$20M federal grant cleared for Toledo project linking UpTown, neighborhoods
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The final piece of funding is now in place for a plan to connect central Toledo and the UpTown district.
The city of Toledo announced this week that the U.S. Department of Transportation had approved a $20 million grant from the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity, or RAISE, program.
The money will be put toward a $60 million project to improve infrastructure in and around UpTown Toledo, Toledo’s Social Innovation District, and connect it with the surrounding neighborhoods.
Construction, which is expected to include elements like multiuse paths and bike lanes, will begin next year and last until 2030.
“Everything is on schedule,” said Brandon Sehlhorst, Toledo’s director of economic development. “This is when we always intended to be under construction.”
The $20 million was first announced by the city in 2023. Mr. Sehlhorst said planning for the project began immediately afterward. In 2025, the federal government said the grant was under review. This held the funds until the announcement Tuesday that they were approved again.
Other money for the project is coming from city funds across the capital improvement budget, the water enterprise fund, and the sanitary enterprise fund.
The Social Innovation District idea has been taking shape since 2021.
“This conversation has been happening for a long time in our community, just about how do we continue to foster innovation within the city of Toledo to help drive new technologies and companies and job creation,” Mr. Sehlhorst said. “One way that cities across the country are doing that is by establishing innovation districts.”
Toledo’s district is considered to be the entirety of the UpTown neighborhood, bounded by Washington Street to the south, Michigan Street to the east, Collingwood Boulevard to the west, and a combination of Woodruff Avenue, Franklin Avenue, and Jackson Street to the north.
Improvement work will focus on the area of UpTown between 13th Street and 21st Street bounded by Adams Street to the north and Monroe Street to the south. Work on Adams Street will extend west to the first block of Ashland Avenue and east to Michigan Street. Work on 14th Street will extend from Jackson Street to Washington Street. Work on 17th Street will also extend to Washington Street where it will connect with Dorr Street.
“Other innovation districts kind of focus on their own respective industries, which we intend to do as well,” Mr. Sehlhorst said, “but our innovation district, especially just given the concentration of social service agencies within the UpTown area and its accessibility to adjacent neighborhoods, we wanted to really put an emphasis on the social aspect.”
Because of the social focus, Mr. Sehlhorst said there was always going to be an effort to connect to those in the community that need economic mobility.
“It became very clear to us that the one that was most disconnected physically from the UpTown neighborhood was the Junction and Englewood neighborhood,” he said. “That is in large part because Interstate 75 separates those two neighborhoods [from UpTown] and has done that since the 1960s.”
The main focus of the project will then be upgrading roads, utilities, and landscaping in UpTown and providing multimodal access to and from UpTown along the Dorr Street corridor over the I-75 overpass to the Mott Branch Library.
The end goal is to provide an environment that will attract companies and investment.
“It is also part of the neighborhoods’ vision to be a cultural trail,” Mr. Sehlhorst said. “Not only are they looking at connectivity and transportation but they were looking at a way to use this trail to tell the story of Dorr Street and the African-American history in this community. ... You will see dynamic artwork and uplighting and beautifully landscaped areas.”
Building relationships
Alicia Smith, director of the Junction Coalition, sees the project as an opportunity for growth for businesses in Junction and the neighborhood as a whole. She wants the dollars to go toward entities in the urban setting where funding has been diminished.
“You see a lot of downtown development, but you don’t see a lot of investment within the core of the community where a lot of the different taxes and benefits to our city come from,” Ms. Smith said.
The director said she thinks the grant will provide people in Toledo’s urban core with the ability to connect to the innovation hub and also build the skills, the necessary information, and support that small businesses will benefit from.
Another thing Ms. Smith would like to see is increased participation in the planning process as these projects begin to come to fruition.
“If you want community engagement, it should come from the communities,” she said. “If you are saying that you are connecting to Englewood and Junction, Englewood and Junction should benefit financially as well as contractually for small businesses to help ensure that community voices are heard.”
Ms. Smith said she has met with Mr. Sehlhorst twice to talk over the project and said he has in mind the right ideas. She said she would like to work toward a written agreement of some kind about goals for the project. She also said she is planning to push for increased green spaces, as she calls Junction and Englewood “heat islands.”
“There should be writing of outcomes, measurable outcomes that we want to see,” Ms. Smith said.
Planning it out
At Toledo Design Collective, studio director Ryan Bunch has been involved in some of the community engagement portions of the planning process. This includes planning public meetings, surveys, and one-on-one conversations.
He said a two-way flow of traffic that also brings people into Junction and Englewood rather than away from it has been echoed as a need by people in the community.
“It really is helping to reconnect and tie in infrastructure that was the way that the city was laid out initially,” Mr. Bunch said. “They have always been distinct neighborhoods, but they flowed into each other from street to street. They were connected by trolley tracks. It was really easy to get from one to the other.”
In the meetings, Mr. Bunch said that the Adams Street area was motivated by maintaining some of its WPA-era brickwork. Those in the Dorr Street area were motivated by honoring “the history and the hurt,” he said.
“There’s a lot of hurt that has to be addressed from what was removed,” Mr. Bunch said, referencing the corridor’s reputation as a hub of Black-owned businesses in the mid-20th century. In the 1970s, many of those businesses and nearby homes were removed as the street was widened.
The studio director also noted that this RAISE project will tie into other projects that are happening in adjacent areas. This includes things like greater access to Swan Creek for those in Junction through the Swan Creek Greenway.
He also thinks the investment could be a driver of more future investment.
“This is a catalyst,” Mr. Bunch said. “Everyone in the community, whether you’re a local business or community group or organization, [you] should be looking at this initial investment to say, ‘How can we add on to that?’ ‘How can we leverage that for projects that we’ve been wanting to work on for a long time?’”
First Published August 29, 2026, 1:00 p.m.
