NEW CLEVELAND POVERTY STATISTICS... A BIG HELPING OF SALT: As glad as I am to see Cleveland's low-income citizens getting some overdue attention from the media and public officials, I have to report that the source of Friday's big headline -- the Census Bureau's American Community Survey -- looks kind of shaky.

To be fair, the Census makes it quite clear that these annual updates are "estimates" with big error margins. But this hasn't stopped the Plain Dealer and others from leaning hard on this year's ACS "Ranking Tables" to sound the alarm about income and poverty in Cleveland.

One side of my brain says, great, it's about time! But the other side has been staring at four years of ACS Data Profiles for Cleveland -- on which the Ranking Tables are based -- and thinking, there's something strange here.

Just two examples:

1. The city's population living in households, according to the ACS estimates, was 468,389 in 2000; sank to 455,396 in 2001; jumped back up to 464,814 in 2002; and then plummeted to 424,948 last year.

2. The number of households in the city, according to the ACS estimates, was 186,435 in 2000, 184,358 in 2001, 189,171 in 202, and 186,708 in 2003.

Thus while the city supposedly lost 44,000 residents in the past three years, we supposedly gained nearly 300 households in the same period.

Do you think Cleveland lost nearly 10% of our population between 2000 and 2003? Unless we did (which would be much bigger news than being 68th rather than 65th in the "poorest cities" list), there's something badly wrong with the Census' survey techniques... wrong enough to make all the numbers dubious. If they don't have a good approximation of the number of Cleveland households, how can we rely on their estimate of those households' median income?

If anyone reading this can offer an informed explanation, I'll be overjoyed to print it. Meanwhile, though, I'm afraid we need to take the whole ACS thing with a large helping of salt.

DOES THIS MEAN CLEVELAND ISN'T REALLY ALL THAT POOR? No, it does not. As I pointed out a couple of days ago, Cleveland's place at the bottom of the big-city income pile was clearly established by the regular 2000 Census, and all the data was available over two years ago. It's laid out in excruciating detail in Cleveland Wages Pages (which I cleaned up a little over the weekend, moving the Yahoo ad boxes out of the way).

We didn't learn anything new about Cleveland's poverty last Friday. The media has just gotten around to telling everyone about it.

So... the Mayor has responded by calling a "working summit" on poverty this Friday morning to...

work in concert with the Center for Community Solutions to identify the best practices in lifting Cleveland out of poverty. The working group will develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to attack poverty in the City of Cleveland.

This is a discussion the city needs, and if the Mayor is finally ready to kick it off, more power to her.

But let's hope it doesn't stay in one meeting room. Let's hope it spills out into next year's City election, forcing candidates in 2005 to debate the one issue that really matters in Cleveland: Why are so many of us so poor, and what can we do as a community to enable our citizens to make more money?

Some of my answers next time. Meanwhile, take a look at MaryBeth Matthews on sending Cleveland to college.

THE BIG PICTURE: Meanwhile, MaxSpeak lists some things that the new American Community Survey tells us about the national economy...

THE PLAIN DEALER NOTICES POVERTY: In big black type, top of the front page this morning:

Cleveland No. 1 in big-city poverty
The story concerns the U.S. Census' newly released American Community Survey for 2003, an annual mini-census which attempts to update the decennial census data by polling a large sample of households throughout the U.S. About 2,400 Cuyahoga County households were interviewed for the 2003 data, presumably including a large number in the city, which has about 35% of the county's population. This is a substantial professional polling effort, but it's a lot less comprehensive than the regular Census, so its results -- especially for the smaller samples like the city -- need to be taken with larger amounts of salt. But within its comfortable error margins, the ACS is probably the best current data available.

News coverage of the ACS (nationally as well as locally) has focussed on its "Ranking Tables" comparing states, counties and "places", i.e. cities, on various topics. The "Places" rankings compare sixty-eight big cities including Cleveland.

What the PD noticed this morning is that Cleveland showed up dead worst in the following categories:

Median household income -- $22,978 (68th of 68)
Median family income -- $28,108 (68th of 68)
Percent of people living below poverty level -- 31.3% (1st of 68)
Percent of children below poverty level -- 46.9% (1st of 68)

Well. Apparently this is a surprise to the PD editors. Maybe that's because, with all the paper's huffing and puffing about the Quiet Crisis, they never got around to looking at the city's income rankings in the real Census, when the 2000 Decennial Census data came out two years ago. Since the PD and other media didn't report it, most local readers wouldn't have known that Cleveland showed up at the bottom of those same rankings five years ago -- before 9/11, before the recession and the jobless recovery, when we were still basking in the Clinton boom and the Voinovich/White "renaissance" and "neighborhood rebirth" era, and downtown offices were still hiring temp workers, and the IT sector was growing, and thousands of single mothers had supposedly moved from welfare to employment. Back when the Crisis was, you know, Quiet.

In fact, I was so appalled by the lack of coverage that I put up a website called "Cleveland Wages Pages". Here are the opening words on the index page, circa September 2002:

Here's a headline you haven't seen in the Plain Dealer:

Cleveland is poorest of top 50 U.S. cities

But it's true -- or at least it's what the new U.S. Census tells us. Look a little further down this page for the details, but here's the nub of it: The average personal income of all Cleveland residents in 1999 was the lowest among the nation's fifty largest municipalities.

That makes us literally the poorest (to be precise, the lowest-income) big-city population in the nation.

Well, now we have seen the headline in the Plain Dealer -- big, scary and above the fold on Page 1. It's about time. Now what will that headline lead to -- other than complaints from some quarters about the PD's negativity?

More later.

CLEVELAND SCHOOLS' PROFICIENCY SCORES STUMBLE: As the Plain Dealer says this morning, the complete 2003-04 school district report cards won't be on line at the Ohio Department of Education site until next Tuesday. However, the data is available at http://dnet01.ode.state.oh.us/DistrictRatings/, which makes the PD's failure to report on it a little mysterious.

Here are some key 2004 numbers for the Cleveland Municipal School District that haven't yet appeared in the newspaper:

High school graduation rate: 40.8%, up just 1.3% from 2003 but topping 40% for the first time since 1997. (See chart below)

Fourth grade proficiency test (percent of students scoring at or above "proficient"): The average of all five tests was 53.5%, down 4% from last year. The declines were in citizenship (-5%), reading (-4%) and writing (-4%). Science was unchanged; math improved by 4%.

Sixth grade proficiency tests: The average pass rate for all five tests was 43.8%, down 5% from last year. Science, reading and citizenship all showed big declines (-13%, -12%, and -10% respectively). Writing was up 3% and math was up 5%.

Tenth grade proficiency tests (percent of tenth graders at or above ninth-grade prociency levels): The overall average was 77.8%, up 3% from last year. All five tests showed modestly higher pass rates than in 2003, with the biggest improvement in math, up 4%.

For those who are keeping track, here are the "official" CMSD graduation rates for the last nine years:

OHIO'S RECOVERY CONTINUES, JULY EDITION: The Bureau of Labor Statistics posted its July state employment numbers yesterday. Let's go to the chart:


Alison Grant's coverage in the PD is headlined "...manufacturers add jobs" and quotes Jo Ann Davidson calling the manufacturing count "even more encouraging", so here's an extra chart to put it in context:

LOCAL FORECLOSURES UP 25% SINCE 2001, SHERIFF SALES MORE THAN DOUBLE: Policy Matters Ohio has a major new county-by-county study of Ohio home foreclosures available on its website. It's based on a statewide survey of county sheriffs and it's full of bad news.

The bad news for Cuyahoga County:

Home foreclosures in 2003: 8,686, up 25% from the number in 2001.

Sheriff sales in 2003: 4,421, up 111% (!) since 2001.

One out of every sixty-six homes in Cuyahoga County was the subject of a foreclosure last year.

IF I LIVED IN COLUMBUS... Columbus, like Cleveland, is served by both a private investor-owned electric company (Columbus Southern, a subsidiary of American Electric Power) and a municipal electric system.

If I lived in Columbus, my new electric bill for 615 kilowatt-hours would be:

$51.90 if it came from the city's Division of Electricity, or

between $53 and $54 if it came from Columbus Southern.

In either case, my electric bill would be at least $25 cheaper than the one I just got from CPP.

Why can both the private and public power companies in Columbus sell exactly the same service as CPP (and CEI), subject to the same Ohio laws and regulation, for 30% to 35% less?

OUCH! CLEVELAND PUBLIC POWER MAKES MORE HISTORY: Our Public Power bill -- for service in July -- showed up in the mail yesterday. The charge for 615 kilowatt-hours was $79.16, or 12.9 cents per kwh. Not only is this the highest rate ever charged by CPP... it's probably the highest price charged for home electric service by any utility, private or municipal, in the whole state of Ohio this month!

According to the new Ohio Utility Rate Survey for June, CEI's Summer bill for 750 kwh is $95.63. CPP's bill for that same 750 kwh used in July would be $96.54.

Here's how CPP's July 750-kwh charge compares to the seven major investor-owned electric utilities in Ohio, according to the Rate Survey:


I can't believe this hasn't become a news story. Thirty thousand households switched over to CPP in the '90s on the promise of lower bills, and now they (and the fifty thousand of us who were already with the system) are getting gouged as badly as any ratepayers in the country... and it isn't news? Why aren't Tom Meyer and Carl Monday chasing down Public Power Commissioner Jim Majer, or his boss Utilities Director Julius Ciaccia -- or his boss, Mayor Campbell -- to demand an explanation?

STUDY SAYS EDUCATION LEVEL DRIVES CITY GROWTH

"The Rise of the Skilled City", Edward L. Glaeser and Albert Saiz, 2003 (abstract):

For more than a century, educated cities have grown more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital. This fact survives a battery of other control variables, metropolitan area fixed effects, and tests for reverse causality. We also find that skilled cities are growing because they are becoming more economically productive (relative to less skilled cities), not because these cities are becoming more attractive places to live. Most surprisingly, we find evidence suggesting that the skills-city growth connection occurs mainly in declining areas and occurs in large part because skilled cities are better at adapting to economic shocks. As in Schultz (1964), skills appear to permit adaptation.

The whole paper (68 pages, pdf format, lots of graphs and regressions) can be downloaded from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve site here. For those with shorter attention spans or slower connections, here's a one-page digest/review (with related research by Glaeser) from the National Bureau of Economic Research. First paragraph:

Possessing or attracting a large population of skilled, educated workers appears to be the key factor in determining whether declining urban areas -- such as the infamous "Rustbelt" manufacturing centers of the 1980s -- chart a path back to prosperity or remain relatively stagnant. In the Rise of the Skilled City (NBER Working Paper No. 10191), NBER researchers Edward Glaeser and Albert Saiz conclude that the percentage of workers with college degrees is a "powerful predictor of urban growth."

Send Cleveland to college!

HIGH TECH AND HUMAN CAPITAL: From an article by Boston Federal Reserve economist Pingkang David Yu, by way of Don Iannone (thanks, Chris Seper!):

But what exactly is a high-tech industry? And how can we determine how high-tech a city or metro area is? In the late 1970s, researchers often used the share of scientists or engineers to classify an industry as high-tech, but recent studies have tended to focus on factors such as whether the industry produces high-tech products (like electronics and computers) or uses high-tech inputs (for example,spends a lot of money on research and development).

A growing body of research suggests that human capital -- skilled labor -- may be a better gauge and a more important driver of economic development. Growth theorists have stressed the importance of human capital to productivity and income growth for the economy as a whole. Other researchers have tried to assess the role of skilled labor in regional employment growth. In The Rise of the Skilled City, for example, Edward Glaeser and Albert Saiz suggest that metro areas with educated workers grow more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital, for the most part because they are more economically productive and better able to adapt to economic change.

Download the article here in pdf format.

In the last census, 11% of working age adults in the city of Cleveland had four-year college degrees -- tying us with Detroit for last place among the fifty biggest U.S. cities. And 31% of Cleveland adults lacked even high school degrees.

What are our chances?

AND SPEAKING OF THE CLEVELAND SCHOOLS' GRADUATION RATE...

MaryBeth has something to say.

CLEVELAND SCHOOL BOARD PROPOSES 35% PROPERTY TAX HIKE.

No press release from the Mayor.

No press release from the School Board or CEO.

It's not like they're hiding from reporters. Apparently the Mayor held a press event to support the proposed levy today, judging from this Channel 3 clip.

They just don't seem to want to discuss this subject in writing... like the budget cuts and layoffs, which are still non-events on both the City and School District web sites. (To be completely fair, there's now a release posted on the School District site about "District transportation changes" which begins: "Due to the Cleveland Municipal School District’s financial crisis, a number of significant changes have been made in transportation services offered by the District." But the words "budget" and "cut" do not appear in it.)

I'm going to vote for this levy -- probably -- but it sure would be easier if the public officials in charge started making a visible effort at public transparency. And please, please, please, Madam CEO, stop talking about "improvements in graduation rates". At some point it's going to get embarrassing.

"WE THE MEDIA":

From Lessig...

The full text of Dan Gillmor’s book “We the Media,” about blogs and other things, is now online.

GAMES AND GAMES... The big event of the last week leads one to ponder the meaning of being a Democratic political leader in Cleveland. No, I don't mean the convention. I mean the International Children's Games.

For the past eight months Jane Campbell has invested a lot of her resources -- and the City's -- to make the Games look good. She personally took on a large share of the fundraising responsibility. She had Cabinet members spending half their time overseeing the details of security and technology. They called in every imaginable favor to get business resources and volunteers. Some City utility employees worked full-time on the Games for months. (Disclosure: I was part of the committee for the "Cyber Scene" game area -- at a Cabinet member's request -- and I met some very nice people doing it.)

Campbell did all this while other Democratic leaders and footsoldiers, in Cleveland and throughout the country, were obsessing about nothing but the national election. As her reward, she got to wake up Saturday morning to see George Bush's smiling face on page 1 of Alex Machaskee's newspaper, opening her Games (and Machaskee's) in the biggest media market of the nation's most crucial swing state, on the day the Bush campaign most wanted him there to distract voters from Kerry's big convention moment.

How do you think the Kerry campaign liked that?

I've written before that Campbell's best chance for re-election is to play a recognized role (like helping create a massive Cleveland turnout) in a Kerry victory in Ohio that puts him in the White House.

If I'm right, the Mayor appears to have some serious ground to make up in the next three months. Far from helping, the Children's Games -- and the grownup political gamesmanship around them -- probably cost her a few steps.

Of course, what's really important is that the kids had fun. But I hope the Mayor had fun, too, because she paid for it.

NEIGHBORHOOD BLOGGING... at Digital Vision.

"SAVE WITH PUBLIC POWER?" NOT ANY MORE...

Back in April I reported that Cleveland Public Power rates had actually exceeded CEI/First Energy rates for the first time in February. This should have been big news in Cleveland, because CPP still routinely claims that its customers have lower bills -- and because there's a whole chapter of recent Cleveland history devoted to the struggle to preserve "Muny Light" as a low-cost alternative to CEI.

My earlier comparison was based on CEI charges for a residential customer using 750 kilowatt-hours a month, according to the PUCO's monthly Utility Rate Surveys. At that time the PUCO surveys showed CEI's Winter bill for 750 kwh at $82.64. But that's changed; the PUCO now says the amount was really $80.08. Using that corrected figure, it seems that CPP charged more than CEI not just in February, but in November, January, March, April and May as well.


(Note: As you look at this graph, remember that CEI charges higher Summer rates for June, July, August and September. CPP has higher Summer rates in all four of those months plus May.)

Over the whole past year, the average CPP kilowatt hour for a 750-kwh household cost about 11.4 cents, compared to 11.5 cents charged by CEI. There was still a total "public power savings" for the whole year -- the princely sum of $10. But that "saving" doesn't factor in the "WPS" aggregation discount that the City provides to CEI households in Cleveland. Include that discount in the equation, and CPP's total year-round cost was higher than CEI's for Cleveland residents..

Of course, both local utilities are far more expensive than other municipal electric systems in Northeast Ohio -- not to mention the private utilities that profitably serve homes in Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, and the rest of southern Ohio for 7 to 9 cents a kilowatt-hour.

So when do you suppose this is going to become an issue for the Mayor and City Council?