By Steven Litt, cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Merchants at the nearly century-old Shaker Square shopping center on Cleveland’s East Side can be a tough audience.

They’re impatient for change more than three years after the historic property fell into foreclosure in late 2020, jeopardizing a regional landmark and a retail anchor as important to the city as the West Side Market.

It took nearly another two years before Cleveland City Council voted in 2022 to spend $12 million to enable a pair of local nonprofit community development agencies to buy the troubled property from creditors and carry out a 21st century reboot.

Since then, the nonprofits Cleveland Neighborhood Progress (CNP) and Burten Bell Carr Development, Inc., (BBC) have raised and nearly spent $5.25 million on urgently needed repairs.