Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
Cleveland: What’s Wrong?
Along with Detroit, Cleveland is the poster child for major Midwestern urban decline and a favorite punching bag for the national and international media. But Detroit’s travails are easy to understand. Anyone can look at and attribute them to the auto industry and poor race relations. The reality is more complex, but at least Detroit lends itself to a narrative. Cleveland is a different story. What happened in Cleveland to cause this? Even I cannot come up with a “grand unified theory” of Cleveland, which those of you who read this blog know is very unusual.
I was drawn to start thinking about Cleveland by this “tourism video”:
It’s humorous but also curious. Why would someone, presumably a local, create something like this?
That got me to wondering about Cleveland. I’ve actually never been to Cleveland. That in itself is notable. Out of the 11 Midwestern cities I typically cover in this blog, I’ve been to all but two, and most of them many times. (Kansas City is the other, but it’s a bit out of the way and arguably as much Great Plains as Midwest). Business never took me to Cleveland, another data point. And despite my desire to spend a weekend at least in all these places, Cleveland just never made the cut.
I also haven’t written much about it. I scan the news in every Midwestern metro daily but seldom find much that would cause me to write a major post about Cleveland. While not writing about it certainly plays a role, I get less web traffic from Cleveland than any other of my Midwest cities. I get more hits from New York, LA, SF, Boston, and DC than from Cleveland. It might be the only city in the Midwest where I don’t know of a web site that has linked to me.
It doesn’t appear to just be me either. Jim Russell over at Return to Pittsburgh says, “A better definition of Cleveland is a cul-de-sac of globalization”. He excoriates their lack of regional thinking. He also reminds us that Richard Longworth, author of the seminal work on the challenge of globalization in the Midwest, “Caught in the Middle“, found Cleveland an odd place indeed. Per Longworth:
“In all my travels through the Midwest, Cleveland was the only place, big or small, that seemed heedless of the global challenge. Only 4 percent of its population is foreign-born, in an era that demands new blood; the city government isn’t sure it wants more. One of its leading economists told me, ‘You can’t kill manufacturing–that’s stupid,’ but manufacturing is fleeing and cities need new ways to support themselves.”
Cleveland’s economic development establishment comes in for criticism not just from bloggers like Russell and journalists like Longworth, but from economic development professionals like native Ed Morrison:
“Most of the people doing regional economic development in this town don’t really know what they’re doing. It’s not really that surprising that the region has launched some remarkably unproductive efforts.”
That’s pretty stunning coming from a guy who lives there. I don’t know Morrison, but he works for Purdue University and commutes from Cleveland, where he also founded an open source economic development organization called I-Open that appears to be one of the few things keeping Cleveland’s economy in business. I’m alert for such things, but I don’t think I’ve heard Morrison criticize Indiana’s economic development, or anyone else’s, like that. He actually sounds a bit like a woman scorned, so I’m sure there’s a story in there someplace, but it’s pretty telling nevertheless.
Neither Morrison nor Russell care much for the site selection consultant tours Cleveland has been doing. You can see coverage of them here and here. Russell hits us with an interesting excerpt from the Plain Dealer:
“To distinguish its red-carpet tours, Team NEO crafts attention-grabbing invitations. For the tour during the Rock Hall’s induction weekend, invitees received small guitar cases with invitations tucked inside.“‘We are competing for these jobs against Indianapolis, Detroit, Pittsburgh,’ said Team NEO’s Carin Rockind, vice president of marketing and communications. ‘We have to break through.’”
I realize gimmicks are par for the course, but does this person really think anyone is going to pick Cleveland over those other cities because of the quality of their swag? Detroit? Michigan is economic kryptonite these days, so that’s no problem. Pittsburgh is a much tougher competitor for jobs these days than a lot of people give them credit for but is still a rather slow growth place dependent on “eds and meds”. Those are easy cities to measure yourself against. But let’s look at Indianapolis and do a quick comparison of the two cities.
| Attribute | Cleveland | Indianapolis |
| Population Growth Last Year | (0.3%), 51 out of 52 large US metros, 10 out of 11 large Midwest | 1.3%, 40% higher than national avg, 19th in US large metro, #1 in Midwest large |
| Migration | Negative (net out-migration) | Positive (net in-migration) |
| GDP Growth 2001-2006 | 21% | 26% |
| Unemployment Rate | 9.4% | 8.2% |
This is just a sample, but will give you a feel. On any relevant measure, Indianapolis beats Cleveland. Most notably, Cleveland’s population is shrinking meaning that the labor force situation is deteriorating over time.
Like almost all other cities, Cleveland is chasing dreams of life sciences, high tech, and green industry. That’s totally undifferentiated, though there is no denying that the Cleveland Clinic is one of the absolute best in the entire world, so anyone in a health care related company that could leverage the Cleveland Clinic connection would have to take a serious look at Cleveland. But beyond that, I couldn’t find much else, nor any indication that there is any strategic depth to the thinking in these spaces, and I spent a lot of time looking. Grass roots organizations like I-Open and E4S seem to be thriving, but it looks like they are just filling the vacuum left by the establishment.
Indianapolis, like most places, also has the same list of industries, but to that you can add things like motorsports and the sports events industry. Also, where that city is shooting for the target sector du jour, it has, in some areas, really taken a look at where it can win and tried to be focused on its target. For example, in the green industry segment, the Energy Systems Network is looking at some very focused areas, with a largely private sector funding model. Interestingly, Ed Morrison helped develop this. In the high tech space, it isn’t just scattershot here and there, but there’s a mini-cluster in internet marketing companies that is one of the nation’s biggest, with over 1,000 employees. The era of the large, megalithic corporation as the engine of growth is coming to a close. Tomorrow’s economy will be powered by clusters of smaller, densely networked firms that in aggregate will add up to what a traditional HQ used to bring. The motorsports and internet marketing clusters are right on point with this.
Plus there are plenty of other emerging sectors. I talked previously about how proximity to Chicago creates unique opportunities for Indy (and Milwaukee). And how the central Indiana region was primed to be a center for BPO. KMPG recently named Indianapolis one of only two US cities as hot spots for BPO (Boise was the other). In fact, the Indianapolis region has some of the most favorable geography of any city for BPO with the region-leading but still low cost downtown in the middle and a ring of ultra low cost small cities ringing it within easy commute distance.
Indianapolis has its problems to be sure. It is no Sunbelt boomtown by a long shot. But it runs rings around Cleveland, as do other Midwest growth champs like Columbus, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. Having Cleveland compete against any of these cities in most spaces isn’t even a fair fight. It would be interesting to see a study done on average incentives paid for site selections and what the averages are per city. I’d speculate that if Cleveland didn’t have some unique tie in like the Cleveland Clinic, it has to pay much more to win. That is, it has to buy the business.
This must put the state of Ohio in a bind since given an open playing field, most businesses are going to choose already thriving Columbus over Cleveland. But tilting incentives towards Cleveland to compensate would fracture the fragile balance in a state with 7-8 decent sized cities, including three major metros over one million in population. It’s a tough balancing act.
Now obviously the TeamNEO guys aren’t going to flagellate themselves in the media. That would only be material for other cities to use against them. They’ve got to do their best to sell the city and maximize what they can out of its assets such as my favorite, the Cleveland Orchestra (one of the absolute best in the entire world – I love some of their old recordings), the Rock N Roll Museum, the Cleveland Clinic, Lake Erie, and the transit systems they have. (I salute Cleveland for its transit, and especially the new Health Line BRT). But it makes me wonder if they believe their own press.
As I’ve noted of many Midwest cities, there is a legitimate marketing problem out there with vanilla and negative brand images in the marketplace. But it’s not just a marketing problem, it’s a product problem. If Midwest cities want to make themselves attractive to the labor force of tomorrow and new economy businesses, they need to change their aspirational value proposition and start changing the product to match it. I don’t see that happening in Cleveland, except in pockets.
Back at the beginning of the decade the Cleveland Plain Dealer did a fantastic series called “The Quiet Crisis“. You should definitely look at this, but be careful, because it can suck you in and take up tons of time. I spent a few days looking through all these articles. What strikes me is that all of the problems in Cleveland were well known a decade ago, but what has really happened in response? It’s eight years on and the answer is Not Much. To a great extent, it just didn’t seem to resonate locally. I recall again how Longworth recounted the editor of the paper telling him how the sections on globalization and immigration “landed with a thud” and that Cleveland seemed content to sit “sour and crumbling” on the lake.
Again, what is it? What happened here? Lots of large Midwestern cities got walloped by the Rust Belt era and globalization, but few came through as bad as Cleveland and Detroit. Again, the auto industry provides a narrative lens through which to process Detroit. But in Cleveland I’m having trouble grasping it. Was it steel dependency? If so, why did Pittsburgh walk through the valley of the shadow of death and come through it still standing? They aren’t a thriving city by any means, but seem to have bottomed out and even hit the inflection point in a few eras. Pittsburgh is even being touted recently as a role model for Detroit, though I don’t know if I would go that far personally.
There has to be some sort of historical dynamic going on that I’m not aware of. The only angle that makes any sense at all to me is that something poisoned intra-region relations long ago and that carries through to today. Cleveland to me exhibits some of the worst regional cooperation I’ve ever seen, with tons of in-fighting. Jim Russell rails on them for not including Youngstown in Northeast Ohio. But that’s small potatoes. I remember last year when a suburban community called Avon wanted to build an interstate interchange. A developer was even going to pay the cost. But since it was on an interstate highway, it had to be put into the regional transportation plan from the MPO, and since the MPO was controlled by Cuyahoga County, they vetoed it until Avon agreed to a tax sharing deal. In effect, Cleveland is trying to solve its problems by extorting money from its own suburbs at gunpoint. This is terrible. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere. Whatever one’s opinion of sprawl or regional taxes, this is not the right way to do it.
Cleveland seems to have forgotten that a great city needs great suburbs. We have to bring the city up, not pull the suburbs down. In a region of the country that is too often struggling, every part of a metro area has to bring their A game, and there needs to be a recognition that a rising tide lifts all boats.
Beyond that, Russell’s calling Cleveland a “cul-de-sac” struck a chord. Cleveland just seems curiously disconnected from the rest of Ohio, from the rest of the Midwest, and from what is going on out in the world. Normally if I post an article about a city, it gets forwarded around in that city and I get lots of hits from there. We’ll see if anyone in Cleveland even notices this. In fact, I’ve got to confess, I’m running a bit of an experiment with this one. Will anyone in Cleveland notice? I’ll post a comment in a few days to let you know how it turned out.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear any thoughts you have that explain the Cleveland situation since I will admit to being at a bit of a loss. For more input, Ed Morrison gives his take over at New Geography in a two part series called Cleveland: How the Comeback Collapsed (part one and part two). I should clarify something here. Ed Morrison, Jim Russell, and I all post stuff at New Geography, but we have no financial or other relationship because of that. I know Jim via email through blogging, but I don’t know Ed from Adam, though I read his stuff.
Your take?
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I am also a Clevelander. I moved here in 2005, so my experience is somewhat limited compared to Jeffrey. However, I’m an active networker and have met a lot of natives and non-natives alike, including a former member of Mayor Jackson’s staff. I can second Jeffrey’s observation on why people move to Cleveland. No one is really excited about moving here, and that is both a symptom and the disease. The problems I see are as follows
1) Bad administrative decisions/priorities
The decision to build a convention center/med mart seems ludicrous when we have a decaying downtown, increasing unemployment, and decrepit suburbs. There are many things that could be done to clean up Cleveland and make it a more exciting place to live before building a new convention center.
Also, Cleveland doesn’t put much emphasis on its technology base. As a software developer I meet a lot of talented technologists every day. I know many people who would love to start their own company if it was a little more feasible. We also have one of the fastest internet lines in the world running through our city. Unfortunately, our mayor seems intent on embracing technology: he turned down a huge deal for Apple to build a multimedia center downtown and help high school students learn the latest and greatest. A friend owns a software company downtown and he’s struggling to keep his location because the city wants to use it for something else in 10-20 years. His office is used to host a large number of the networking events I attend. He is very active in building up the tech community here.
3) Apathetic citizens
The other major problem I’ve noticed here is that people aren’t excited about moving or living here. No one really goes downtown except to sporting events or performing arts events. There are so many ways we could improve our downtown area to make people want to stay there for the day. Revitalizing the immediate suburbs would be a huge help as well. I work in Ohio City, just across the bridge from downtown. I love the area, but the neighborhoods just don’t feel safe, so I don’t live there.
On the positive, the parks system is really great. Most of the entertainment here isn’t extremely expensive; in fact, cost of living as a whole is something we could advertise as a reason to move here. It’s obvious to me that Cleveland has a rich history (even though I don’t know it) and a lot of historical neighborhoods.
Those are my thoughts. I’m not an expert in any of these areas, but I’ve observed a lot in my short time here. Obviously, I’m also more than a little biased towards technology as a great economic advantage. Cleveland is a good town, but it needs to embrace the future in order to become great.
“Obviously, I’m also more than a little biased towards technology as a great economic advantage. Cleveland is a good town, but it needs to embrace the future in order to become great.”
If “embrace the future”, you mean embrace the potential of technology, why talk about it being the future? It’s the here and now. Too many communities, especially urban centers, still see technology as an add-on when anyone can see that it’s fully integrated into most peoples lives, even seniors and low-income residents (whether they want it or not). As an individual, you are the future, but your field is as everyday as anything else going on in the city.
Discussions like the one on this board really set me off. Asking what is wrong with Cleveland implies our metro area could be like some other areas if we made better decisions, or where fundamentally better people. It implies all you people who moved to “better” places a year or two ago are responsible for the decades old trends you’re riding. I lived in NYC for four years, the Bay Area for two, and Chicago for five. Was I a better policy maker when I lived there?
There are hundreds of thousands of hardworking, educated people doing important productive work in Cleveland. On a number of measures, quality of life is great here. The parks and access to outdoor recreation are very good. The public buildings and housing stock are full of artistry and craftsmanship. There are more interesting independent restaurants than you could eat through in a decade. On any weekend, I can go to hear live music at a dozen different venues. I can go to a hundred different bars and meet friendly, interesting people.
It is absolutely pointless to compare Cleveland to any state capital, college town, or regional hub like Chicago or New York. State capitals create economic growth and jobs through taxation. Places like Cleveland have to develop and market products and services, replace outmoded industries, and keep up with foreign competition, while paying those taxes. Appropriate comparisons would be Pittsburgh, Buffalo, St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Philadelphia, and perhaps a few others.
All comparison of cities has to be in the context of the stratified modern economy. People with a college degree or a skilled trade can have a decent income and quality of life anywhere in this country. There are perhaps 60 million American adults who have neither, and they only participate in the economy on the margins. The most widely used measure of the success of a region is its ratio of college graduates to everyone else. The main thing that determines this is the *denominator* that you started with when we transitioned to a post-industrial economy.
State capitals and college town never had masses of unskilled workers. All they had to do was hire (with taxes and subsidies) a relatively small number of college graduates, and they appear brilliant. Businesses bring in amenities because of the stable economy, more graduates come for the comfortable life, and you’re on an upward trend.
Cleveland still has hundreds of thousands of people working in manufacturing and related industries. We also have 200-300K people with no education or skills. This is our denominator. How are we supposed to change that? Close the factories, and put those people on a train and ship them out?
Education? No one knows how to educate children raised in a ghetto culture! If you know, or someone knows, please give me an example! Chicago? 508K native-born high school drop-outs. Atlanta? 315K native-born dropouts. Washington DC? 197K. Minneapolis? 112K. Raleigh? 81K (2006 ACS). No one knows how to create middle class jobs for uneducated people. Beyond the jobs in cleaning, food service, and retail that are created by high income residents, no one is creating mass employment for the unskilled in any developed country.
Because we have inherited our neighbors, everything we try to build here is in the context they create. They elect the council and mayor in the city and the county officials. If you want to do business here, you have to support their infrastructure. You build a $10 million town home development and they move in next door with a section 8 voucher. You try to open some nice retail, and they loiter and scare the customers away. In Chicago, the middle class people (mostly from Michigan, Iowa, Ohio, etc.) are numerous enough to crowd and price the low income people out of neighborhood after neighborhood. Here, the numbers work against us.
Still we are trying. We are building new housing in the city and rehabbing neighborhoods. There are groups trying to reform the county and city government. There are people trying to get start-ups off the ground. We are trying to build on our health care and design industries. We do need more regional co-operation.
I welcome constructive ideas, but please lay off the uninformed comparisons. People in other cities take way too much credit for their success. You either got lucky with where you were born, or you participated in a regional form of middle-class flight. These aren’t things Cleveland can emulate.
Anon: 10: 30
Totally agree, particularly with:
“It is absolutely pointless to compare Cleveland to any state capital, college town, or regional hub like Chicago or New York. State capitals create economic growth and jobs through taxation. Places like Cleveland have to develop and market products and services, replace outmoded industries, and keep up with foreign competition, while paying those taxes. Appropriate comparisons would be Pittsburgh, Buffalo, St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Philadelphia, and perhaps a few others.”
The idea that industrial cities can’t upgrade the educational attainment of their communities is factually just wrong. In Oakland California, 13% of the population went to grad school and 21.8% have a bachelors degree.
People have figured out how to educate people who grew up in the ghetto. Look at the success of the Kipp Schools or the American Indian Public Charter School. Both take improvished minority students and provide them with an outstanding education, they are doing this with poor minority students in Oakland and in the case of KIPP they are having success nationwide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/23/BAGPH8CQRC1.DTL
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/bc0313cs.html
I think success for regions is contingent less on elaborate corporate recruitment programs than on basic performance levels of governance. How well can a region provide affordible housing to its population (something the midwest excells compared to California) and how well it can educate its population.
One of the strengths of Cleveland is relatively cheap housing.
One of the strengths of California is very cheap community colleges in state tuition is $11 a unit. In state fees in the California State University system are $1524 for full time students.
What this means is that people who are interested in improving themselves face less barriers to actually doing so in California than Ohio.
Not everyone in the ghetto is going to grad school, but if Cleveland increased its pool of people with bachelor degrees from 14.8% to 24.8% of the population, and the number of people with grad degrees from 8.5% to 10.5% the economic prospects for the region would change dramatically.
How many more educated people would Cleveland have if tuition at the local community college was free and if tuition at local branch of the Ohio State University was $11 a unit?
Before you are argue the cost is too high, look at the cost in terms of people recieving state assistance and in terms of forgone income taxes because the population isn’t better educated.
Since the area is having problem attracting people from outside the area, it needs to do a better job of improving the lot of the people living in the region right now.
This idea that the region has to write off whole sectors of its population just isn’t true and its holding the region back.
Ed in Sac
Ed,
Oakland has graduates and post graduates who have been priced out of San Fran. They are not home grown. The exception might be some Asian immigrants. Their culture is supportive of education, not hostile to it.
*Every* inner city school district has some good schools that take kids from terrible circumstances and get them into college. But *no* inner city district has scaled this up to get a high school graduation rate above 80% for disadvantaged minorities.
Cleveland is doing a lot with charter schools. Maybe we’ll be the first.
We are also talking about people on different margins. 60% of high school graduates go on to college (which is the number nationally), and about 30% finish. How many people who just barely finish high school will do better in college than that 30% of the cohorts that currently drops out? College or community college tuition of $0 is useless to a high school dropout.
Two things strike me about most of the comments …
First, most don’t really address the reason for the region being in a slump, which seems to be typical for this region … Let’s just play the word game and not really address anything.
Second, those who do make suggestions generally suggest the same old, same old. The old paradigms no longer work, we need brand new, never thought of ideas, ones that turn everything upside down and address the issues from totally different angles. This is not something we do at all in Cleveland.
Frank A. Mills
Urban Paradoxes
Cleveland, OH
It reminds me a bit of the Louisville/Cincy thing where the first thing people ask you is “Where did you go to high school?”I can’t really imagine adults asking each other where they went to high school unless the answer they are expecting is the name of the country, or in the special case of having to gotten to know each other and realized that they might have actually gone to the same one.
But as they say, anecdote isn’t data. I don’t think Milwaukee is really a cosmopolitan land famous for all the highly educated immigrants, but I work in academia and stand out as a local, having grown up in nearby Illinois.
For whatever it’s worth, growing up in the Chicago suburbs, living now in Milwaukee, Cleveland hardly even has an image in my mind, at any rate no more negative than any other random midwestern city.
Thanks again for all the comments. This post has official set a record. My previous top comment garnering post had 57 comments.
Michael Pereckas, you might be skeptical on the high school point, but believe me, it’s true. Check out this post on cincinnati imports.
Frank A. Mills, I agree I haven’t heard a lot around solutions, but to be fair, the posting was about problems. It’s hard to suggest doing things when you don’t know what you are trying to overcome. I agree that not just Cleveland but many Midwest cities need significant change. However, not all of the “blocking and tackling” basics are bad. You need a mix of both.
Philadelphia’s metro population is increasing – very slowly, but it’s increasing. Its downtown, Center City, is also rapidly revitalizing, and increasing in population. Overall, 21.8% of the city’s adult population has a college degree. Cleveland doesn’t even have that.
On another note, reducing college tuition does not do much for high school dropouts, but not all people without degrees are high school dropouts. A lot are older adults who would like to come back to school to break the poverty and welfare dependency cycles.
Michael Pereckas:
“It reminds me a bit of the Louisville/Cincy thing where the first thing people ask you is “Where did you go to high school?”
I know this does exist in both Cinci and Louisville. Is this true elsewhere?
By the way, this question is only asked when the other person is known/discovered to be from Cinci or Louisville
Okay, now that I’ve found easy to access data about college degree rates, here are the numbers for Rust Belt cities, as of 2007:
Pittsburgh 32%
Cincinnati 29.8%
St. Louis 24.9%
Buffalo 22.1%
Rochester 21.6%
Philadelphia 21.1%
Milwaukee 19.7%
Cleveland 13%
Detroit 11.8%
If you include cities that aren’t really Rust Belt, like Minneapolis (42%) and Chicago (29.6%), Cleveland looks even worse.
Indianapolis was omitted from the above. Using the same Census ACS data, 20% of adults over 25 in the Indianapolis MSA have an undergraduate degree, and 10% a graduate degree, for a total of 30% with at least an undergrad degree. That would put Indy near the top of the Rust Belt if the comparison was for MSA and not city proper.
Anon 10:30 and 1:05: Indianapolis (and all of Indiana) have long been dependent upon manufacturing, just like our neighboring states. Jobs here (and job growth) have not come from taxation. They’ve come in health care (Eli Lilly, Wellpoint, several major medical centers) and education (IUPUI, Ivy Tech, Butler, public and private grade schools).
Most of those enterprises require degree attainment. The about-to-close GM, Ford, and Harvester plants, and now-closed Chrysler and Western Electric and RCA Records plants did not.
At least in THIS state capital, job growth came from growth in companies already here and from attracting new ones to replace the industrial dinosaurs. Manufacturing jobs were replaced with others, but not with jobs in state government.
Why hasn’t Cleveland done better with a much bigger handful of civic and “beachfront” assets?
A lot of these cities are highly suburbanized, so you also have to look at the metro area numbers.
Philadelphia 31.3
Milwaukee 30.4
Rochester 30.3
Cincinnati 28.2
St. Louis 28.1
Buffalo 27.3
Cleveland 26.8
Pittsburgh 26.7
Detroit 26.4
Cleveland has some nicer inner ring suburbs where more graduates live. Of course, young people would rather be in a city, even if the suburbs are as dense and historic as nice parts of other cities.
With these education level, like anything, were do you intervene in the cycle? Our private schools and suburban schools are as good as any in the country. We send tons of people off to college, where many do fine. But once they’ve seen the gentrified neighborhoods in Chicago or New York, or the prestine neighborhoods in Denver and the twin cities, how do you convince them to come back and battle the blight here? How do you convince people from outside the region to rent or buy in our “transitional” neighborhoods?
We send tons of people off to college, where many do fine. But once they’ve seen the gentrified neighborhoods in Chicago or New York, or the prestine neighborhoods in Denver and the twin cities, how do you convince them to come back and battle the blight here? How do you convince people from outside the region to rent or buy in our “transitional” neighborhoods?
anon 9:20, you do it a couple of ways:
Firstly, you forget about retention, which is a bad strategy. Chicago didn’t get to be great by keeping its home growth talent. It got to be great by taking your home grown talent. Cleveland has to target being a place people will desire to live in its own right, not just because they grew up there.
Secondly, you don’t try to compete with Chicago head on. You can’t create neighborhoods like the ones in Chicago, so why try? Taking on an entrenched competitor at its strongest point is a recipe for failure. Don’t try to beat Chicago at their game, make them beat you at yours. What’s Cleveland’s game? What unique value proposition can Cleveland create for itself? This is the question that needs to be answered.
For those of you reading through these comments who have not lived in Cleveland, you should pay particular attention to the pro-Cleveland messages. Notice how often the following “amenities” are repeated as evidence that the city is a wonderful place:
* The Rock Hall
* The Cleveland Orchestra
* The Theater District
* Cleveland Clinic
* NASA Glenn
You have to realize that these are the same amenities that are repeated again and again in every booster publication for the past ten years. Sure, they’re good amenities, but if you examine them in more detail you realize that they don’t make as much of an impact on one’s daily life:
* The Rock Hall: It’s cool, but you go there once and you’re done. It’s like the Statue of Liberty in NYC–New Yorkers take their out-of-town guests there, but that’s it. It’s not like you go there once a week because Jimi Hendrix’s guitar is shinier now.
* The Cleveland Orchestra – Sure, they’re fantastic. My good buddy subs for them sometimes. But guess what? They’re also expensive. This is not the sort of thing that you just casually go to. It’s a special occasion amenity–perhaps once or twice a year.
* Theater district–see Cleveland Orchestra.
* Cleveland Clinic–this is the one amenity that arguably holds up. It’s a huge institution that employs around 30K people and is an international leader in medical services. Definitely an asset (unless of course you don’t actually work in the medical field).
* NASA Glenn–ok, it’s pretty cool. But it’s not actually that big. I mean, it’s just a research center. It’s not like some giant Kennedy Center complex that dominates the city.
So overall, here’s the lesson to keep in mind: the Cleveland booster like touting certain amenities, but you have to realize that they are describing the 1% of Cleveland that might be really cool. There’s still 99% left over, and when you’re driving down Chester and you see crumbling warehouses that haven’t been occupied for decades, you realize that maybe… just maybe… the city is a bit grimier than the boosters would have you believe.
The problem with noting the amenities in Cleveland or similar cities is that nobody is denying such great institutions, organizations etc. exist.
The issue is that despite such nice things – at the end of the day, the metro is not able to even moderately have enough net growth.
Again, if a region is not growing, it unfortunately shrinks.
Now, does every city need to have Sunbelt growth to be considered moving in a good direction or have a decent or even strong economy?
Of course not. As often noted, Indy and Columbus do quite fine.
The Twin Cities and Chicago do ok.
Cincy is doing ok.
All have problems as well, but it is unfortunate the most rustbelt of rustbelt cities – those that had serious industry have a lot of baggage.
There is no doubt at best a few more decades over perpetual decline.
It maybe moderate, but the dynamic needs to change, and there is no magic bullet.
Yes Cleveland has some wonderful institutions and it’s frustrating to see people flock to cities without the character and institutions of well established cities like Cleveland.
But the reality is jobs.
People migrate to opportunities despite amenities or the lack of them.
I know people that have moved to Portland OR, which doesn’t offer a rich sporting history (though is associated with outdoors)
People love it there and there are opportunities to be had.
If a landlocked city becomes known as a magnet for say, some bio, or tech related industries and creates momentum in such industries, then the migration trends will reverse.
In 1970, Seattle is not what it is today.
Sure it’s easy to credit Bill Gates, it even then it didn’t happen over night.
Most here are probably familiar with the famous billboard there about the last person leaving, turn off the lights.
Seattle was industrial too.
It’s about making the right investments and nurturing and supporting what will create jobs.
Amenities are important too and some people will locate to Cleveland for the lake and arts.
Some may like the mountains of the Pacific Northwest or Florida winters, but many people will go where jobs are.
This is why I stated that growth happens despite other pluses (arts, sports, recreation) or minuses (traffic, cost of living, poor race relations).
Everything plays into it, but at the end of the day, a city needs to be able to create jobs.
-JoeP
Thundermutt: I didn’t include Indy in the table because state capitals might have different rules – for example, they naturally attract lawyers, policy experts, and lobbyists. I also excluded cities that recovered from Rust Belt conditions, like Chicago and Boston. Including these would only make Cleveland look worse.
Anon: you’re right that Cleveland’s suburbs are doing better than the city proper. The problem is that increasingly, a city needs to be centralized to succeed. There are exceptions, especially in Texas, but overall, there’s a strong correlation right now between low unemployment and centralization.
Thanks for the thoughtful post about Cleveland. And thanks to everyone who has posted.
First a preface … I see a lot of posts about Cleveland’s negative out-migration against other Midwestern cities’ in-migration. First, data suggests that most of that positive in-migration is actually the result of metros like Indy, Columbus and Louisville successively annexing their suburbs. When you look at the 1980 borders of the city, before agglomeration, populations tend to be stagnant or decreasing. Second, while I understand that growth is desirable and makes economic development and economic vitality in general easier, growth = success is a dangerous oversimplification. In cities like Fort Lauderdale and Las Vegas, “building for the boom” has put such regional economies in a very perilous position. As another poster mentioned, slow-growth cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, while definitely hurting from the housing crisis, are not currently facing nearly the same level of problems in construction and ancillary fields. High levels of growth have also led to quick sprawl and low-density development. In an age where energy concerns are mounting, Sun Belt meccas like Phoenix may end looking more like dinosaurs than cities like Cleveland in 2050. Meanwhile, this process of shrinkage is still occurring in most of the cities of the upper Midwest and East Coast. I would wager that few people would be pessimistic about the future of Boston or Chicago, despite those cities’ lackluster growth projections. For Cleveland, I think a more realistic approach is shrinking gracefully … continuing to diversify our regional economy, working to attract a more substantial national and international in-migration, investing heavily in higher education … but also pragmatically planning for how our city can be most successful if shrinkage continues as a trend.
Okay, I see four main problems facing the city. First, the exodus of population and jobs creates a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is very difficult to get people optimistic about the future of their city when there is such a dire daily reminder in the local media and the blog world that “Cleveland is failing”, “Cleveland is failing”.
Second, there is little churning of population. I think in any American city, and particularly in the Midwest, the majority of people who have lived in the area their entire life have this feeling that where they are from is “uncool”, that they are missing out on something. And the more people you have in a region who believe this, and the fewer you have coming into the region with fresh eyes, the more pervasive and more vocal this opinion becomes. Local wisdom suggests that “There are two kinds of people who hate Cleveland … those who’ve never been and those who never left”. That rings very true for me; most of my friends are either transplants who accidentally fell in love with the city or who moved back after trying out places like New York or San Fran for several years. And the number one reason I hear from people entertaining moving away is the pervasive negative attitude of those who never left.
Third, Clevelanders wrestle with an identity of being a national joke, often as a result of outdated stereotypes. For decades, our place in the national spotlight was little more than a punchline for Johnny Carson, and even today you see this kind of pervasive jeering in viral videos like the one you posted or Fiji Water’s ill-fated campaign “Because it’s not bottled in Cleveland” (subsequent water testing showed that Cleveland tap water was significantly “cleaner” than what comes in Fiji bottles … Fiji contained significantly higher levels of trace arsenic.). To a great degree, this pervasive national and local pessimism is like Cleveland has been repeatedly punched in the stomach and now walks permanently hunched over.
Fourth, Cleveland’s outmigration to the suburbs has been devastating, perhaps more than most American cities. Not only have the city’s tax bases sunk and its locational advantages of co-location decreased, but equally importantly, there is less and less identification with the central city. In the 1920s, people were heading to the inner ring, by the 1950s to the outer ring and now people are raising families in bordering counties. For many young people, their view of Cleveland and the quality of life there is less shaped by the city itself and more by their impression of an exurb sometimes 45 mins. away from the central core.
All that being said, I can’t think of a single place I would rather live. I moved there for graduate school (the Levin College … ranked 2nd in the country for urban policy) with every intent of heading to DC after, but along the way, I was infected with an unexpected love for Cleveland. I had never been there before school, had no family connections, but still found so much there to love. Right now I’m doing a fellowship in Berlin. During the year, I have had the opportunity to travel extensively throughout Europe, to places that many Americans dream of as ideal cities. I’ve seen Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland. And while all these places are great, Cleveland is my adopted home, and I can’t wait to get back.
So what’s to love? Until the fellowship, I lived in a completely renovated 3,000 sq. ft. Victorian with two other people. My share of the rent was $282.50. I was in the middle of the second largest Chinatown in the Midwest, an old industrial neighborhood, where artists are quietly converting old warehouses. The Wall Street Journal just ran a front-page story about the key role artists are playing in neighborhoods throughout the city. Meanwhile, in 2006, Cleveland passed a cigarette excise tax in support of arts and culture organizations and artists … among large U.S. cities, Cleveland now has one of the highest levels of per capita arts and culture funding nationwide. And a recently launched artist fellowship program is the largest such public program in the country.
I worked ten blocks away in yet another converted warehouse space. As an arts administrator, I was paid roughly what I would be in NYC but was able to afford twice as much of everything in life. The city is sandwiched between a Great Lake, an “Emerald Necklace” of public parks forming a ring on the outskirts and a national park to its south and bisected by the Cuyahoga River and a series of dramatic bridges. I was able to bike pretty much everywhere or hop on a train.
I got to explore Little Italy, Tremont, Detroit Shoreway, Shaker Square, University Circle, Ohio City, Edgewater … a ton of really distinct neighborhoods, dotted with tucked away galleries, kitschey shops, urban farms and community gardens. I got to eat from an amazing culinary scene. And counter to the prevailing wisdom of this thread, I was doing my work within the context of a global framework … the year before I left, we met two groups of craft artists from the Kyrgyz Republic, a group of Ethiopian educators and a delegation of social workers from Istanbul. I watched what a small group of people could do to improve their community by participating in Cleveland Colectivo, a giving circle that pumps money into grassroots projects. Similarly, I watched how the Great Lakes Urban Exchange is bringing together a critical mass of young professives throughout the Midwest to address common policy issues (Cleveland is one of the most active chapters, if not the most). Meanwhile, the Regional Learning Network is bringing together community development professionals from Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh, and the business community is increasingly recognizing the benefits of working with those cities to create a regional “Tech Belt”. And with a little digging, I saw how OneCommunity was revolutionizing government and nonprofits with IT and wireless access and what organizations like BioEnterprises were doing to spin off start-ups in biotech and medical manufacturing.
In the end, I enjoyed an amazing quality of life there and perhaps more than anything Cleveland has struck me as 1) a place where grassroots urban experimentation is not only pervasive but welcome, 2) a city that has a real story, not always good, but something epic, something big and 3) is perhaps has the strongest feeling of authenticity of anywhere I’ve ever been.
In a country where we for decades forgot what “urban” means, where Sun Belt cities are building up like giant suburbs without any “there” there and where cities like Indianapolis and Columbus strike me as nice but rather sanitized and vanilla, Cleveland just strikes me as, at the very least, truly urban. I don’t think the amenities of the city, or its slow economic transformation, are very obvious and certainly are not pre-packaged for the non-adventurous … you have to seek the charm out. But when you find it, it seems much deeper and richer than many places I have been.
I have no association with any of the local tourism organizations or relocation firms. I am not about to try to sell you the “package vacation”. But if you ever make it to Cleveland, I would be happy to give you the “full Cleveland” tour … the good, the bad and the ugly
In Migration is the result of annexing.
In Migration is from other counties outside of the the metro, whether it be the same state or somewhere else. But in migration is not the result of gaining people from taking more land.
“Similarly, I watched how the Great Lakes Urban Exchange is bringing together a critical mass of young professives throughout the Midwest to address common policy issues (Cleveland is one of the most active chapters, if not the most). Meanwhile, the Regional Learning Network is bringing together community development professionals from Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh, and the business community is increasingly recognizing the benefits of working with those cities to create a regional “Tech Belt”. And with a little digging, I saw how OneCommunity was revolutionizing government and nonprofits with IT and wireless access and what organizations like BioEnterprises were doing to spin off start-ups in biotech and medical manufacturing.”
Seth, the kind of inter-regional collaboration you describe is exactly why Carin’s comment on behalf of Team NEO about competing with Pittsburgh (as well as Detroit and Indianapolis) is both ignorant and destructive. Her words undermine Northeast Ohio and are at odds with the Tech Belt initiative, as well as the Regional Learning Network.
Coming from a Team NEO executive, this is highly distressing and demonstrates an insensitivity to other NEO communities such as Youngstown. It comes across as Team NEO and Cleveland Plus just serving Cleveland. This parochial mindset is rampant throughout the Midwest and is one of the major impediments to economic development.
There’s nothing “wrong” with Cleveland that isn’t wrong with many other aging urban areas. And as the previous posts have shown, Clevelanders have plenty to be proud of when it comes to the communities in which we live.
What’s “wrong” is that the local economic development bureaucracy has generally ranged from crooked to merely ineffectual for many, many years.
The Cleveland Chamber alone spends probably $30 million a year on an assortment of activities. The organization writes checks to a number of spin-off groups (like TeamNeo, BioEnterprise, JumpStart, The Cleveland+ Marketing Alliance) in the name of regionalism, but the VAST majority of its efforts are spent on local shenanigans.
The only discernible activity in which the Chamber seems to play a leading role is in lobbying the state and federal governments to obtain public funds to finance private development activity.
Cleveland is the highest-tax city in the highest-tax county (Cuyahoga) in one of the highest-tax states in America: an obvious impediment to development. However, the Chamber persuaded Cuyahoga County Commissioners to use an obscure loophole in Ohio law to RAISE the sales tax without a popular vote…for the purposes of building a controversial convention center, the funding for which has been rejected by the voters three times previously.
The Chamber is on the brink again of supporting a referendum to bring casino gambling to Ohio, despite five failures in the past ten years to persuade the voters to okay it.
And of course, County government is currently the focus of a wide-ranging Federal investigation into allegations of massive corruption…on the heels of a similar scandal enveloping the City of Cleveland during the kleptocracy which was the Administration of Mayor Mike White.
Of course, corruption is to be expected in government; one can argue that Chicago runs on corruption. But at least in Chicago you GET something for your corruption. In Cleveland, even the corruption doesn’t pay off.
All of this corrupt activity has been brazenly enabled by a small group of developers and corporate “fixers”…who just happen to be among the leadership of the Chamber.
The idea that Cleveland has mainly a P.R problem incredibly disingenuous. The economic development bureaucracy is lazy and insular, the government is incompetent and corrupt, and local institutions pay lip service to regional collaboration while ignoring issues related to educational attainment, workforce development, broad-based entrepreneurship, immigration, tax, health care and regulatory reform in favor of boondoggle projects which develop the economies of a small number of developers, bond counsel, investment bankers and contractors.
THIS is what’s “wrong” with Cleveland: its leaders aren’t leading. The afflictions of parochialism, rampant corruption, insularity, self-dealing, and arrogance infect both the area’s elected officials and the corporate leaders who happily enable corruption because it’s good for their business.
And in the face of all this dysfunction, a couple million spent on regionalism “happy talk” is just putting the proverbial lipstick on the proverbial pig.
Connie Schultz, wife of Ohio’s Senator Sherrod Brown and Plain Dealer columnist, had this to say about clothing and sports.
http://www.cleveland.com/schultz/blog/index.ssf/2009/04/dont_you_dare_disrespect_the_d.html
I’ve lived in Cleveland/NEO region for 45 years and you certainly nailed it. I wish I had some answers.
Unfortunately it seems that our leadership is very paranoid of giving up control in such a way that would help move the region forward vs. backward.
It would be helpful if recent posts and comments were linked at the top of the blog in the right-hand column. My scrollwheel is starting to protest at the workout it’s getting keeping up with this thread.
In California, the only requirement to attend a community college is that one is over the age of 18 and interested in getting more education. You don’t have to be a high school graduate. Instead a community college is one of the places you can go to get remedial education. Tuition is also only $11 dollars a unit.
Community colleges don’t just prepare people to attend college but provide training to be auto mechanics, truck drivers etc, even to learn how to embalm bodies.
Cheap education lets people get new skills without a lot of financial risk. That raises access.
In Ohio the cost of school at both the community colleges and in the State collge system is much higher. That limits access.
If there is any place in the country where access to college is important its probably a rust belt city like Cleveland.
Getting laid off from work in a union job is probably a big motivator to get other types of employment. But when you are out of work, cash is limited.
This is why increasing access by limiting tuition is so important.
Community colleges offer classes at night. They allow anyone who is interested in improving themselves the opportunity to do so.
Why not make that free or deminimis to encourage people to do things that make everyone better off.
If they have more skills they are less likely to be on public assistance. To me high fees for community colleges are pennywise and pound foolish.
Cleveland needs to be better educated, so make it easier for that to happen.
Ed in Sac
Ed in Sac: another positive feature of California is that people who do well in the community college system can transfer to the U of C system, getting a prestigious four-year degree. This is increasingly popular in California, compared to the traditional route of doing all four years at Cal.
Seth: inability to annex suburbs is a serious failing of cities, and you’re right that it’s affected Cleveland particularly strongly. Jane Jacobs noted that problem in the Death and Life, and argued that it represents failure of city governance to appeal to people outside the city. (She doesn’t say so, but it also represents the fact that the city is poorer than its suburbs, leading to fears among suburbanites about having to subsidize the inner city.)
Sputtering with Outrage: as I noted in a previous comment, if a problem in Cleveland exists in other cities, you can’t blame it for Cleveland’s decline. Is Cleveland’s Chamber of Commerce really worse than New York’s political situation, where a billionaire spent his way into the mayoralty, and then convinced the city council to repeal term limits so he can stay in power indefinitely?
“It would be helpful if recent posts and comments were linked at the top of the blog in the right-hand column.”
Sorry, I missed the archive links at the top. Still, it would be nice to have recent comments easily accessible too.
Alon Levy
In terms of governance there are a lot of benefits from having multiple governments competing with each other versus one goverment that controls everything. If you compare Los Angeles versus the Bay Area, in LA, both the City and County governments are huge bigger than many states.
In the Bay Area, a smaller population is spread out over 9 counties and hundreds of cities.
The smaller competing governments spur government innovation. Both Berkeley and Venice have similiar demographics. But why traffic calming and smart growth came first to Berkeley is that Berkeley is its own city. It didn’t take that many people to get involved to change things around. Venice is a district in the city of Los Angeles. In Venice when activists wanted to try adopting these kind of intiatives, they were thawrted by the large and less responsive bureacracy of the City of LA. In the bay area as other cities saw what was working in Berkeley they adopted those policies. But government intiatives that aren’t working don’t get adopted by other areas. In this sense government is both more innovative and more responsive in the bay area.
My hunch is that governance in Cleveland would probably improve if Cleveland itself was broken up into smaller more manageable chunks. That would encourage government to be more responsive to local needs. Special interests would have less influence because it would cost less money to run for office to propose and get new intiatives passed.
Instead of having one city with a population of 475k it might be better to have ten cities with a population of 47.5k
Ed in Sac
“Instead of having one city with a population of 475k it might be better to have ten cities with a population of 47.5k”
It’s one thing to grow a city to this population where you can plan a tax base, services, etc. It’s quite another to slice up a city into smaller bits. How do you divvy up all of the city facilities? Or the staff? Vehicles? Parks? Libraries? Who gets the non-residential tax base? 10 city governments means 10 mayors and 10 councils and 10 city managers or city administrators. Sounds like a mess.
“Special interests would have less influence because it would cost less money to run for office to propose and get new intiatives passed.”
Really? You don’t think special interests can and do control small-town politics? Think again.
Ed: on the contrary, fractional government tends to screw over everyone who doesn’t live in the favored quarter. It leads to a fractional school system, where the districts serving the richest towns get to hog all the best teachers and the rest get the rejects. It leads to towns too poor to afford basic services, or even loans, because interest rates are too high.
Let’s compare New York with the Bay Area here. New York is relatively unified – its central city has 40% of the metro area’s population. The upper class of the Upper East Side and Upper West Side pays taxes to support citywide services: mass transit to the Outer Boroughs, a well-funded school system by inner city standards, police, reasonable social services. Some people have fled to small towns in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Long Island, where their tax money goes to city beautification and public schools with the same per capita funding as private schools, but most haven’t.
Conversely, in the Bay Area, government is fractional. San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose together account for 30% of the Bay Area’s population. The fractionalism is most acute on the Peninsula, between SF and SJ. There you have sharp splits between rich towns like Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and poor ones like East Palo Alto. This leads to wide gaps in school funding, police funding, and social services.
For example, take crime. Central Harlem, which is protected by the same police force as the Upper East Side, averages about 19 murders per 100,000 people. Newark, which is less poor than Central Harlem but has to raise money for itself, averages 37. Oakland averages 30.
The example you give of Venice shows that LA is run badly, not that it is too big. If Venice weren’t part of LA, it would probably be even poorer than it already is; it would look more like Compton than like a future Silver Lake. A good city gives its neighborhoods more say in internal affairs, such as zoning and traffic issues, police governance, and so on, without creating favored quarters. Tokyo, which has split into 23 cities while maintaining a unified prefecture government, is a good model. I think Paris is the same, but I’m less sure. New York and Los Angeles are both examples of how not to do it.
anon 10:01 – two things. One, if you post via a real account, you can configure blogger to email you follow-up comments on a post by post basis. Also, there’s an RSS feed for comments, though don’t think I have the link posted. It’s the standard blogger comment feed.
Having said that, your suggestion is an excellent one. I’m looking to update the template for the blog in the coming weeks, and adding a recent comments sidebar is something I’ll think hard about adding to the mix. Thanks for the suggestion.
Fragmented government appeals to some public choice theorists because of the competition aspect. It has its pros and cons. Alon sums it up I think. Small cities are great when they work, but when they fail, they fail hard. Fragmented government often leads to stratification by income and huge disparities in towns. Successful towns tend to implement policies that exclude lower income people as much as possible. One of the virtues of a large city is its ability to contain mixed incomes inside the civic border.
The downside is that city government is large and removed from neighborhood concerns. It also tends to become the prisoner of powerful interest groups such as unions or wealthy businesses. While small towns can be corrupt, the scale of city government makes, for example, running for office as an outsider a daunting proposition.
Alon Levy
You might want to read the “Homevoter Hypothesis” by William Fischel. He points out how when California decided to shift funding of public schools to the state after prop 13, the quality of public schools went from being some of the best in the country to the worst in the country.
He points out that benefit of good public schools flows to the local neighborhood and as such homevoters (even those without children) were willing to support increasing funding for local schools because better quality schools would add to the value of their home. Cost of public education was capitalised in the value of the homes.
In California, once you could no longer increase your property values by increasing the quality of your local schools voters no longer had the same financial interest in providing schools. Since the the state shifted the majority of the cost to the state government the amount of money being spent statewide on schools is now less in real terms than it was spent in the poorest neighborhoods before the state took over responsibility for funding schools.
Now because increasing support for local schools no longer increases your property values, these measures are a lot less popular and die at the poles. In California, the public schools are poorly funded and of poor quality.
Fractional government makes government much more responsible to local needs. Its also weakens entrenched political interests because the cost of running for election drops dramatically reducing the importance of fund raising.
It also opens up the government to smaller groups who might otherwise be marginalised. In a community of 475k, the interests of 30k homosexuals might be overlooked. But if that same community is concentrated in one or two communities of 45k, they will have a very big voice in that community.
In Cleveland it probably would be difficult to ban chain stores or chain restaurants. The conservatism of the majority prevents innovation coming from a small minority.
But in smaller community if people want to ban the chains to create a greater sense of place, to ensure that local business serve local needs creating local jobs that type of innovation suddenly becomes possible.
Ed
Ed, you seem to gloss over the cost of providing services in a fragmented government. If this form of government was fiscally successful, the ring of suburbs that surround major cities like Detroit would include thriving communities. Instead, many of the inner-ring suburbs in Detroit and elsewhere are struggling and facing many of the same problems that are sinking Detroit.
Ed, large public school systems EVERYWHERE have “failed” since Prop. 13. I don’t think Prop. 13 is the cause. Cleveland didn’t have Prop. 13. Neither did Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Indianapolis…
We’re back to Alon Levy’s comment: if the same condition exists in more than one place, it’s not the cause of unique problems in a single place, whether that place is Cleveland or California.
Thundermutt
If you are arguing that large districts are failing everywhere, why would you oppose efforts to break them up?
Alon Levy
But are the inner ring suburbs of Detroit doing better than Detroit itself? Are they incorporated with the right to self government?
In Los Angeles look at the San Fernando Valley (SFV) and the San Gabriel Valley (SGV). In the 1970’s the SFV was wealthier in part because the air was cleaner and the climate was a little better because it was closer to the Ocean. The majority of the SFV is included in the city of Los Angeles.
Since that time both of those areas have lost their anglo majorities. But today the SGV is wealthier than the SFV.
The local governments in the SGV were just better at responding to the needs new business. They made decisions faster meaning that cost of business was cheaper in the San Gabriel communities. There was also learning. What worked in Monterrey Park got adopted in Rosemead.
Schools were also much more managable. The SFV was served by the huge LAUSD one of the largest districts in the country. To win one of the elections you needed a huge war chest, that meant that pretty much whichever candidate the teachers union endorsed won. No one else had the resources or the interest to run for office.
In the San Gabriel Valley, there are a lot of different much smaller school districts. There if you are worried about the schools, you can run to through out the incumbents. That is also true for local government. In the SGV, the local government is actually local with a lot of little cities.
In the SFV the city government is Los Angeles. In effect you have no local government. Its too big.
If Cleveland was to break up into much smaller communities. These cities would start out fairly poor because the community that they are starting from has its economic challenges. Some of these smaller communities will continue to be mismanaged. But not all of them will be mismanged. Some of them will be aggressive about courting new employers. Some of them will be aggressive about improving government services to their constutitents and some will probably try to cut services in an attempt to be a low cost provider of government in the region.
That is all part of government innovation. Trying things out and seeing what works. Some will fail. But some will succeed. Then what will happen is that the areas the cities that aren’t doing so well will copy the cities that are doing well. Good policies will spread and bad ideas will be dropped.
Look at the areas with lots of cities versus 1 big city, the small towns do better. Compare Orange County vs LA, the Bay Area vs Southern California.
Its very difficult for 1 big city to sustain good leadership for any period of time. Its much better for an area to have lots of little cities and if a few areas is mismanaged it doesn’t screw up the rest of the region.
Ed
There’s a far simpler explanation for what happened after Prop 13: property taxes were capped, and with them school funding went down. It’s misleading to say prop 13 shifted funding responsibility to the state; it merely capped property taxes, without requiring the state to step in and spend money on education.
To compare local funding of schools with more uniform funding, you really have to go outside the US. The idea that schools are funded locally is uniquely American. The schools of Canada are funded provincially, and the schools of unitary states like France are funded nationally. Both Canada and France surpass the US in quality despite lower per student funding; there are many reasons why they do, but at the very least this should suggest that local funding isn’t that great of a model.
There was a California Supreme Ct decision Serrano v. Priest 1976 that declared funding disparities in California unconstitutional and it required the state to make up the difference between districts. As such people in high property tax areas (not necessarily weatlhy people) no longer were recieving the benefit of better schools for higher property taxes. Essentially this is why they voted for prop 13, to roll back their taxes – to escape higher taxes that didn’t lead to greater local benefits.
Its worth reading Fischels paper on the matter here.
http://ntj.tax.org/wwtax/ntjrec.nsf/0/a1723c9dfcacb8c58525686c00686da2/$FILE/v42n4465.pdf
Ed
“Are the inner ring suburbs of Detroit doing better than Detroit itself? Are they incorporated with the right to self government?”
Not really and yes, they are independent cities. There are even two stand alone cities within Detroit borders. One, Hamtramck, is doing OK although it’s losing its largest taxpayer (American Axle). The other, Highland Park, has managed to fall into a state worse than Detroit.
Ed: the paper is interesting, but does not mention some of the political boilerplate issues in California. California then was polarized between a very conservative Republican Party, and a very liberal Democratic establishment. Orange County was one of the epicenters of the new conservative movement, which was opposed to high taxation (especially when the money was spent on the poor). Conversely, the courts were generally liberal at the time, and interpreted civil rights issues broadly. This was bound to lead to conflict: on gay rights, on affirmative action, on taxes, and so on.
Fischel argues that Massachusetts did not face a proposition as onerous as Prop 13 because the court’s standard for spending equity was laxer than in the Serrano decision. But he does not provide much additional evidence for it, or against the theory that as a liberal state, Massachusetts had less of a conservative revolt than California.
He also points to New York as a state that did not impose funding equity, and consequently did not suffer from spending caps. But New York City does have funding equity – if anything, schools in poorer areas get more money because of extra funds for ESL and low-income students. Upper West Siders pay a lot of money in income taxes to subsidize Harlem’s schools. Despite that, there is no significant tax revolt – even Giuliani, the most conservative mayor in recent history, boasts that his overall spending cuts spared teachers. The battle lines on education in the city concern school integration and union versus reform concerns, rather than money.
When I was offered a job in Cleveland 2-1/2 years ago, for almost $20,000 more than what I was making in Chicago, I jumped at the chance, dragging my dear husband with me (Jeff Hershberger who posted above). We recognized the value, not only in the additional salary and benefits, but that Cleveland was cheaper and smaller and, potentially, a place where we could settle.
I hadn’t been here a month and I regretted that decision. I moved into temporary housing in downtown Cleveland, thought I was getting a STEAL at $1750/month for a furnished, one-bedroom apartment with a parking spot and doorman. Heck there was even a restaurant in the building! Any of my locally-born co-workers scoffed at my price tag and told me to be VERY careful – downtown was not very safe. Often as I was introduced around the office, and I told people I had moved here from Chicago, the response was “why?” I couldn’t believe that local Clevelanders hated their city so much.
Since I was here alone, going out by myself was a normal occurrence. Never in my life had I encountered a town less friendly. Once, I was sitting in a downtown sports bar watching the Indians play, I remarked to the person sitting next to me about the play at hand and he actually turned to me and said, “I’m here with my friends.” In Chicago, as well as Indianapolis and Detroit where we have family, a single woman in a bar would be included in the group – the more the merrier. Here, I realized I could go into any bar and sit down, the seats on either side of me would vacate. The distrust of outsiders was profound.
The egregious cliquishness of Cleveland continued as I began to hunt for a house – was I going to be an “East-sider” or a “West-sider”? This is a concept I could not completely understand. It seemed you would be pulling on a set of expected traits just by the side of the city you chose to live on. We moved into a racially integrated neighborhood with more PhDs on our street than I have ever encountered in 10 houses.
But because we lived in a “mixed” neighborhood, even our mailman, on the day we moved in, told us to get an alarm system. This Cleveland suburb was declared unsafe. We were instructed, many times, to stay off of Buckeye and Kinsman roads, avoid the Rapid and be careful when we went to Shaker Square. Turns out our neighbors had, indeed, all been robbed in the past few years and within the first year we lived here – a neighbor was almost beaten to death outside his home.
We weren’t even here a year and we were ready to pack it in and go. We actually put a Lincoln List together to give us reasons to stay. We did produce a lengthy list of reasons – please see all the above pro-Cleveland posts.
So, we asked ourselves why is Cleveland beating itself up? It has a lot to offer. What is it about this town that makes itself impossible to love? We talked to a lot of folks and finally concluded that while the above arguments are absolutely true – race issues, education issues, government corruption, lack of global strategy and thoughtful urban planning – the underlying problem is that Cleveland suffers from its own self-esteem problems. It’s inhabitants complain – a lot – about this town without really wanting to do anything about it. They are waiting for it to magically change, someone else will fix it. Apathy and ignorance are rampant dictators of attitude and behavior in Cleveland’s inhabitants.
And it’s that behavior that spills over and covers anyone who has relocated here. If it hadn’t been for MeetUp.com, we wouldn’t have made any friends here. And the friends we have made – only a few are natively from Cleveland. The other transplants mostly encountered the same cold shoulder that I received. We have no alliances here outside of each other. We live all over the area, we are not east-siders or west-siders, we don’t associate ourselves with the high school we graduated from, nor do we give much thought to the fore warnings of “beware”.
So we gave it another year and now, that the loss of my job seems eminent, we’re more likely to leave than to stay despite the fact that we’ll lose money on the house and have to possibly move to more expensive, less accessible city. It saddens me because I thought Cleveland would be a nice place to settle in and grow roots.
That anecdote contrasts greatly with my experiences moving to, and around, Indianapolis over the past several decades. I think Aaron might say from his own recent experience here that this city can and does embrace “outsiders”, because so many of us were when we started out here.
How sad for Cleveland that its “outsiders” end up feeling this way.
I really liked reading Matt’s personal commentary. It actually reminded me of a former co-worker who grew up in Cleveland and exhibited a similar “mindset”.
The one thing I wasn’t sure I agreed with was linking the “good enough” sentiment with Cleveland alone. I think that this exists all over America (maybe a little more concentrated in the Midwest). One could point this back to the days when GM (and others) paid ridiculously good wages, and people got complacent and thought a factory job would be good enough for them and their kids in the future. We’ve “limped” along for the last 20 years trying to keep such things around and now more people are finally seeing that those things aren’t good enough anymore.
Alice, your posting, and the one by Jeffrey above, are really troubling. If newcomers find it difficult to meet people, penetrate social networks, and there is excessive cliquishness, I’d say that’s very bad. It is completely the opposite of the experiences I’ve had in Chicago and Indianapolis, where meeting people and getting connected with others is super-easy.
I was born and raised in Cleveland (suburbs) and attended graduate school in Cleveland, too. After school, I had the opportunity to live in Washington DC and NYC. I moved back to Cleveland last year to buy my first condo and really (sadly) regret the decision. There is nothing for young people to do in this city. The shopping is terrible, there’s no fashion, the gyms are the worst, there’s no fun events such as ‘wine tours’ or hiking events. The dating scene is awful; everyone is married! Plus, besides two or three bars in Tremont, there aren’t any bars filled with younger people (i.e., aged 26-29). It also seems like so many young people are overweight or the men bald. It can’t be attributable to the weather because people are slender (and have hair) in Chicago! Also, downtown is allegedly ‘unsafe’ to live, so the suburbs are where to buy and live…and the suburbs consist solely of couples with children. Puke. I’m putting my condo on the market – which is a beautiful space if anyone’s interested – and looking at Miami, DC, Chicago or Charlotte. Sure, I’m part of the problem (“all Cleveland’s young people leave”), but I’m not about to waste anymore of my youth in this city.
anon 10:32, not sure what to make of the bald comment, since I resemble that remark. But at least I’m 39!
“Once, I was sitting in a downtown sports bar watching the Indians play, I remarked to the person sitting next to me about the play at hand and he actually turned to me and said, “I’m here with my friends.” In Chicago, as well as Indianapolis and Detroit where we have family, a single woman in a bar would be included in the group – the more the merrier. Here, I realized I could go into any bar and sit down, the seats on either side of me would vacate. The distrust of outsiders was profound.”
Great discussion here in general, but as for the quoted material:
Are we to take seriously the notion that it’s measurably easier to meet people in bars in Indianapolis and Detroit than it is in Cleveland, let alone the notion that Cleveland’s deficiency in that regard plays any major part in its malaise?
I mean, call me the typical cynical, stuck-in-his-ways Clevelander, but I don’t think we’re going to solve any of this city’s myriad problems by modelling our happy hour behavior after Detroiters. It might be just a tad more complicated than that.
I know that Cleveland has the Rock and Roll Hall of fame and it has Symphony. But how strong is the local music scene?
Are their enough dive bars to give opportunities to unknown bands getting started? Any local music festivals? Any type of monthly area wide get togthers, something like 3rd Saturday event where the local art galleries hold wine tasting and art premieres and the city permitts certain streets to be blocked off for local musicians playing on the street?
Ed
One problem with comparing experiences in Cleveland with Detroit or Chicago or Indianapolis is that Cleveland is much smaller than any of those cities. In comparison, Detroit is twice as large geographically and in population than Cleveland. The same is true of comparisons of the MSAs (although Cleveland’s is larger than Indianapolis in that one regard). Those differences in population make a huge difference in terms of the level of urban activity that each city can and does support.