become their permanent home.

A successful ownership transfer can preserve jobs, maintain services, keep a storefront active and allow a retiring owner’s life’s work to continue. It can also give another Cleveland family a path to stability, ownership and generational wealth.

Becky Gaylord’s warning was correct in 2010, and it is even more urgent today: Cleveland needs immigrants.

It also needs a system for passing the torch.