I promised that this weblog won't obsess about IT issues, and it won't, but this Free Times editorial calling for the city to create a free downtown wireless network raises a whole different kind of issue. The key word is "downtown". As in, why just downtown?

A political age ago, the theme of City politics was "neighborhoods vs. downtown"... meaning, of course, "Why spend all that development money on center city hotels while the 95% of Cleveland where people live is circling the drain?" We're past that now, of course; we're building homes all over the place and big development hustles like the Convention Center strive to express some connection, however tenuous, to citywide improvement. But most important, the collapse of the Galleria, Euclid Avenue and the office market in general have caused downtown developers and property owners to veer sharply into housing; the big news now is the addition of several thousand upscale, "creative class" rental and condo units between the river and the Inner Belt. As the mantra goes, "Downtown is a neighborhood."

Well and good. But the Free Times now proposes that downtown should be a privileged neighborhood that gets free high-speed Internet service courtesy of City Hall. Of course the argument is couched in the FT's sort-of-populist style... see, here's a public investment that would really get people going in Cleveland, not like that stuffy corporate Convention Center plan. But the core message is that downtowners are special -- creative, cool, cutting-edge -- and should get their own special public infrastructure as a reward.

The FT appeals directly to Council President Jackson (interestingly, not to Joe Cimperman) to take up this brilliant idea. Frank Jackson represents one of the city's poorest wards, the ward with the largest number of public housing units. Carver Park and Outhwaite Homes would probably be an ideal place for the City to invest in free Wi-Fi. The geography would make it easy (flat, not many trees, very dense population), and the large majority of the residents really can't afford DSL or cable. Many of them (and their kids) have a genuine educational need for good Net access. Tri-C's metro campus is right there in the neighborhood for technical support. And there are a fair number of new and rehabbed homes that could probably use free Internet as a marketing hook. So if we're looking for a place to invest public funds on a "leading edge" Internet initiative, how about Ward 5?

One more point: As far as I know, the only Cleveland neighborhood with a real community Wi-Fi initiative is Tremont, where a couple of tech-savvy "new residents" are working to create some public hot spots. They could have just talked to other middle-income homeowners around Tremont Ridge. Instead, they've been going around to the whole block club network, looking to create interest throughout a very diverse community. Here's a West Side Sun article about the effort. Other members of the Cleveland "creative class", please take note.