Hough burned in 1966. That is the fact that every history of this neighborhood begins with, and the fact that the neighborhood has spent a century and a half trying to transcend. The riots — sparked by racial segregation, police brutality, and the concentrated poverty that American cities engineered with surgical precision — destroyed four square blocks and killed four people. The rebuilding never really happened. Decades of disinvestment followed, the same pattern repeated across Black neighborhoods in every American city: capital withdrawn, services reduced, population blamed for the conditions capital created.

By 2140, when the corridor was taking shape and corponations were claiming sovereign territory across the Great Lakes region, Hough was among the neighborhoods that nobody claimed. Too poor, too depopulated, too much liability. What happened next was not planned by any corponation or government. The remaining residents — predominantly Black families who had held their homes through every wave of abandonment — began the Reclamation. Using salvaged materials, cooperative labor, and technology acquired through the excluded economy, they rebuilt the neighborhood on their own terms. Vertical farms in converted apartment buildings. Solar arrays on every rooftop. A mesh communication network that operates independently of Saltmarsh's signal grid. A community governance model based on block councils that traces its organizational DNA back to the mutual aid societies that sustained Black communities through Jim Crow.

Hough Reclamation is now the most self-sufficient neighborhood in the Cleveland sprawl. It generates 80% of its own power, grows 60% of its own food, and maintains its own communications infrastructure. It is also, by every corporate metric, one of the poorest — because the metrics don't measure what Hough has built. The corponations have taken notice. Tollgate has offered infrastructure integration three times. Tessera has proposed a 'community cognitive wellness partnership.' Each offer has been declined by the block councils with the same response: 'We remember what your help looks like.' The phrase has become a neighborhood motto, painted on walls and printed on the mesh network's welcome screen.