MAYOR "CELEBRATES" BEING 12TH POOREST CITY: Well, at least the PD figured out that the new American Community Survey numbers on poverty in Cleveland are questionable. So they put "no longer poorest U.S. big city" in a headline across the top of page 1, then spent half the lead paragraph as well as half the story explaining that experts think the numbers behind the headline are, well, very suspect. I guess this is the New Journalism.

But then, of course, we have this:

But other poverty watchers are heartened. They say Cleveland's optimistic numbers reflect trends reported by social service agencies and hunger centers, where demands for services have stabilized or fallen.

"I wouldn't write this off to just sampling error," said Claudia Coulton, co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change at Case Western Reserve University. "That's quite a big difference being reported. I think we can believe there are fewer poor people in Cleveland."

And the Mayor, with depressing inevitability, "cheerfully welcomed the news".

"Cleveland has moved to No. 12 on the list. I want to celebrate that," she said at the opening of a $3.8 million extension to Bessemer Avenue near I-490 industry Tuesday morning.

She credited her administration's success at building homes and creating jobs in the city.

Problem is, what the new survey numbers say is that there were a lot fewer poor people in Cleveland a year ago, when the Mayor was calling an emergency Summit On Poverty and Coulton and other "poverty watchers" were crowding in to tell us how bad things were. Guess we didn't really need that Summit after all. Never mind.

The PD didn't ask the Mayor if she also cheerfully welcomed the new ACS' news that 50,000 people left the city between 2002 and 2004, bringing the total population below 415,000. Maybe that's tomorrow's front page headline.