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?)

PRIORITIES: Here's something to ponder about Cleveland's economic development strategy:

In the last census, Cleveland had a strikingly low percentage of four-year college graduates among our working-age residents... only 11.4%, which essentially tied us with Detroit for last place among the 50 biggest U.S. cities. Among the same 50 cities, we ranked 45th in the percentage of our young adults (18-24) enrolled in college or graduate school. (I'll send you the spreadsheet if you're curious... write me here.)

The "business community recommendations" for a new Convention Center include a new quarter-percent increase in Cuyahoga County's sales and use tax to help pay the debt service on the proposed bond issue. That dedicated sales tax would raise about $40 million a year, based on the county's existing 1% tax which raised $157 million in 2002.

Tuition and book costs to get an associate degree at Tri-C, and then finish a bachelor's degree at CSU, add up to about $16,000. So the annual revenue from that proposed Convention Center sales tax hike could send 2,500 young Clevelanders to college -- full ride. In ten years, it could pay for enough full scholarships to double Cleveland's current supply of working-age college grads!

Whaddaya think? What's a better investment for the city's future... 25,000 college-educated workers, or a Convention Center?

ON THE TRAIL OF THE BUFFALO: I don't have much to say about the big Convention Center issues yet, like who should get the bond fees or which tax-abated hotel it should be closest to. (Though it was kind of striking to have the business guys propose a new quarter-percent county sales tax hike on the same day the Ohio General Assembly raised the state sales tax 1%. And a 2% Convention Center tax on restaurant bills... did you see that coming?)

But here's something I feel I should pass along:

Maybe you heard Growth Assn President Dennis Eckart explaining to WCPN today that the City has to show its commitment to build a CC in order to compete with... Cincinnati and Buffalo. Yes, Buffalo. Now, as it happens, my weekly Net reading includes the Buffalo Report, a Roldo-esque site produced by University of Buffalo professor Bruce Jackson. And just the other day, Jackson posted a couple of articles (this and this) about a proposal to sell Buffalo's convention center to the Seneca Nation for a gambling casino.

Think there might be something they're not telling us?

THE FREE TIMES CRUSADE (continued from yesterday): Why do I have my briefs in a knot about this, you ask? Good question.

It's not that I have a problem with WiFi. On the contrary. I love my home 802.11b network, over which this comes to you. We've been building a little hotspot at the West Side Community Computer Center, where our DSL is now shared by a GED classroom down the hall and a few offices across the parking lot... and soon by some nearby homes. I've been happy to help the folks who are creating a community WiFi in Tremont. I've spent many happy hours studying homebrew antenna designs.

And I certainly have no problem with the City promoting digital infrastructure or even owning it. Hey, I'm a Muny Light booster from way back. If the FT was calling on the city to get out on the leading edge by creating the nation's first municipal wireless network -- all over Cleveland -- I'd be right there, a hunnerd percent. A little skeptical, maybe... but right there.

Furthermore, let me state for the record that I'm glad the Free Times is back. And glad Dave Eden is running it.

So my problem is not with WiFi, City infrastructure-building or the Free Times itself. My problem is with the aggressive New Elitism that pervades the FT's argument in this case. You know what I mean; you hear it all around you. The New Elite says: The city's greatest need is smart, entrepreneurial, educated young people ("like us" is always the unspoken subtext.) We are the "creative class" and we need to be attracted. Entertained. Catered to. So get with it, City Hall, and give us free, fast Internet access wherever we go, so we'll think Cleveland is cool. Well, anyway, the parts of Cleveland where people like us live... the rest is, you know, not our problem.

Jane Campbell and Tim Mueller work for a City whose people are over 50% African-American and nearly 10% Hispanic. Only 17% of our young adults (25 to 34) have finished college, and 22% of that same demographic haven't finished high school. Our average household income is about $26,000 a year, which makes us 49th among the fifty biggest U.S. cities. Our current jobless rate may be unknowable, if George Zeller is right, but there's no doubt that that we have at least 25,000 to 30,000 residents out of work, and many thousands more working part-time.

There are many reasonable arguments about what it will take to improve this situation, including Richard Florida's theory of a "creative class" spurring entrepreneurial growth. There's a case to be made for public investment in high tech infrastructure. There's a case to be made for continuing to pour money into downtown -- and then a sub-case for concentrated residential development there. I suppose there's even a case to be made for "coolness", whatever that might mean.

But Clevelanders who argue these fashionable theories need to recognize what they're proposing, which is trickle-down economic development. And the Free Times proposition -- let's make Cleveland cool by giving free digital infrastructure to the creative class in its downtown neighborhood -- is such a pure version of the New Elite Theory that it approaches satire.

Now, I don't think the FT editors actually believe what they appear to be arguing. In fact, I'm sure that many of those now burbling with New Elite enthusiasm -- very nice, compassionate, civic-minded people -- think of themselves as grassrootsy, populist, small-d democrats.

All I can say is... listen to yourselves.

Even better, listen to some other people. Spend some time in the parts of this city that aren't ever going to be cool, but where the large majority of your fellow citizens live. Talk with some Clevelanders who don't have college degrees and laptops. Ask what they would think about their Mayor and Council spending public money to provide free Internet service to downtown and maybe a couple of other selected islands of "the creative class", just because, well, they'd like to have it.

Where's Roldo when you really need him?

FREE TIMES CRUSADE FOR FREE DOWNTOWN INTERNET, PART 2: Okay, the new Free Times is out and we have the second installment (in City Chatter, but not on the FT web site) of David Eden's demand for City Hall to provide free wireless Internet service all over downtown. It seems that Tim Mueller says there'll be Wi-Fi on Mall C in September, and there's talk of a Wi-Fi corridor all along the Euclid Corridor from Public Square to CWRU. But this is not enough to make the Free Times Wi-Fi Warriors happy. It's just not up to the standard set by "other cities [that] are using Wi-Fi... to attract the entrepreneurial and creative classes..."

What other cities? Well, last week's editorial cited New York and Pittsburgh ("even Pittsburgh") as cities that "are making free wireless Internet access available in downtown areas, and other 'hot spots,' as part of an effort to attract visitors and companies to business districts". Here's where the language gets a little loose. Neither the City of New York nor the City of Pittsburgh is doing what the FT wants the City of Cleveland to do, i.e. deploy a free Wi-Fi grid throughout downtown at public expense.

In New York, there's a grassroots organization called NYCwireless creating voluntary hot spots throughout the boroughs (here's their system map). And in Pittsburgh, another nonprofit called Three Rivers Connect -- with much heavier corporate leadership, but still private -- has one small wireless network around its office downtown, pilot wi-fi projects on the North and East Sides and an experimental commercial network in the Oakland (University of Pittsburgh) area. The Oakland net is actually run by a company called Grok and costs $19 a month.

There is no indication on either website that their purpose is to "attract visitors and companies to business districts", let alone the "entrepreneurial and creative classes..." (Maybe they never met Richard Florida.) Three Rivers Connect does all kinds of things to promote IT and broadband throughout the Pittsburgh area. NYCwireless is one of the "wireless community networks" -- second generation FreeNets -- that've popped up all over the world; its mission statement says: NYCwireless promotes open wireless hotspots in public spaces throughout the New York region... NYCwireless intends to work with public and other nonprofit organizations to bring broadband wireless Internet to under-served communities.

Get that part about "underserved communities"? Read through the NYCwireless site and you get a sense of creative New Yorkers cooperating, with their own resources, to create something for the benefit of the whole community. Read the Free Times (not to mention a few local blogs) and you get a picture of a "Cleveland creative class" that's -- well, just kind of whiny. And in the case of its journalistic spokesnerds, a little loose with its facts.

Incidentally, the one city mentioned by the FT where the city government itself is sponsoring downtown WiFi as an ED initiative is Long Beach, CA. The "HotZone" covers four blocks. They also plan to WiFi their airport and their convention center. Sounds a lot like Cleveland, doesn't it? Read about it here.

HURRAY FOR THE LIBRARY: The Cleveland Public Library, that is. The CPL gets my Hurray of the Week because I made my periodic weekend run to the Main Branch today and was reminded what a great operation they have. I picked up a book I knew I wanted and one I just ran across, re-renewed the book my wife's been reading for three months, and got it all done in fifteen minutes. Five staffers helped me in one way or another, and they were all cheerful and on the case. I passed by ten or so Internet terminals on three floors and they were all getting used... at 4:30 on Saturday, downtown!

It's no wonder Cleveland voters passed the Library levy by a 60-40 margin. How many services, public or private, run so well? (Of course, I realize that Mark Schumann's endorsement was the real turning point in that election.)

Now if the City would just stop eliminating parking spaces around East 6th and Superior...

So I got real busy this week, and now I look around and it's Friday! Oh well, both of the people who read this were probably busy, too. Who knows, maybe they were also at...

THE WEEK'S COOLEST EVENT: Yep, there we were in City Hall Rotunda Thursday, two or three hundred of us and the Mayor, with giant mop-props, music, folks beating a rhythm on plastic buckets, cheering, dancing... all celebrating a big step forward for downtown and the people who work there. The people, that is, who work there after everybody else goes home. The cleaning staff. The janitors.

Over seven hundred employees of downtown office cleaning contractors, represented by Service Employees Local 47, have been negotiating a new contract for the past few months. These are mostly African-American, mostly female, mostly Cleveland residents. They work shifts that start at 5 or 6 p.m., hard physical work, for pay that starts around $7 an hour. Many are kept on part-time status, meaning no health insurance. The union, as part of its ongoing national campaign called Justice for Janitors (anybody catch the movie Bread and Roses?), was asking for a modest pay increase, health insurance eligibility for everyone, and more full-time work.

Thursday's event was supposed to be a big support rally. But at the last minute -- Wednesday, I think -- a proposed agreement was reached with the major contractors. The union won $1.30 an hour over three years, health insurance for part-timers and a track for part-time workers into full-time work... a big and significant victory. (Here's the PD story.) So the rally turned into a party at City Hall, where the Mayor and City Council both supported the union's efforts. And lemme tell you... these cleaning folks know how to party!

Absolutely the downtown event of the week.

MORE ON LOCAL JOB LOSSES: The Cleveland-Lorain SMSA lost 55,000 jobs during 2001 and 2002, according to a new report issued Saturday by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Over 32,000 of those jobs went away during the "jobless recovery" of 2002. Cleveland's two-year total was eighth highest among U.S. metropolitan areas.

The Plain Dealer did not have the story in this morning's edition, although many other big-city papers did. (Here are the stories from Detroit, Indianapolis, and Boston.) Maybe it was just a deadline problem... we'll see about Monday.

MORE ON CLEVELAND MEDIA OWNERSHIP: What the PD did have this morning was a long front-page report on local implications of this week's FCC media ownership decision, with accompanying info on the concentrated out-of-town ownership of Cleveland radio and TV stations (and the PD itself.) Strangely, none of this is posted on cleveland.com.

My big question on this topic is: With all of Cuyahoga County's local broadcast frequencies taken up by outside corporate owners, why is there so little interest in creating alternatives? Where are Cleveland's radio entrepreneurs?

Remember the FCC shutdown of five Cleveland "pirate radio stations" a few years ago? But when the FCC solicited applications for Low Power FM licenses, there was virtually no interest here. (FCC records show 110 applications filed from Ohio, but only one from Cuyahoga County.) And there's no apparent upsurge of Internet radio sites based here, either. What's the matter... no one in Cleveland wants to hear the sound of our own voices?

HURRAY FOR THE RTA: Looking back over my first week of posts I can see why dogs and small children sometimes get nervous around me. Geez, what a downer. Unemployment. Media monopolies. The Free Times. It makes me think of Joe Btfsplk, the guy in Li'l Abner with the raincloud on permanent hover over his head.

But I'm not really Joe. And just to prove it, here's my first Hurray of the Week:

Hurray for the Regional Transit Authority plan to put up signs at a bunch of their busiest stops with real-time information about where your bus is now, and when it's likely to arrive.

As a frequent RTA rider all I can say is Thank You Jesus! And Thank You Joe Calabrese! I don't care how long it took to get around to this, it's on its way now and I am sooo glad.

Hurray!

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.

PHONY UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES UPDATE: As I promised yesterday, here's George Zeller's whole explanation of why the State of Ohio's employment and unemployment figures for Cleveland are "phony", now posted as a page of my Cleveland Wages Pages site. Here's a sample:

...You can say with accuracy that right now we are seeing 1,546 Cuyahoga County workers laid off EVERY WEEK, a figure that is twice as high as it was four years ago. You won't find any unemployment figures anywhere that will say that the Cuyahoga County unemployment rate has doubled over what it was four years ago, but it has actually done so. That's about as close as anybody can get to a precise figure on this issue.

PHONY UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES? My entry Monday on the Cleveland unemployment rate drew an email response from George Zeller, the research director of the Council on Economic Opportunities of Greater Cleveland (CEOGC). George knows his stuff, so here's most of his message:

First, the unemployment rates that you mention are phony, and they therefore do not deserve the coverage that you are complaining about...

Second, we do have some honest figures up on the CEOGC web site. One of them shows that Cuyahoga County has lost more than 5% of all its jobs during the past two years. Another way to look at that is that Cuyahoga County has 14.7% of Ohio's jobs, but it has suffered 24.3% of Ohio's job losses during the past two years.

http://www.ceogc.org/research/index.htm

Further, also on the web site is a comparison between local job growth and cash welfare cuts in all 88 Ohio counties. For every quarter during the last two years, the biggest discrepancy between job growth and welfare cuts in Ohio has been in Cuyahoga County. The gap between the two figures has exceeded 18,000 during every quarter of the last two years. The welfare cuts are continuing every quarter, despite large local job losses in those same quarters...

George

This led to an exchange in which George ended up explaining in great detail why the State's employment and unemployment figures are bogus, why there's no workaround available for us to get better numbers, and what related indicators are honest and reliable. I can't print it all here but I'm going to post the whole exchange on my Cleveland Wages Pages website in a day or two.

Meanwhile I highly recommend a visit to the CEOGC page linked above, where you'll find lots of data supporting the real point I was trying to make -- that the city has been experiencing a wrenching level of job loss for many months. Which, for some reason, is not seen as front-page news to those who decide these things.

HOMETOWN MEDIA (NOT!): Here's the state of the Cleveland radio and TV markets today, before any effect is felt from the FCC's new policy on concentration of ownership.

There are nineteen commercial radio stations broadcasting from Cuyahoga County. Not one is owned by a county resident or local corporation. Five are owned by Clear Channel; four each by Radio One, Salem Communications and Viacom; and one by Disney. The nineteenth, WABQ, is owned by a small Christian radio chain based in Youngstown.

There are five commercial TV stations operating in Cuyahoga County (Channels 3, 5, 8, 19 and 61), plus one in Lorain (Channel 43). All are owned by national chains.

There are still some stations in Summit County, and in small towns elsewhere in the region, under local ownership. But in this county -- the population and political center of northeast Ohio -- local control of commercial broadcasting is a thing of the past.

(My source is the Center for Public Integrity's media ownership database.)

Also controlled from elsewhere: Cleveland's cable TV service (Pennsylvania), phone service (Texas), and gas and electric utilities (Virginia and Akron, respectively) -- all of which operate here subject to PUCO regulation and/or City franchise.

I'm not sure this requires any further comment.

UNEMPLOYMENT NO LONGER NEWS IN CLEVELAND: In April, the "official" State unemployment rate for Cleveland city residents exceeded 11% for the sixteenth straight month. The rate was over 12% for the thirteenth time since January 2002. About 26,000 adult Clevelanders were "in the labor market" but out of work. (Here's the State of Ohio web query site where I got these figures.)

This was not news. It was not noticed by the PD, the radio and TV stations, Crain's, Scene, or anybody else that I'm aware of. The Mayor did not put out a press release. It was not the subject of a Feagler show or a "Quiet Crisis" forum. Apparently it was not mportant enough to bring to our attention... unlike the search for Laci Peterson, the career prospects of LeBron James, any number of lost animals, the daily fluctuations of the stock market, and local reaction to the Bachelor's choice of a bachelorette.

The Mayor and her former fellow County Commissioners Dimora and McCormack, who used to brag about reducing local welfare rolls by more than 15,000 families (almost all in Cleveland), have not been heard worrying that maybe these folks have now gone from welfare to work to unemployment. Researchers at CWRU's Poverty Center have a recent follow-up report on the County's "welfare leavers" (pdf file, Acrobat needed) that indicates their efforts to find and keep jobs have been pretty grueling. But there hasn't been much "recidivism" (interesting how the term for a return to criminal activity is now applied to asking for public assistance), the caseloads are still at historic lows and "welfare reform" is still successful. So it's yesterday's issue, right?

Of course the most important fact about unemployment in Cleveland is just how controlled we are by national upturns and downturns. When the national economy gets a cold, we get double pneumonia. The jobs that NE Ohio leaders are spending money to attract --service industries, conventions and tourism, advanced manufacturing, even most IT sectors -- are just as sensitive to these national cycles as our old manufacturing base. (One exception might be health care.)

Indeed, the biggest difference between our traditional jobs and the ones we're adding at the low end -- aside from the obvious issue of pay -- may well be the number of Clevelanders who have to work part time, or sporadically, or even as temps, and thus fail to qualify for unemployment benefits... so extending benefits as a response to the current stubborn recession makes little difference to them.

In this situation, which is not going to change any time soon, responsible leaders should be looking at countercyclical options like public service employment. Back when uneducated single mothers were being shoved into Job Clubs and then out the door into $7 "starting jobs", advocates of direct employment were told that the "permanent-growth private sector" would absorb all the willing workers it could get. Now four years later, in an intractable recession, with the Federal and State governments firmly controlled by tax-cut ideologues, we have no welfare system for those mothers and no jobs, either.

It's hard to believe that the Mayor, City Council, the County Commissioners and other county officeholders -- all Democrats -- are ignoring this most basic of historic Democratic concerns. But I guess if those unemployed Clevelanders aren't on TV, they can't really matter all that much. Not like Laci Peterson and the Bachelor.

(Footnote: To their credit, Mayor Campbell and Cleveland City Council recently agreed on a new standard for employment of city residents on City-assisted projects. I personally don't know how real this is, and there's always the suspicion that it's just a step in the slow dance toward a Convention Center ballot issue. But Council President Frank Jackson has a consistent record of taking the jobs-for subsidies approach seriously, so I'm willing to be hopeful.)