1800 JOBS? Listening to the Steelyard Commons debate on "90.3 at 9", it occurs to me that I should re-post this from March...
"1800 PERMANENT JOBS": By now, if you live in the Cleveland media market you've heard it a hundred times: "Steelyard Commons would create 1,800 permanent jobs." This is the killer argument, the reason no sane community leader should do anything that might jeopardize the project.
But it doesn't have much to do with reality.
Let's assume that the new mall is built as projected, with five big-box stores (including an expandable Wal-Mart) and several dozen smaller spaces in adjacent strips. And let's assume the vacancy rate is low and the stores are very successful (you'll notice we're doing a whole lot of assuming). And finally, let's assume that the resulting work force is, indeed, around 1,800 people.
Does this mean we've "created" 1,800 new jobs? No, and here's why: New retail floor space doesn't create new retail jobs. Higher retail sales, i.e. more consumer spending, is what creates new jobs (sometimes). And since building a mall in the Flats will have no effect on the amount of money Cleveland-area consumers spend -- only on where we spend it -- it will result in little or no new job creation.
Here's a chart of total retail employment in the Cleveland-Lorain region during the last eleven years. During this period, millions of square feet of retail space were built in Cuyahoga and Lorain Counties: the South Park mall in Strongsville, Avon Commons, Legacy Village, the Promenade in Westlake, most of the Ridge Park mall in Brooklyn, etc., etc., not to mention a half-dozen Wal-Marts, another half-dozen Targets, chain drugstores on every corner and many specialty big-boxes. So look at the resulting employment change:
Not what you'd call a robust growth picture, eh?
Retail employment doesn't grow when developers build more stores, it just moves around. This is especially true when the region's retail space is already overbuilt, as ours is, according to the County Planning Department's Northeast Ohio Regional Retail Analysis.
If eighteen hundred people get hired at Steelyard Commons, that will simply mean that a similar number of jobs are lost somewhere else in the area. And it's a sure bet that many will be lost to Cleveland residents, over 15,000 of whom already work in city or suburban retail establishments.
So please, can we stop talking about "creating 1,800 jobs" in Steelyard Commons? It isn't exactly a lie, but it's even farther from being a meaningful truth.
