Cleveland is the city Rob Peace identifies as the starting point for Peace Realty, a prospective escape from the weak returns and exhausting difficulties of investing in Newark and the Oranges. It represents more than a market: Rob sees in its surrounding working-class communities a version of the stable, manufacturing-driven Newark that existed before his time, and he tries to convert that historical analogy into a practical business opportunity.

A Market Beyond Newark

Rob turns toward Cleveland after managing the Greenwood Avenue property convinces him that real estate in his home area is too labor-intensive and financially narrow. He had renovated the house, lived with Jackie Peace on Chapman Street, and rented all three Greenwood units, producing about $1,000 a month, although repairs repeatedly reduced the return. His experience made the problems tangible: tenants struggled to provide security deposits, rent collection was difficult, lenders were suspicious or crooked, and property values were high enough to limit profit while remaining low enough to demand substantial work. Jackie Peace had warned him that buying in the neighborhood where he grew up was a bad idea, and his own experience gradually confirmed her judgment.

Cleveland offered a different calculation. Several of Rob’s aunts and uncles lived in and around the city, and he had visited often enough to study its neighborhoods directly. He found modest houses on decent plots in diverse working-class communities, many situated in exurban areas where home values could fall into the mid-five figures. The local economy, as he understood it, was supported by historically stable manufacturing companies, while the prospective residents tended to have stable jobs and families. For Rob, that combination suggested a manageable relationship between purchase price, renovation, and rental demand.

Prospecting for Peace Realty

Rob began making weekend trips to Cleveland and its surrounding communities, researching property titles in records offices, cultivating contacts in the lending community, and inspecting houses in person. He was not treating the city as an abstract investment map. The work required him to move through institutions, neighborhoods, and professional networks, testing whether the place could support the business he imagined. Cleveland became the location in which Peace Realty might gain a workable foothold rather than remain an idea attached to the Greenwood property.

His plan depended on finding houses that needed improvement without requiring renovations so expensive that they would erase the margin. He imagined buying undervalued properties, repairing them, locating suitable homeowners, and making $20,000 or $30,000 in cash on a successful transaction. Cleveland appeared promising because its lower purchase prices made the arithmetic more plausible than in Newark, but the opportunity also exposed the limits of Rob’s ambition: research and travel had consumed money, while nine months after he conceived the career change he had not yet completed a deal.

The Airport as Cleveland’s Access Route

Rob’s job with Continental Airlines made Cleveland practically accessible. Nathan, Rob’s cousin, worked in the control tower at Newark International Airport and helped him obtain the baggage position. Continental employees could fly standby for free after logging a monthly quota of 160 hours, while buddy passes allowed selected friends and relatives to travel at cost. Rob no longer had to wait for holidays or spend heavily on flights to Cleveland and other prospecting locations.

He adapted the airport’s labor system to the requirements of his property search. Weeknight shifts were easier because runway traffic was lighter and the air cooler, and he traded nights, days, and weekends as though arranging another form of exchange. By front-loading his monthly schedule with double and triple shifts, he cleared stretches of time for travel. The job was physically demanding, but he worked with a quiet, nearly anonymous efficiency: he moved bags quickly without wasting stamina, rarely spoke during shifts, read alone during breaks, and remained calm while dispatchers shouted instructions. Cleveland therefore depended on a paradoxical arrangement in which exhausting manual labor financed and physically enabled a hoped-for transition into real estate.

By the end of his first summer with Continental, Rob had narrowed his search to three target neighborhoods in Cleveland and two in south Florida. He estimated that a $10,000 down payment would produce a mortgage of roughly $400 a month. Four properties would therefore require about $1,600 monthly, only marginally more than the income generated by Greenwood Avenue. The figures looked possible only if the houses were sound enough to avoid ruinous repairs; Rob specifically worried about having to replace boilers, a detail that condensed the practical risk behind his larger vision.

Cleveland in Rob’s Larger Network

Cleveland was connected to Rob’s wider life through family, travel, and aspiration. He had relatives in the area, and he spoke of wanting to visit aunts, uncles, and cousins in Ohio as well as Florida and Georgia. The city thus belonged to the same expanding geography through which he imagined remaking himself: Rio de Janeiro as a second community, South Korea as a possible destination, Croatia through Hrvoje Dundovic’s memories, and Cleveland as a possible business base. These places were not interchangeable, but together they expressed his desire to build a life that exceeded the boundaries of East Orange and Newark.

The city also carried an implicit contrast with the criminal economy that continued to surround him. Rob remained tied to friends and associates from St. Benedict’s, East Orange, Newark, and his various dealing networks. He provided money, transportation, rent assistance, and other practical help, while those relationships supplied loyalty and immediate support. Cleveland represented a legal and property-based future in which the same drive to earn and provide might be redirected into ownership, shelter, and family security. Yet the transition was never complete. Even while pursuing real estate, Rob continued to move through networks shaped by marijuana distribution, and the capital for his plans remained entangled with unlawful income.

Symbolic and Practical Significance

Cleveland’s importance lies in the way Rob reads it as both opportunity and historical mirror. Its working-class neighborhoods, modest houses, and manufacturing economy recall the Newark that had once offered stable livelihoods before deindustrialization and urban decline. By investing there, Rob hoped to recover an economic structure he believed had disappeared at home and to turn that recovery into personal mobility.

The plan also reveals the tension between Rob’s idealized economic language and the unstable conditions under which he operated. He imagined real estate as a fundamentally honest business that could provide shelter, heat, security, and family stability. Cleveland gave that ideal a concrete setting, but it did not remove the obstacles: travel was expensive, lenders were difficult, renovations were uncertain, and he needed airport wages to sustain the search. The city therefore remains in the narrative as a projected destination rather than a completed transformation—a place where Rob’s intelligence, labor, family connections, and appetite for risk briefly seemed capable of converging into a different future.