#5: Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions)

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Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:00:00]:
We wanted something green. We wanted something that would enhance the community, but primarily we wanted something that would give people that would stabilize lives. And the guys coming out of incarceration, their number one problem is money. So we wanted to help them solve that money problem so they didn't go back to doing whatever landed them in prison the first time. So that's why we picked grapes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:25]:
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we're exploring what people are building in Cleveland, also known as the forest city. I'm Jeffrey Stern here with my fellow cartographer, V Teigen.

Tagan [00:00:44]:
And we are coming to you live from Cleveland. By some estimates, this is the 2nd largest urban farming city in the United States.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:55]:
I couldn't tell you what the first largest is, but it's hard to say exactly anyway because apparently there is no commonly accepted definition of urban farm districts distinct from urban gardens. In any case, our guest today is no stranger to this fact and Cleveland's larger urban agricultural movement.

Tagan [00:01:14]:
Today's guest, Mansfield Frazier, is the executive director for Neighborhood Solutions. This is a nonprofit that publishes Reentry Advocate, a national magazine that goes into various prisons, libraries, county jails, halfway houses, and prison ministries around the United States. The organization won a competitive grant in 2010 to establish the country's first inner city vineyard, the 3 quarter acre vineyards of Chateau Hough, located in the heart of Hough, where he resides. Unfortunately, I was unable to make this interview. However, please enjoy Jeff and Mansfield's conversation right after this message.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:02]:
So we'll get to the history of huff and the Vineyard and and Chateau huff. But I wanted to start with, you know, what drew you to agriculture and in an urban context? Is that something you did growing up or, you know, what what kind of brought you to the space in the first place?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:02:22]:
Well, the space was there. And when we put the vineyard in 10 years ago, there was a lot of buzz about urban agriculture. There was this false notion being propagated, and it still is, about there being food deserts in urban areas. I still don't believe there are food deserts. There's transportation problems, not food deserts. But they wanna say there's food deserts so they can get the government to do certain things. And so there was a real push to start urban agriculture to supposedly solve these food deserts. And we had, my wife and I, when I said we we had a nonprofit that we were helping people come out of incarceration.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:03:07]:
I mean, I'm formerly incarcerated, so I served on a committee that the mayor Campbell that mayor Campbell at the time started a reentry committee and asked me about 5 of us had been formally incarcerated. The rest were from law enforcement, judges, lawyers, college professors. And after serving for a couple of months, I told my wife, I said, I'm not going back down here because these they don't know what they're talking about. The problem was a lot of people were gonna be coming out of incarceration and they needed services and were gonna overwhelm the social service agencies. And so they wanted to start reentry programs. So my wife and I, we formed a nonprofit and we trained people on best practices to help people coming out of incarceration. We would train people at prisons, case managers, parole officers, probation officers, people who've come in contact with, some people that from the ministry on what to how to best help people. Well, didn't take us long to train most of the people that were that wanted to avail themselves on the training.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:04:17]:
So we started a magazine called Reentry Advocate Magazine. And the goal was to put stories in the magazine and send it to prisons so that guys that were in prison would read the magazine and use their time wisely, not to be thinking, well, I can't get a job when I get out so I might as well sit here and vegetate. Our goal was to change their thinking, get rid of what we call stinking thinking and get them to not just vegetate, but to acquire some skills while they were incarcerated because there were jobs when people got out. So we did the magazine and we, eventually went into 20 states with the publication. But politics changed, the funding stream dried up once they got rid of the county commissioners. And so we said, rather than tell people how to help people coming out of incarceration, let's actually show them. So that's why we wanted to put in a venue because it's labor intensive. We're about a quarter of a mile from Orianna House, which is one of the main facilities that people coming out of incarceration where they reside when they come home.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:05:30]:
And so our goal was to take people coming out of incarceration. We would hire them to disabuse them of the notion that they can never get a job. We would hire them, then we would find out what their needs, wants, desires are, teach them soft skills, then move them on to something else. It was temporary, part time, just to figure out what you wanna do with your life and see if we can help you get there. And we were successful about 50% of the time. And over the life of the program, we still hire some, but over the life of the program, we've had over a 100 guys that come from the halfway house or come directly out of prison that come to work at the vineyard with us. They they installed the vineyard. So we wanted something that was labor intensive, but we also wanted something that could produce paychecks.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:06:32]:
Our goal was to pay people. We only asked people to volunteer if they're in the halfway house. We also use volunteers like people from CASE that wanna come and volunteer. We give them the experience of volunteering, But our goal is create paychecks. And to do that, you have to grow a crop that produces money. And wine grapes is a crop that produces money. So that's why we selected a vineyard out of all the crops we could grow.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:00]:
Yeah. What I find really inspiring about the whole story is how you've kind of landed on this idea of the triple bottom line, you know, something that is ecologically positive, socially and community positive, and also is out there to be a profitable business at the end of the day?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:07:22]:
The whole goal and what we have to always be aware of is to keep our compass pointed toward true north, and that is to help people coming out of incarceration. We've gone actually, we've gone beyond that mission. So to do that, we have to create paychecks. So we wanted something green. We wanted something that would enhance the community, but primarily we wanted something that would give people that would stabilize lives. And the guys coming out of incarceration, their number one problem is money. So we wanted to help them solve that money problem so they didn't go back to doing whatever landed them in prison the first time. So that's why we picked grapes because as we we're we're 501c3.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:08:06]:
To get funding from foundations to do grapes and wine is difficult. They'd rather you do bell peppers. But like I told them, we'll always be coming back for more money because you can't make any money doing bell peppers. So we finally convinced them to fund the wine grapes. Even table grapes, can't make money doing table, table grapes. And we love taking care of the planet. That's just a passion of ours. We had we have a big backyard when we built our home, which is right across from the Vineyard.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:08:36]:
We put in a raised bed garden, so my wife gardens back there. She hasn't been doing it the last couple of years. She'd been so busy teaching, but, we have fruit trees. In fact, I got my pear tree is producing a copious amount of pear. I gotta gotta find somebody because the woman I used to give them to, she used to make pear preserves. She retired, and I don't know how to find her. So she worked at Fatima. So if anybody want any pears, just call me.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:09:00]:
You know? But this probably won't be mounted to by the because the pears are ready now. I gotta do something with More pears than I know what to do with. I'm not gonna make pair of wine. There's a way of making pair of wine, but it's more trouble than it's worth.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:14]:
It's it's not particularly as tasty.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:09:16]:
Well, it's not. There's no market for pair of wine. Some people might want it, but no.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:22]:
So when when you talk about the North Star, I'd love if you could expand a bit on recidivism as a gateway to jobs, better communities, and and revitalization?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:09:33]:
Well, I mean, people ain't people getting up, going to work every day, they're paying taxes. They're not breaking the law. It's kinda self evident. You want people to get back into the, job market. Some never been in the job market, but you want to make society a better place by reducing crime, reducing recidivism and making citizens, making individuals tax payers instead of tax takers. When they're in prison, they're tax taker. They're taking their money by locking them up, $27,000 a year. I'd rather they'd be making for, you know, I've often said, if you give them 20,000 a year, they wouldn't commit crime.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:10:13]:
You're $7,000 ahead. Just do what Andrew Yang wants you to do. Give everybody a basic income. That's how you saw a crime. Give everybody a a a basic floor income, 12, 15000 a year, and we could easily afford to do it, but we won't. Not as a society. We we just won't do that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:34]:
Why do you think we're not quite there yet?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:10:37]:
Oh, no. We're nowhere from that because our society was based off there's a new book called Caste. It's by, Isabel Wilkerson. She's an award winning writer. She wrote a book 10 years ago, won a Pulitzer prize, The Warmth of Other Suns. This book is called Caste. Why do we have the problems we have in America? And it's a caste system. She compares it to the caste system in India.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:11:06]:
And the reason, even though slavery was over, we still have these hierarchical problems, is because some people got to have somebody to look down on to feel good about themselves. So they don't wanna they don't want people to, you know, hey, he might think he's good as I am. So I want somebody down below me. And that's a very real feeling because and it's been it's been created and you can see it on display at any Trump rally. These are people who wanna keep somebody beneath them. They're not at Trump's level, but Trump is playing them, feeding them hatred. And hatred is nothing but fear that they don't wanna deal with the fear of other people rising up to their level. Because if they rise up to my level, who am I gonna look down on? And so as long as you have a society that's based off you you know, we don't have a democracy, we have a pigmentocracy.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:12:03]:
As long as you have a pigmentocracy, we're not going to help the people at the bottom. It's just not something we'll it's not something we're willing to do except by bits and pieces. And then the minute something goes wrong with whatever we try, we quickly abandon it or another party, the republics, will get in and do away with it altogether. That's why we only nibble around the edges of social problems and never really stayed the course and solved them. And it's really the government's responsibility because all of the all of the problems of the underclass, black, white, or Hispanic, are created by the government. All of them. Every one of them is government created. They set up the game that way and give everybody a level playing field, and everybody will come out the same.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:12:49]:
They have an unlevel playing field, puts results and unlevel outcomes, but then they say, oh, well, we didn't cause it. We actually did cause it. We know how you did it. There's books like you really should read this book, Cass. She explains chapter and verse things that I've known for years, but I never wrote it down so succinctly and linked them all together. It's an amazing book. 10 years ago, there was an amazing book called The New Jim Crow written by my friend, Michelle Alexander. Well, people went, wow.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:13:20]:
They started teaching off of it. Stuff that I knew about prisons, because I'd been to prison. You know, when I was in prison, I thought I was the only guilty guy there. But I'm not guilty. I'm not everybody lying. But the criminal justice system is flawed, and Michelle Alexander pointed out the flaws. And what happened is that it they still aren't fixed, but people will learn from reading The New Jim Crow what the flaws were. Well, this book, Caste, which is still very new, it's going to point out for people who want to educate themselves what the flaws of our current system, economic system, our social systems, our political systems, how we got this way and what we can do to solve it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:04]:
Yeah. What what strikes me about what what you're doing in particular, though, is how it's really a practical way to address the problems that you've just identified, right, really trying to foster entrepreneurship, create opportunities for for folks post incarceration, creating happier, healthier, wealthier communities to raise people up specifically instead of, you know, to your point of, you know, dissension or or looking down upon others. I'm curious, you know, from your background, what you know, I imagine you could focus on a lot of problems and and rally people as a community activist and leader. You know, what is it about this problem that that's that's drawn you to it?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:14:51]:
Yeah. Because I was I was part of the problem. I had the problem and I knew the solutions to it. I was formerly incarcerated myself. And you get a lot of guys that come out of prison and what they want to do is help other people. It's just human nature. I know the experience. I know what I'm doing.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:15:04]:
Let me reach back and help. But actually, I was doing the wrong thing. And when I said that we we were a reentry program, we still are, but we're trying to transition. That's why we wanna build a bigger winery so we can make a lot more money so that we can become a pre entry program. That's where we should be. Re entry? Yeah, it needs to be done. But what needs to be done more is preentry. A lot more should be done on preentry than reentry.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:15:34]:
Because then my wife has a master's in social work. She said, if you help a child, 13, 14, 15, he's 18, you got maybe 60 years of good living. You help somebody that's 40, you're only getting 40 years. So from a standpoint, how do we prevent young people from going to prison? That's more important than helping people when they come out of prison. Not that helping people when they come out is not as important, but if I can only do one, then I would rather prevent a young person from going to prison. Pre entry. I've got a young man. He's coming home from Pennsylvania.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:16:13]:
His grandmother is gonna call me in about a couple of weeks, and I don't have an answer for her. The only answer I can give her for this young man is let's hope he breaks the law and goes to a safe prison before he gets shot out here in the street, because he's a young gangster. And what's going to happen is that she's gonna go back home, live with his grandmother because there's no place else for him to reside. Pre entry requires mentorship. And if I had the kind of facility that I want, I would have him come lift this facility, have the people there who can mentor him, take the gun out of his hand, and settle him down until he grows up. But that takes having the facility, having the salaries, being able to pay people to do it. And it's not complicated, but it's expensive. But it's still less expensive than locking somebody up in prison.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:17:12]:
Far less expensive. But society is not ready to do that. They won't fund it, put it that way. So we we're going to try to build a bigger winery so we can start a revenue stream so that we can start taking these houses, basically group homes that are run by young men, young black males, who know the language, who know how to talk to them, and then we step to mothers who are having trouble because everybody knows who's going to pick up that gun in 3 or 4 years. You can see him start acting out in school. You can see him dropping out. You can see him start hanging out in the street. Everybody knows who he's going to be.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:17:52]:
Before a guy pulls the trigger on a gun, he's had 7 interactions with the police. 7 before he ever pulls the trigger. So what we wanna do is catch him at number 2 or 3 interaction with the police, step to his mother and say, hey. Look like you're having trouble with Ray Ray here. Why don't you come and let him live with us? And us meaning a house that's run by grown men that said, come on in, Ray Ray. We love you, but you're gonna do it like we say do it, and we'll win. You can't tell me that I can't keep a 14 year old straight. His mother might not be able to.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:18:28]:
His grandmother may not be able to, but I know a lot of grown men, and that becomes their job, to take this kid that eventually is going to run a fall of the law, pick up a gun, get into a gang. All we're talking about doing is recreating family. When he has a weak family structure, maybe a mother alone, he goes into the streets, and he gets into a gang. What is a gang? A family unit. All we're gonna do is give him another family unit that's gonna keep him on the right track. It's gonna work a 100% of the time? No. Will it work most of the time? Yeah. Yeah.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:19:04]:
We know how we know how to do it. But we can't get anybody to talk about funding a program like that. Can't get any foundation to even listen to us. We've tried. But we know what the answer is. And like my wife has said, we know what the answer is for 40 years. She went to University of Michigan, got her master's degree in social work. She said, we knew the answer back then 40 years ago.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:19:25]:
But that's our mission. Our mission is to make a safe, sane society and to turn lives around. And we think we know what, how to do it. We don't have we don't have the funds to do it. That's it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:37]:
Right. Well, how did you start a vineyard and winery in the middle, of the city?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:19:44]:
There was a grant called Reimagining Cleveland. It was 58 grants that were given from the federal government. The reimagining Cleveland had to tagline makes make Cleveland a green city on a blue lake. And we applied to put in a vineyard. People put it in pocket parks. They were putting in raised beds. Some were putting in orchards. We said we wanted to put in a vineyard, and they said, no.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:20:12]:
What do you know about grapes and wine? And I took exception. I said, well, I'm the expert at taking a quark off the bottle, which is about all I knew at the time. So it started with a grant, but I knew then that the majority of the other grants were not going to be successful long term because they were all based off of volunteerism. And it sounds real good. Every spring, I call it the Brick and Stock Bunch. Every spring, people would've just, oh, I've been cooped up all winter. I want to go out and dig in the dirt and play in there. That shit lasts till about August.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:20:47]:
Then we start July August come, you can't find nobody to do the work. So we know that. We know human nature. The way you got them to do the work is we pay people. So we weren't doing a little volunteer project. Out of the 58 grants that they gave, there's only about 4 or 5 of them left. And ours was by far the most successful. Why? Because it was based off of money.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:21:11]:
And they didn't. They were they're 58 grants. They said, we're gonna get 58 this year. We'll see how it works. We'll come back and give a 100 and something grants next. They never gave they never tried it again. Because I was in the room with the people. I said, people are not gonna be successful.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:21:25]:
Guarantee you, they're not gonna be successful. Voluntarism only goes so far for so long. I guarantee you. The world, like it or not, operates off of money. And if you don't address that part, just like people coming out of incarceration, young people that we're talking about, pre entry, we have to have a way to put money in their pocket to keep them from breaking law. Nobody wants to be broke in a iPhone, iPad world. And they're not going to be. And I can't I can't blame them.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:21:53]:
So you take a kid out of poverty and say, oh, you can't have that because your parents can't afford that. They're gonna take it from the kid that has. So our goal is to figure out a way to house that kid and let him have the other things that he sees in this world. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that's all it's based off of. It's very simple. Treat him like he was every other kid. Give him the support and raising of every other kid. So getting the land, that's very easy.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:22:22]:
Once you have a reputation that you know what you're doing. And so when they told me that they weren't gonna give me 1 of the 58 grants, one of the people that was at the table was Tim Trammell at Burtonville Carr. And Tim knew my work. He knew I'd I'd done some work for their nonprofit. He knew me from the community, and he knows that I'm pretty much gonna say I'm gonna do what I say I'm gonna do. So he convinced them to give us the grant. That's how we got the money to get started.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:52]:
So having figured out a model that that works, how do you take the the lands across Cleveland where there's a pretty, you know, well established issue of vacant homes slated for demolition and and work to reuse those and take those old buildings and produce something good out of them to ultimately, again, create wealth.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:23:17]:
Well, it's not it's not as easy as it seems that well, talking about vacant you're talking about vacant land, Yeah. You can grow hops all over Cleveland. You can sell all of them. But putting in a hops farm is, you're gonna need a lot of money. I tried to partner with, we grew grapes. Grapes are very good. First 3 or 4, after 4 years, we harvested our grapes and they made excellent wine. We said, wow, let's build a winery.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:23:44]:
So we built a winery. I'd like to grow hops, but I do not wanna be a a brewmaster. I do not wanna make beer. I'd rather grow hops in conjunction with a brewery that could then brag, oh, we got local grown hops. Our beer is made from hops from right down the street. I would like to get in a relationship where they partner with me and I supply the labor and grow the hops and give them the hops. It seems like a win win situation. I haven't been able to do that for one basic reason.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:24:21]:
And you know what the reason is? There's brew pubs all over Cleveland, all over downtown, right? Yeah. The hot new thing. Had been for over a decade, right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:31]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:24:31]:
You've been to any of them?

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:33]:
Sure. I've been to a few.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:24:35]:
You ever seen a you ever seen a Black Brewmaster? No. It's a racist industry. That's the short answer. I can't get 1 beer manufacturer, 1 brew pub to partner with me. Now, if I was just exclusively helping white guys, the answer might be different, but it's pure racism. And and I know it, but they will, they will, they will scream loud and clear. Oh, no, no. That's not the reason.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:25:00]:
But, you could grow hops in a lot of vacant land that's not good for anything else. Then if a better use come along for the land, you could take the hops up. Yes. But you could make it profitable and create create wealth out of out of vacant land. Buildings is something else again. The reason I wanted to turn the building that we did, we turned it into a bio seller. I think that's what you're talking about. We had the vineyard and we built a bio seller.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:25:27]:
We built a biocellar because we knew that marijuana was going to get legalized and we were pushing that marijuana would be legalized so you could do it in every community that they would let that we could put, say, they were saying one of the things that they were were saying, and they need to go back and do it, is that each person could grow 5 plants of their own. Well, I get 10 people, put them in a basement. That's 50 plants. Grow your own marijuana within the law. Well, what happened was the corporate guys took over the marijuana business and they didn't do that. And they bought out the guys that had these great ideas on how to farm marijuana. They basically chickened out and let the corporation take it over. Marijuana should be grown, and I don't smoke this stuff, but marijuana should be grown in each neighborhood and sold only in that neighborhood.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:26:18]:
That's the proper way to do marijuana. But I thought that they I thought there was a chance. That's why I wanted to add when they gave me the idea of creating a bottle seller. It's the perfect growing environment for real wine. Absolutely perfect. Nobody can steal your plants. It's very secure, but that's not gonna happen. So trying to raise other crops in a bio seller, maybe you could do it with mushrooms, but mushrooms don't work so well because mushroom gives off spores and it's too sealed the environment.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:26:49]:
We were going to do the woman who introduced the add idea to us, she's a mushroom mushroom expert, but she didn't tell us about those spores. It comes out the gills of mushrooms that can make you sick. They can't, they can't be toxic. So you have to ventilate. And so the reason I'm saying all this, reusing vacant buildings is just tricky. I had an idea to reuse a vacant factory, but nobody wants to take me up on it. You know what that is? Drone racing. They're doing drone racing.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:27:24]:
You you seen you ever seen those drone? That's all you're raping. They get in prizes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:28]:
It's fun to watch.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:27:29]:
It's fun to watch. Why don't we do drone racing? But that's out of the box thinking. People look at me like I got 2 heads, like I'm crazy when I say something like that. So the world has to catch up. The world has to be forward thinking. And Cleveland is not a hotbed of forward thinking people and ideas. We're very provincial in Cleveland. Provincial to the point of being backwards sometimes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:49]:
Yeah. How do you think we could work to address that mischaracterization or proper characterization that persists of Cleveland as the mistake on the lake? You know, why is it that Cleveland seems to be defined by its struggles?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:28:06]:
We tend to want to number 1, we're not a poor city in the United States. We just beat out Detroit. We've always hung around the bottom level. But every city that has a large urban population, black population, is down on itself. Because except with maybe a city like Atlanta, which has a large black population that's doing very well, most blacks, most cities with large black populations because of low education, because of higher education, how education is funded, most of those cities are struggling. And so most of them, you take Youngstown, it's not the garden city, but somebody made Cleveland a mistake on the lake as a joke, and it stuck. So how do you overcome that? Via education. So how do you do that? By changing how education is funded in Ohio, you can raise education levels.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:29:00]:
But the problem is we have a high percentage of low educated people in greater Cleveland. And if you just look at the number of high school graduates, college graduates, advanced degrees, we rank low. The places that are doing better, they rank higher. So it's all education. It all falls back to education. But you gotta realize, we're in Ohio. Are you familiar with the DeRoeff decision?

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:27]:
I am not.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:29:28]:
The DeRoeff decision, this person DeRoeff filed in court and won that said that the way Ohio funds schools is wrong. And the court agreed with it. And what did the state legislature did? They ignored the court. If the court if the Supreme Court wanted to, they could tell the Ohio National Guard, go arrest every state legislator because they're outside of the law. And they've they're they're ignoring the law. This the Supreme Court said, you must find a way to fund education that's more equitable in the state of Ohio. And the legislators said, let us see you make us. And they totally ignored it.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:30:07]:
The DeRoeuf decision is still enforced. The the law hasn't been changed, and it's totally ignored because what the DeRoeuf decision said, you must fund education in inner city Cleveland at the same rate that you funded in Shaker Heights. And they said, no, we're not gonna do that. Basically, screw you. And we haven't figured out nobody's had the guts to challenge it. So as long as you have these kind and all this is institutionalized racism. They will make you think that it's something wrong with people that are poor or people that are disadvantaged and that it's something wrong with us now. Something was done to us.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:30:46]:
Nothing wrong with us. And we know who did it. We know how they did it. We know how they continue to do it. And so a lot of this, you know, again, and I think I said it before, this is not a democracy. It's a pigmentocracy. They want somebody to stay down on the killing floor so that poor whites, middle class whites can have somebody to look down on. Because if you ain't got somebody below you, that means they're down on the bottom.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:31:13]:
They don't want that. So it's a matter of hierarchy. And, you know, the bureaucrats that run this country, they devised an amazingly effective system of doing this. And it's been working for 400 years. When slavery was over, they came up with a new way. Jim Crow. When that was over, they still come up with other ways or they just ignored the law. What do you think this whole election about Trump is about? To change our system of government to form of American apartheid.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:31:43]:
How can a smaller number of whites control a larger number of minorities? Because, you know, the 2000 census told them by 2042, there'll be more people of color in the United States. They said, well, we can't have that. And then not long after that, here comes Obama, a black man as president. They went bonkers. They started a tea party. They started forming militias. They started, let's go get our guns. Because you have to understand there are some whites that are so far to the right, they would just assume burn the country down if they can't control it like they always have for the last 400 years.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:32:20]:
They said, it's ours, we own it, we stole it, and we're gonna keep it. And they stole it from Native Americans, but they'll never admit that. Just ours. Well, you stole it. And you're white folks, John, sorry to say that. Some white folks are still anything. They stole Jesus. Jesus don't look like Charleston Heston.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:32:40]:
Come on. White folks stole him. So they they to prove they'll steal anything, and they steal people's labor. They they, you know, steal people's dignity. So that's what we're fighting against, and it's goes hand and glove with the American tradition.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:55]:
Well, one of the things I know you've done very intentionally that that we haven't talked about yet is, you know, where you've chosen to build this in Hough specifically. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about the intentionality behind that and, you know, the statement that that you're making by doing that.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:33:12]:
Well, I built it for convenient for me. It was a lot right across the street from my house. The question is, why is my house in huff? That's the bigger question. The fact that I put the vineyard and winery, I put it on available land, that was very easy for me to use. That was a no brainer. The reason I'm in huff is because my wife and I wanted when I asked her to marry me, she was living in Dayton and the deal was I would build her a home. So we looked all over. She didn't know Cleveland, so I showed her all over.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:33:46]:
She finally asked me where I wanted to live, and I said, I don't think you wanna live where I wanna live. I wanna live in Huff. And so she said, show me. And I showed her. And she said, this is exactly where I wanna live. Now we could have built this home in Shaker Heights, Bentleyville, Solon, Westlake. We had that kind of money at the time. That's why the reason took a lot of it now.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:34:06]:
We don't have it now probably, but we could have built substantial home in any of these communities. But we wanted to we were similar in our worldview that we wanted to help our race. So how would it look, me living in Shaker, coming back down to Huff where the problem is in helping people in Huff? That would make me an a limousine liberal, an arm's length liberal. I wanna come help you, but I don't wanna live among you. We wanted to live exactly where the problem was. Oh, and the other part was, if we would have built built a home, say, in Bentleyville, the neighbors might see our black asses and say, Oh, I want to live next to those people and move. I'm we have power in our community, political power. We control things down here, just like everybody does in their own community.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:34:56]:
We would have no political power in an all white community where we could have built a home. The whole notion of integration is a fault, is a flawed notion. And I was, I'm an integrationist in my thinking, The integration won't work, because you know why? It takes 2 races to integrate, and white folks ain't ready to integrate. And it's still white when white folks get ready to integrate, I'm all for it. But they proved they're not ready because when black move in, they move out. I did that back in the sixties, the first home I bought. And the community was 95% white. I moved in.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:35:30]:
2 years later, it's 95% black. The funny thing is I never once saw a moving truck. I said, damn, these white people must move out under the dark at night. I don't know how they got out of there, but boy, they got out of there. So why would I wanna live in a community where somebody don't want me for a neighbor? Makes no sense to me. So which is why we wanted to live in Huff. We have a beautiful home. We have everything we want.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:35:53]:
It's near downtown. And so we decided to put the Vineyard where I could watch it, where it was easy to commute. I hate commuting. That comes from when I was, you know, I was raised in a beer tavern that we lived upstairs over. My father owned this building, and we lived upstairs over the business. So I like being very close to the business. So it's part of my tradition, I guess. That's why we chose Hough.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:36:14]:
And they wouldn't allow me to they I wouldn't have been able to do this in a community where I didn't have some sway, some influence. Like I said, they told me no. Tim Trammell, because I'd done work in my community, convinced him, yes, I know the guy. I know he's going to do what he say he's going to do. So bloom where you are planted. I love Hough. And there's a, yes, there's a political philosophy for why we're at Hough. The land, you know, there's this notion among whites and we've kind of fostered that notion that we think that it's that we're somehow better if we live next door to a white person.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:36:54]:
That's the most ridiculous thing. Or if my kid goes to a white school. No. My kid don't need to be sitting next to a white kid. He needs to be sitting next to a computer. Now if it's a white kid there, and I I I'm I'd like that because I'd like to see them, like for them to see the world as it's written large. But the notion of what we wanted to create is that the land we occupy in Huff is just as valuable to us as the land that people occupy in Hunting Valley is to them. We think just as much.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:37:27]:
We're not sitting there, oh, God, I wish I could live out there in Hunting Valley. No. I'm happy here enough. And they some people can't believe that. Some whites just cannot believe. In fact, when we first started developing health, there was PhDs, there were people from Case and from Cleveland State Urban Studies Professionals. Oh, never worked. Nobody wants to live there.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:37:49]:
But they were white. They didn't know there was a pent up demand to live in our own communities, not have to chase after white folks who didn't want to live next door to us, but live in the type of homes we wanted. My wife and I built a very large, beautiful home with a big backyard on a 3rd acre of land, because we always said we're gonna have dogs, and we're very comfortable. And some people still don't like the fact that we're that self contained and that happy. You know, when we first built in the home, my wife was working at Children Family Services. She's going into work one morning, 2 women were at the water cooler, and one was saying to another, you see some fool was building a home on 66 and up? And she said, she didn't say a word. She just walked right past it. So we love where we're at.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:38:36]:
We invite whites to come move in. See, integration, if it's integration is like a door. If integration is the work, then it's just swing both ways. If whites want to integrate, come move next door to me. I know there's a lot across the street. I'll pull the vineyard up and let's, to let somebody do it, say we're gonna build an expensive enough home. I'd love to have white neighbors, but I'm not chasing them. So yes, it's a political statement.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:38:58]:
And the world is starting, people are starting to get tired of driving 45 minutes, an hour to, you know, Yipit. We're we're 5 minutes from everything. The world is coming in our direction. That would with that comes gentrification. So that's one of the things that I'm very good at is protecting what we have and by inviting people in to have growth and development without black people getting pushed out because that's the biggest wheel we have now, is gentrification.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:32]:
How have you done that? How has the has Huff changed in the last 10, 15 years?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:39:38]:
Well, what we do is that we start a land trust. That's how you that's how you prevent gentrification. You take land into a land trust. That way you control the land. People can come in, like, build an apartment building if we left them. But, you know, there's some guys that built $400,000 townhomes, and I told them, so you should've talked to us first because we might put an apartment building next door for formerly formerly homeless people right next door to your $400,000 townhomes. And guess what? You can't stop us. It's our community.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:40:09]:
So if you wanna put that there, we don't mind you putting up $400,000 time homes for Cleveland Clinic, doctors. Great. But we're also going to build for the needs for our community. So you can't legislate this away. You can't stop us from building the type of properties that we need because Hough is big enough to accommodate people from every income level when I from including no income to millionaires. When by no income, people that are on social security, people that are formerly homeless. That's how you fight off gentrification. Make sure that you, we're looking at building some tiny homes for our seniors.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:40:50]:
Make sure that there's a variety of homes available, of living environments available so it don't all become one end. Because let's be honest, I gentrified the community when I built my home 20 years ago. Let's face it. And there's a lot of other a lot of other blacks that built substantial homes like mine, 100 of us, but we didn't do it to black out other people. So we want to, keep the community accessible for everybody, for our seniors who might want to get out of their big homes that they've had for 40, 50 years, we'll build you a little tiny home, something that's small, that fits your footprint, fits your lifestyle. You do it by legislation. You do it by controlling who the developers are, not letting them run rough shot over the community and you do it through politics. And we know how to play politics.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:41:40]:
That's all. We're very good at playing politics here at home. Some very bright people that built some nice homes. So we don't we don't get taken advantage of. We're not afraid. We'll we'll deal with anybody.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:52]:
Well, one of the things that we're hoping to do with this podcast over time is, as we kind of paint a lay of the land for people, is to collect, you know, things that that you appreciate about Cleveland. And I'd I'd love to hear your opinion on, you know, what what are your favorite hidden gems?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:42:14]:
It's not so hidden because it's in my community. I love League Park. It's 2 blocks away, and I knew it was there. That's why we built our home here. League Park is the oldest remaining, still in existence, baseball field in the United States that was built in 18/91. Babe Ruth hit his 500 home run there. It was the home of the Cleveland Indians. They were called the Cleveland Spiders.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:42:40]:
And it's a treasure. It's it was revitalized a little over 10 years ago. But when we built our own 20 years ago, I knew that that place was going to be revitalized. So it's a hidden gem. Another one is Dunham Tavern Museum. It's at the other end of 66th Street, 66 in Euclid. It's the oldest house still in existence in Cleveland built in 18/24 and it's got new life. That's right next door to where the Cleveland Foundation is gonna build their headquarters.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:43:12]:
So this corridor that I'm on on 66th Street is going to become a walkable corridor that has enough attractions to we would like for to see as many people out here in the summer as they do on fourth street. So we wanna build it as a enjoyable corridor as a showplace for the east side of Cleveland. And we can do it with these hidden gems that we have.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:37]:
Yeah. That's fantastic. If people have any questions or things they'd like to follow-up with you about, if they wanna purchase some wine, how can, how can they find you?

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:43:48]:
My email is mansfieldf@gmail. They can go to chateauhuff.com, our website for the winery, or they can just pick up the phone and call me. 216-469-0124. I don't mind giving out my phone number because in half the prisons in the United States where the guys are getting their clothes to go home, my number is. Hey. Call me as when you get back. So I get calls all the time. So if it's good enough for those people to call me, anybody who wanna reach me, I'm I'm I'm a journalist by profession, so I'm easy to reach.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:44:23]:
And as you see, I'm opinionated.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:27]:
I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today and sharing your story and background and and everything you're working on. So thank you.

Mansfield Frazier (Chateau Hough & Neighborhood Solutions) [00:44:34]:
I appreciate you having me.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:37]:
That's all for this week. Thanks for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so shoot us an email at lay of the land at upside dot f m, or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland, at thetagan, or at sternhefe, j e f e. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land. If you or someone you know would make a good guess for our show, please email us or find us on Twitter and let us know. And if you love our show, please leave a review on iTunes. That goes a long way in helping us spread the word and continue to help bring high quality guests to the show.

Tagan [00:45:07]:
Jeff and I decided there were a couple of things we wanted to share with you at the end of the podcast. And so here we go. Taegan Horton and Jeffrey Stern developed the lay of the land podcast in collaboration with the UP Company LLC. At the time of this recording, we did not own equity or other financial interests in the companies which appear on this show unless otherwise indicated. All All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinions of Founders Skip Funds and its affiliates or actual and its affiliates or any entity which employ us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. We have not considered your specific financial situation nor provided any investment advice on this show. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.