Freaking Do Something!
Cleveland is still the poorest big city in the U.S., violent crime is on a rampage and our schools underperform.
Out of control tax abatement and big business subsidies to billionaires cheat our schools, libraries and Metroparks of operating funds, and tony neighborhoods get further gentrified while poor neighborhoods continue to get neglected.
Children are still getting poisoned by lead, seniors still don’t have free broadband, thousands of blighted structures need to be razed, the rapid transit system is lame and the tree canopy that protects the most vulnerable from the ravages of the climate crisis continues to shrink.
Meanwhile, corporate elites and the foundations and nonprofits they control fashion the civic agenda with complicit press boosterism and build up swank downtown districts as their glitzy headquarters, after work playground and a tourist destination, as if all that visitor and entertainment money actually went somewhere other than mostly into the bigwigs’ pockets.
Few people vote here because no one listens to them and they are hopeless. Nothing changes and little good comes to average people at ground level. The cash flows up stream and out of the community.
Take a ride around Gates Mills, Hunting Valley and Chagrin Falls sometime. Then take an extended tour of Cleveland’s east side.
The inequality and inequity in Cleveland are breathtakingly obscene, and it’s been this way for decades.
We have a new Mayor and City Council.
Freaking do something.
