DOWNTOWN POVERTY DEVELOPMENT: I'm going to propose a new term now. The term is poverty development. I define "poverty development" as the deliberate application of public resources and policies to create jobs at poverty wages.

Please note that poverty development is not what happens when people are thrown out of work, or out of their homes, as the result of public policy. These activities may create poverty -- lots of it -- but that's not usually their goal, it's a side effect of some other goal. In poverty development, on the other hand, the poverty-wage jobs are a stated goal, the poverty-level wages are built into participants' long-range business plans, and ensuring a labor supply at those wage levels is part of the public development activity.

An example of poverty development would be the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds into a public convention center, in order to create business for hotels and restaurants that pay most of their employees less than living wages.

In this connection, I've posted a page of excerpts from CSU Urban Studies Dean Mark Rosentraub's pro-convention center "study" on my Cleveland Wages Pages website. The most relevant passages are highlighted in red, but the rest of the excerpt is there for context. What it says, in short, is:

A big part of Cleveland's workforce is uneducated and therefore unemployable in the better jobs we hope to create in the technology and financial sectors, so we need to keep growing the "hospitality sector" to provide jobs for them.

I had a long talk a couple of years ago with a young woman who worked as a housekeeper at the Ritz-Carlton, cleaning up after guests who paid up to $300 a night. She described a very demanding job where pay started at about $7 an hour and rose to $9 only at the top of a competitive "incentive" scale. The workers were virtually all Black, Hispanic or recent immigrants; many did not speak English. She had family members and friends at the Marriott who were working in the same circumstances.

These two hotels were flagship projects of the '80s, built with heavy tax abatements to "revitalize the hospitality industry" and "create good jobs for residents". What they created was dead-end jobs at $14-15,000 a year -- less than the City's definition of a Living Wage that's acceptable for subsidized projects --with no prospect of improvement. (Of the 2,500 hotel rooms built downtown since 1980, a grand total of 140 are cleaned by workers with union representation.)

When we talk about preserving and creating "hospitality sector" jobs for uneducated Cleveland residents, these hotels -- and the restaurants around them -- are what we're talking about. That's downtown poverty development. We've had lots of it in the past twenty years, during which the City has become -- predictably -- poorer.

If we're going to spend a lot of public money to benefit uneducated Cleveland workers, as Dean Rosentraub argues, there is another possible strategy: We could spend it to help them get educated and qualified for all those better jobs in technology, finance and health care.

But for some reason, nobody is calling for "leadership" in that direction.