GROWING CLEVELAND'S POPULATION -- UNA PROPOSICION MODESTA: Mayor Campbell promised in her State of the City Address to reverse Cleveland's population decline and get back to 500,000 residents by the 2010 Census. That means gaining 25,000 folks in the next seven years, after losing about 27,000 in the '90s. This promise is in the news again because the Cleveland Foundation just gave the City $300,000 to help.

I think a lot of the Mayor's themes and proposals make perfect sense on their own terms. But if population growth is the point, there was one very strange omission from her speech and charts -- the word "Hispanic".

From 1989 to 1999, while the city's overall population shrank by 5%, those who identified themselves as "Hispanic" increased their numbers by 55%, going from 4% to 7% of Cleveland residents. They climbed to 15% of the city's West Side, where most live. A couple of West Side neighborhoods -- Clark-Fulton and Stockyards -- actually showed population increases in the 2000 census, due entirely to new families from Puerto Rico and Latin America. West Boulevard, Old Brooklyn, Jefferson, Detroit-Shoreway, Cudell, and Brooklyn Centre also saw big numerical and percentage increases in their Hispanic neighbors. With Hispanics now the biggest and fastest-growing minority in the U.S. overall, there's no reason to think Cleveland's neighborhoods can't continue to benefit on both sides of the river.

So, on the principle that any plan for growth should build first on our strengths, a modest proposal: Cleveland should set out to double our Hispanic population by becoming the Midwest's most Spanish-friendly city.

Yup... I'm saying we should become bilingual. Public communications, signs, local websites, all that stuff. A modest, symbolic start would be a word or two of Spanish on the City's website. More substantively, the schools could push conversational and written Spanish as a standard part of the curriculum. Government and foundation funders could try funding translation services for community and social service groups, especially on the West Side. The business community could make a serious effort to get at least one full-time Spanish-language station on the radio dial.

In my West Side experience, most Hispanic residents work pretty hard at getting fluent in English if they aren't already. This is a good and admirable thing. But wouldn't the city stand to gain from a reputation as a place you can move to and get established, even if your English isn't quite ready for prime time... like the computer science graduate from San Juan I met a few years ago, who could teach Windows classes and design a database, but couldn't find a job because she's a slow language learner? Wouldn't all the rest of us -- especially our kids -- benefit from learning a little of the second most common Western language? And wouldn't Cleveland be better off as a more cosmopolitan, more "international" city and region?

Esto es solamente una idea...

(Hey, did Babel Fish get that right?)