by Tessa Jackson, Faubourg Advisors

   (Plain Press May 2026) A pediatric therapist posted something on social media this week that’s been sitting with me. Teens, he argued, don’t need another program, pipeline, or productivity metric. They need a third space—somewhere to simply exist, unoptimized and unbothered.

   He’s right. And after twenty years in community and economic development, I’d add something he didn’t: the absence of that third space isn’t just a social failure. In cities like Cleveland, it’s a residential investment problem hiding in plain sight.

COMMENTARY

   Mayor Bibb recently unveiled a $600 million vision for Burke Airport. It includes a 180-acre youth sports complex, a golf course, hotels, a marina, and a lakefront promenade. The mayor called it “…accessible, high-impact investment that drives economic growth and creates sustainable opportunities reaching beyond downtown to every neighborhood.”

   The sports complex is expected to bring 400 to 500 families to Cleveland weekly. The hotels planned for the adjacent Muni Lot are described as serving families traveling to Cleveland for tournament events. The economic model isn’t built around the teenager from Central or Collinwood. It’s built around the travel team from Columbus, whose parents need a place to stay and things to do.

   Cleveland isn’t alone. From Orlando to Kalamazoo, cities are racing to build “youth sports complexes” anchored by identical logic. One developer recently described the model plainly: “You may come for two hours of sports, but then you have 22 hours of hospitality that you can utilize as a family.” The average American family spent over $1,000 on their child’s primary sport last year—$414 of that on travel and lodging. That is the customer these facilities are designed to capture. Not the kids who live in the surrounding neighborhoods.

   This is a pattern. Cities build dog parks, pocket parks, and tournament facilities, and call them community amenities; however, none are places where a teenager can show up on a Saturday and claim space.

   So those kids end up at the mall, on the corner, or in the abandoned lot with the empty pool somebody figured out you can skate in. Communities call it mischief—or worse. I call it demand finding the only available supply.

   Cleveland, like other communities, has a serious unmeasured “amenity gap”. There’s never been a comprehensive neighborhood inventory of youth and teen-specific amenities, so we don’t officially know where the third space deserts are. We have hunches—anyone who’s spent time on the East Side has hunches—but we haven’t done the work of mapping them or treating their absence as the infrastructure problem it is.

   Families with choices make housing decisions based on the full neighborhood ecosystem. Whether that ecosystem makes space for their teenagers to belong is part of that calculus. When there are no spaces, families leave—or never arrive. That shows up in the comps, vacancy rates, and neighborhood narrative. The amenity gap is quietly accelerating disinvestment on Cleveland’s East Side.

Here’s what Cleveland should do.

   First, the Mayor’s Office of Prevention, Intervention and Opportunity should conduct a citywide inventory of youth amenities to identify third space deserts—neighborhoods where teenagers have no legitimate claim to public space. This is the baseline needed for planning.

   Second, make youth-related community impact a condition of the Burke project’s community license to operate. As proposed, the project will generate $2.5 million in annual city tax revenue. A dedicated portion should be contractually committed to funding youth and teen-specific amenities in asset-starved East Side neighborhoods. This isn’t a budget drain. It’s a community benefit that strengthens the project’s political viability while opening the door to state and federal youth violence prevention funding and impact-related capital.

   Third, Cleveland should establish a biennial Youth Resources Summit—a participatory planning process that lets teenagers determine which projects get funded. Cleveland has flirted with participatory budgeting before, and this is an opportunity to put the theory into practice without a citywide referendum.

   The proposed Burke amenities will be inaccessible to the kids who need them most. The revenue they generate shouldn’t be.

   Cleveland’s teenagers aren’t asking for much, just somewhere to be. Twenty years in this work have convinced me that cities willing to respond seriously to creating public spaces for teens will retain families, stabilize neighborhoods, and build sustainable residential markets.

And people abandon the ones that don’t.