Cleveland’s A Plum!
If you don’t remember or have knowledge of that unfortunate, civically nauseating, obsequious and corporately driven slogan, consider yourself lucky. Since the silly misnomer was coined in the early eerie eighties, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have consistently lost population, so that should give you a pretty good idea of how well that particularly fluffy sales pitch worked.
But now, it does appear as if the civic power elites here may be getting serious about our population decline, given the way cities like Columbus, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh have colossally kicked our butt in recent memory, in that metric and most quality of life and economic measures of substance.
Destination Cleveland is leading the charge of a cabal of private and non-profit heavyweight civic clubs to attempt to keep and attract talent in our town, and grow the population.
Their focus is development of our strong healthcare, smart manufacturing and information technology economic sectors, especially targeting graduating students who they would like to stay here, and their pithy pitch includes a catalogue of the assets this region has to offer like its abundant fresh water supply and our relative advantages in a world sliding inexorably into climate crisis.
For maybe the first time in the last fifty years, then, there finally does appear to be consensus amongst civic movers and shakers that we’re floundering and we better get on the stick. They historically have in crisis headed apoplectically in different directions, so okay, good for them. They all appear to be on the same page now for a change.
Destination Cleveland will hire one person whose job it will be to promote population growth. One person. Oh, well, I guess it’s a start.
But I didn’t see in their hypnotically designed hype anything approaching the acute emphasis I was looking for on the three main issues that have plagued our city for decades: poverty, poverty and poverty.
If Cleveland would finally attack with a vengeance its endemic poverty effectively, many other important things will start to fall into place for this city and the region, including consistent population increases.
So, let’s just forget the glitz, glam and blah, blah, blah civic boosterism. Yes, the region has tremendous assets, and we don’t need more breathless marketing flimflam to extol its virtues.
What we do need is an overwhelming and incessant focus on the basics: jobs with a livable wage for the poor people in the neighborhoods, education and job training for those people, safe streets, great schools, affordable housing, compassionate social service support systems, responsive government, clean air and water, abundant greenspaces and a tree canopy that protects the most vulnerable, houses that don’t poison children with lead, an expansive and free rapid transit system that directly serves the underserved, broadband internet for all, home ownership opportunities for a higher percentage of residents.
Fundamental urban blocking and tackling. All things that surround the core issues: poverty, poverty and poverty. Address these things. Fix them. That’s what will cause people to want to come here, stay here and raise families.
Instead of focusing so myopically on economic development in the downtown and lavish subsidies to the business community that only increase income and wealth disparity, just for once maybe we should focus on neighborhood development and revitalization that benefit directly every Clevelander and not preferentially the posh, powerful and privileged patrician suburbanites.
We’ve been trying to figure this out for the last 50 years. Trickle down simply doesn’t work. It’s time that we stopped being the poorest big city in the United States.
No one believes this will be easy. But as John F. Kennedy intoned before we went to the moon, we need to do the hard things. Finally.
Then, we can expect our population here to grow, and grow dramatically.
