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The Court

Ohio’s enabling statute authorizes the Cleveland Housing Court to have special personnel and powers to be a problem solving and remedial court. It connects people with resources to ease post-eviction transitions or achieve housing code compliance, and emphasizes mediation and compliance plans over punitive approaches. Nine Housing Court specialists are on deck to help carry out these non-trial remedies.

The tone and strategy of Housing Court is set by the elected judge, who has been Raymond Pianka for the past 16 years. Pianka was born, raised, and educated in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood of Cleveland, where he went on to found the Detroit Shoreway Community Development Corporation, one of the first neighborhood-based CDCs in Cleveland. He became executive director of the CDC in 1974 and through it all he attended Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, graduating in 1977. He was also a founder and the first president of the Cleveland Neighborhood Development Corporation, a trade association for neighborhood-based community development corporations.

From 1985 to 1995 Pianka represented Cleveland’s 17th ward on city council where he served as chair of the council’s Community and Economic Development Committee and the Legislative Committee. This perspective certainly influenced him as he crafted a more proactive court response to the dangerous wave of speculation and neglect facing the city.