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)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.
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)
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: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?
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.
More later.