Thursday, May 21, 2009

Funny and Serious

Kathleen linked to Polk's second "hastily made Cleveland Tourism video" here. (BTW, it seems that Eminem is Detroit's LeBron James.)



I know this is several weeks old, but I thought about it yesterday when my Real Estate agent gave me some hard numbers. The population of the City of Cleveland is down to about 350,000. There are enough housing units for 1 million. Conclusion? Not the best place to invest in rental property. This city is basically dying.

Of course people are moving to the suburbs, West, East and South. One of my favorite letters to Cleveland Magazine was from someone with whom I worked for a time, you can read it here.

I am writing in response to your Slavic Village article (“Can Anyone Save Slavic Village?” November 2007). My parents raised us in Erie, Pa., to believe that Cleveland is the greatest city (and Pittsburgh sucks, of course). So, when I graduated from college two years ago, I moved here. I still love Cleveland, but I have a lot of questions for the mayor. How does sticking a $425,000 price tag on a condo in Ohio City get rid of crime in the area? How can construction crews put up a new interstate in one night, but Euclid Avenue has been a mess for two years? Why do we feel that we have to move to the suburbs? And my biggest problem —where are all the 20-somethings? They all moved. This city could easily be great, but the politics seem so backward. Maybe we need more stories like the Slavic Village one to get the message across that action needs to be taken, or, in 30 years, nobody will be left here except the people who can’t get out.

This young lady is not some type of raging ideologue of any kind. She's what I would consider a very normal, average, young professional who works for a big company with a local office. The answer to all her questions is a word in her letter, about smack in the middle, and it is "crime".

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for adding me to your blogroll. I put you on mine.

    You are very correct that crime is a big reason people don't want to live in the city of Cleveland. We attend a church on W. 43rd and Roberts in Cleveland. Our pastor is a chaplain for the Cleveland police and the FBI and rides with officers fairly regularly. He says while the area our church is in is fairly calm during the day, the crime runs rampant at night. There are several empty houses near our church and I'm sure there will be more before it gets better, if it ever does.

    Our organist and his wife live in Ohio City, but they don't have young kids. I want to live somewhere where I can send my kids out to play without worry, the same privilege I enjoyed growing up. I'm sure you want the same for your kids.

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  2. "...all our fish have AIDS." LOL!

    When I saw the first video, I remember thinking, "Well, it could be worse...they could be Detroit."

    From what I understand, the population in Detroit is distributed in a doughnut shape. That is, the city itself is virtually abandoned, with all the population being in the suburbs. It sounds like the same sort of thing is happening to Cleveland.

    Seriously, it's sad to see this sort of thing happening to America's cities.

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  3. The only thing that keeps us from the doughnut shape is the lake. :)

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  4. So.... we're more like a croissant? Nice..... almost as unheatlhy, no doubt.

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