Jim Rokakis

James "Jim" Rokakis (born April 24, 1955) is a Greek American former elected official who represented residents of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, for 34 years, first as a member of Cleveland City Council (1977–1997) and then as Cuyahoga County Treasurer (1997–2011). His work in government focused on maintaining housing stock and stabilizing neighborhoods and first-tier suburbs.

Early life and education

Rokakis was born in Cleveland to Manousos and Helen Rokakis, who immigrated from Greece in 1951. One of seven children, he grew up on Cleveland's near west side. He graduated from James Ford Rhodes High School in 1973 and from Oberlin College in 1977. At Oberlin he wrote a term paper proposing a housing court for Cleveland to enforce building codes and preserve housing stock. Rokakis earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1983 and subsequently began his career as an attorney.

Career

Rokakis was elected to Cleveland City Council in 1977, months after graduating from Oberlin, and represented Ward 6 and later Ward 15 for nearly 20 years. He was elected to public office ten times and never lost a general election. In his first term, he worked with state senator Charles L. Butts to pass legislation, modeled on his term paper, creating the Cleveland Housing Court. The court opened in April 1980 and is used to enforce housing codes and prosecute landlords who fail to maintain their properties. In 1985, he sponsored what was then the most far-reaching anti-smoking ordinance in Ohio.

As chair of the council's Finance Committee beginning in 1989, Rokakis helped balance the city budget and was part of the team that negotiated with the State of Ohio on the Gateway Economic Development Corporation. Together with a 1992 county sin tax, Gateway financed the ballpark now called Progressive Field and the arena now called Rocket Arena. He also sponsored tax increment financing for Tower City Center and brokered a compromise with the Cleveland Teachers Union under which an admissions tax on Rock and Roll Hall of Fame visitors was paid to the Cleveland Municipal School District.

Rokakis was elected county treasurer in 1996, after the county lost more than $114 million in an investment pool run by his predecessor. He created the Housing Enhancement Loan Program (HELP), a linked-deposit program offering home-improvement loans below commercial rates, which provided more than $200 million in loans in its first 25 years; the county ended the program in 2026. He also won passage of a 1999 state law allowing counties to sell property tax liens, a tool later used by 50 Ohio counties.

Rokakis was an early critic of subprime lending. In 2006 he convened federal banking officials at Cleveland State University, and in 2007 he wrote an op-ed titled "The Shadow of Debt" for The Washington Post. He also created a foreclosure-prevention program in the treasurer's office that other Ohio counties later adopted. As Cleveland became an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis, he was widely interviewed by national and international media, and he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007 and 2010 that private mortgage foreclosures in Cuyahoga County had risen from 3,500 in 1995 to more than 13,000 in 2006. He has said his commitment was personal: the house he grew up in was later foreclosed on.

With former Cleveland city councilman Gus Frangos (1954–2024), Rokakis developed HB 353, sponsored by state representative Matt Dolan and state senator Tom Patton and passed in 2008, which allowed Cuyahoga County to create a land bank to acquire abandoned and foreclosed properties, clear their titles, and hold them for redevelopment. Later amendments extended eligibility to every Ohio county; by 2025, 72 counties operated land banks. Rokakis was the Cuyahoga County Land Bank's first chairman, and he and Frangos helped establish the Ohio Land Bank Association in 2018.

A 2009 county charter reform, adopted after a federal corruption investigation of other county officials, eliminated the elected treasurer's office. Rokakis left office in 2011 and joined the Western Reserve Land Conservancy to lead its expansion into urban areas. With Robin Darden Thomas (1954–2020), he helped organize land banks across Ohio. CBS News's 60 Minutes profiled his work in December 2011.

In 2012 Rokakis persuaded Ohio attorney general Mike DeWine to commit $75 million to the Moving Ohio Forward demolition program. In 2013, drawing on Conservancy research linking mortgage delinquency to property abandonment, he persuaded the U.S. Treasury Department to allow Hardest Hit Fund money to be used for demolition, which ultimately directed more than $2 billion nationally to removing vacant homes. He and Frangos co-wrote The Land Bank Revolution: How Ohio's Communities Fought Back Against the Foreclosure Crisis (2020).

Rokakis retired from the Conservancy at the end of 2020 and remained active with the Ohio Land Bank Association for four more years. Since 2024, he has worked to bring modular home construction to Cleveland's vacant lots; in June 2026 the city announced that Louisville-based builder MMY would open a factory on Central Avenue.

Honors and awards

Rokakis was named County Leader of the Year by American City and County in 2007 and received a NeighborWorks America Local Government Service Award the same year. The Cleveland Foundation gave him its Homer C. Wadsworth Award in 2016.