Beyond The Burning River
by Rev. Colin Bossen, October 25, 2009
Over the next decades Greater Cleveland will survive and thrive or struggle and decline as a single entity. Cleveland Heights, Beachwood, Shaker Heights, Lakewood, Lorain, the city of Cleveland itself or any other community in the region will rise or fall with the region as a whole. Our future is, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., caught up in "an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." This point was brought home to me this past summer when my family and I were in Paris.
One evening Sara and I went out with a friend to a neighborhood bar for a couple of drinks. The bar, named The Stupid Dog, was a hip dive. The owner was clearly a fan of graphic novels and comics. The walls and doors were covered with murals. Stacks of battered illustrated texts balanced on the ledges of booths or sat on barstools.
We found our seats. Then I went to the bar to order drinks. The bartender was gruff but warm. After calling me cheap for not buying an expensive glass of calvados, he asked me where I was from. I said "Cleveland" and he replied, "Ah, Cleveland! The asshole of the world!"
It is the sort of comment that makes you realize that your city has an image problem. This bartender knew practically nothing about our city but he knew enough to associate it with filth and unpleasantness.
As a relatively new resident of our fair metropolis I am not certain when Cleveland's image problem started. It long predates my tenure. I suspect that it even predates my birth. One of the most indelible images of the city is, after all, the 1969 burning of Cuyahoga River. I remember shortly before coming here telling a friend that my family was moving to Cleveland. My friend's response was, "isn't that the place where the river caught fire?"
Of course, the negative image of Greater Cleveland is not all about the burning river. A drive downtown on Euclid Avenue will reveal factory husks and a struggling center city. Drive east on Euclid and you will pass through East Cleveland, a community strewn with derelict wrecks that once served as businesses, apartments and single family homes.
There is more to our metropolis than moldering asphalt and concrete. While our French friend may not have known it there is much to love here. A gem of a park system, excellent museums, a world-class orchestra, fine dining and interesting ethnic cuisine, vibrant nightclubs and bars, and, in many places, tree-lined streets and walkable neighborhoods.
But even so, the truth is that Greater Cleveland is struggling. Inner ring suburbs like Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights and Lakewood--once some of the wealthiest communities in the country--are showing signs of decline. There is tension over the state of the public schools, concerns about rising crime and poverty and the long term fiscal stability of municipal governments. None of these communities will be able to address their issues alone. As urban policy expert Myron Orfield writes, "The idea of an affluent suburban monolith is a myth." And if the inner suburbs eventually collapse the problems that they succumb to will simply be transferred out to the next ring of communities.
The struggles Greater Cleveland faces are certainly not unique. Other Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee face challenges similar to ours. Like us these long standing bastions of manufacturing strength wrestle with shifts in their places in the national and world economies, urban sprawl, environmental degradation and high concentrations of poverty. To some extent this is the general fate of cities in the United States. Most Americans seem to value suburbanism over urbanism. We prefer automobiles to trains and buses, single family homes to apartments and individual yards to community parks.
The difference in lifestyle that this preference brings was something that I was aware of during my trip to Europe this summer. Even the small fishing community of Oban, Scotland--population 8,000--had a more vibrant feel to it than many American communities of four or five times the size. You can easily walk to almost anywhere within the town, strolling past many a locally owned shop as you go, in a matter of no more than twenty minutes. Perhaps even more satisfying, that same twenty minute stroll can take you beyond the edge of town into the countryside to explore ruined castles or to meander through seemingly endless pastoral scenes--sheep pastures, hay fields or rocky beaches. The reason for Oban's delightful walkability is simple, population density. Europeans build their urban areas to concentrate people, we build ours to spread them out.
And spread out they do, in the past three decades urbanized land use in Greater Cleveland has increased at five times the rate of population growth. At the same time the population has remained essentially stagnant. This sprawl is the direct result of misguided government policies that urban policy expert David Rusk has dubbed our "national suburban policy." These policies strengthen many suburban communities by encouraging new housing development and the building of roads and highways. At the same time it weakens center cities and older suburbs.
The national suburban policy developed throughout the course of the last century initially as a response to the growing need for housing during the Baby Boom. After World War II many GIs married and began to raise families. The nation's existing housing stock was inadequate to meet their needs and the country faced a housing crisis. At the same time the developing civil rights movement and the migration of rural African Americans from the South to urban industrial jobs increased racial tensions. The situation led suburban housing developer William Levitt to remark, "America can solve its housing problem or America can solve its race problem. America cannot solve both problems."
The national suburban policy has sought to solve the housing problem without addressing the race problem. Indeed to the extent that we as a country have made progress on racial issues it has been in spite of, not because of, the national suburban policy. This policy has three principal effects. It has fueled urban sprawl by pushing development ever further from center cities. It has concentrated poverty. And it has eroded the tax bases of center cities and inner ring suburbs. All three undermine the long term health and stability of our country and our region.
Urban sprawl eats up agricultural and undeveloped land for largely two purposes, new housing and automobiles. In many cases, such as in the Cleveland area, the new housing is entirely unnecessary. It serves only to make developers a profit while draining population from established communities. In our region, for example, from 1970 to 1990 new housing starts exceeded the need for new houses by almost 170%. To see the damage that this dynamic causes in the region walk down Coventry to Superior. Alternatively, you can drive through a neighborhood like Hough and see streets where every other home has been abandoned. Unless current development patterns are changed the fates of places like Hough and East Cleveland will be the fate of the whole Heights region.
This slow exodus to ever more distant suburbs is not only problematic for the economic impact it has on the core of a metropolitan region. It is troubling because of the impact it has on the environment, health and our society's social structure.
Urban sprawl encourages greater use of the automobile. Far flung suburban communities are rarely accessible by public transit. This leads to higher rates of oil consumption and accelerates the threat of global warming. At the same time the destruction of agricultural and undeveloped lands threatens the habitats of many animals and plants and increases the area's reliance on imported foodstuffs.
There are also health and cultural impacts to urban sprawl. A greater reliance on cars mean that people walk less and spend more time in the isolation of their automobile. This reliance on automobiles is undoubtedly one reason why Americans tend to weigh more than Europeans. Additionally, urban sprawl has negative cultural results. It not only segregates communities along economic lines, it encourages the creation of cheap mass produced buildings. Since communities will be abandoned as sprawl pushes ever outward there is no need to build them with care or character. As the writer William Howard Kunstler remarks, "we choose to live in Noplace, and our dwellings show it. In every corner of the nation we have built places unworthy of love and move on from them without regret."
Related to the problem of urban sprawl is the way in which the national suburban policy has tended to concentrate poverty. It has done this through a combination of ill conceived public housing policies and the development of new housing that is designed only to serve upper and middle income families, locking lower income families out of developing communities.
David Rusk argues that "For three crucial decades federal public housing policy has been the greatest promoter of economic and racial segregation in America's urban areas." Large scale public housing projects in the 1950s, sixties and seventies created pockets of high poverty. High poverty communities exacerbate the social stress of poverty and in many cases concentrate crime within a given community. Perhaps most disturbing is the effect they have on school children. One of the key indicators for how well a child will do on standardized tests is the poverty rate of his or her peers. A child whose family lives at or below the poverty line but attends a largely middle class school will routinely score higher than a child with an identical family situation who attends a school in a high-poverty neighborhood.
The third pillar of the national suburban policy is the balkanization of political life. Depending on how you draw the boundaries, the Greater Cleveland area stretches as many as sixteen counties and contains a couple of hundred different municipalities. In many cases there is little resource sharing or coordination across municipal lines leading to competition instead of cooperation among municipalities. The municipality with the highest tax base fares the best even if the rest of the region declines. Communities like Beachwood seek to steal businesses from Cleveland or other suburbs in hopes of bolstering their own tax base. Instead of focusing on developing new businesses or attracting companies from outside the metropolitan area our communities fight amongst themselves.
The national suburban policy has hit our region hard. Cleveland consistently ranks among the poorest metropolitan areas in the country. It is highly segregated. Job growth is negative. Many young people leave for better opportunities elsewhere. Neighborhoods show visible signs of decay. These harsh realities lead to the perception that we live in a has been and undesirable community. But, as congregant and urban policy expert Rob Kleidman would say, in all this bad news is the good news. The good news is that in the face of a declining metro area some local politicians and public leaders have realized that unless something changes the region's long-term prospects are bleak. People are finally starting to challenge the national suburban policy. In doing so they are building on the success that other communities have had.
Urban sprawl can be stopped. More than three decades ago Portland, Oregon was struggling. It faced many of the same challenges that Greater Cleveland does today. The major industry in Oregon, forestry, had essentially collapsed and new housing starts were draining the center city. Today Portland is thriving. It is considered by many to be one of the most desirable communities in the country and its economy has largely rebounded. Portland's renaissance can be directly traced to the decision about thirty five years ago to fix the region's urban growth boundaries. Under these policies, enacted at the state and executed at the regional levels, land that is currently urbanized must be used before new land for development is made available. This has forced growth inwards and caused Metro Portland to plan as a region instead of as individual communities.
The political balkanization of communities can also be challenged. In the Twin Cities a tax sharing program has been developed where 40% of taxes from new development across the region go into a regional pool. This means that instead of having municipalities compete against each other for business they work together to attract outside businesses to the whole region. As a result the region as a whole has been strengthened.
Finally, better housing policies can be developed. Places like Montgomery County, Maryland have instituted policies to force developers to create mixed-income rather than economically segregated new development. All new housing projects in the entire county are mandated to put aside at least 15% of their housing for low and middle income families. This has dispersed poverty and helped ensure that children from low income households are not isolated in high-poverty schools. You will probably not be surprised to learn that Montgomery County is one of the most prosperous regions in the country and has one of the nation's better school districts. Unlike Greater Cleveland, racial and economic segregation in Montgomery County are significantly lower than the national average.
In Greater Cleveland some people are beginning to advocate for the sort of policy changes that were instituted in places like Portland, Montgomery County and the Twin Cities. Of all of these the policy change that has most support is regional revenue sharing. The Regional Prosperity Initiative, a collaboration between community leaders and politicians from both suburbs and center cities, is an effort to develop a Twin City like revenue sharing model across sixteen counties in Northeast Ohio. The initiative will also seek to better coordinate land use across the region so that urban sprawl can be tamed.
The faith community has an important role to play in supporting efforts like the Regional Prosperity Initiative. Faith communities are often regional in nature. Our own congregation should provide an example. The members of the Board of Trustees, for instance, live in Brooklyn, Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Euclid and Lyndhurst. The regional nature of community should mean that we have regional interests that transcend the boundaries of particular municipalities.
Our congregation can have an effect on the debate over and shape of future policy. The formula for success is simple and spelled out by the old union slogan: Education, Organization, and Emancipation. In order to understand the issues we have to educate ourselves. There are many ways to do so. I can offer occasional sermons like this one. We can leverage our developing adult religious education forum to feature speakers on regionalism. We can read books like David Rusk's "Inside Game/Outside Game," William Howard Kunstler's "The Geography of Nowhere," or Myron Orfield's "Metropolitics." We could form a study group, attend lectures on regional topics at places like the City Club or just resolve to keep up with the debate in the newspaper.
After education comes organization. To some extent as a religious community we are already involved in efforts to organize around issues of regionalism. Our congregation is a member of NOAH, the North East Ohio Alliance for Hope, a coalition of congregations working for social justice throughout the region. In the past NOAH has sponsored educational events and forums on regionalism. Additionally, I am involved in We Believe Ohio's efforts to better organize the faith community around issues of regionalism. Some of us hope to organize a series of conversations in the Heights area sometime in the spring. If we do so we will be sure to involve our congregations in the process. Such forums would be an opportunity to both educate ourselves and challenge our public officials to think regionally rather than municipally.
There are other exciting organizing efforts underway that we can get involved with either as a congregation or as a community. The Cleveland Commitment developed during the sustainability summit sponsored by Mayor Jackson this past summer is one example. Once finalized the commitment will serve as a set of principles which individuals and organizations can use to guide their decision making with an eye towards the health of collective whole. Such a document speaks to the seventh principle of our Unitarian Universalist Association, "respect for the interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part."
After the hard work of organization, and it is hard some times taking the course of generations, comes the final step, emancipation. Perhaps no human community has reached this ultimate goal of the liberation of the human spirit. Nonetheless, it is something to strive for and the visions of poets and dreamers tell us what it might be like. One such vision that has been articulated for Greater Cleveland is that of a Green City on a Blue Lake. A Green City on a Blue Lake would be environmentally sustainable. It would use its land and resources wisely, have primarily mixed-income and multicultural neighborhoods and seek to steward the community for the next generation.
The residents of such a place would not be told that they live in a cesspool when visiting foreign lands. Instead people would remark, "Ah, Cleveland, that plum, that peach, I love Cleveland with all of her natural beauty and cultural treasures. How lucky you are to live there."
Maybe it be so and Amen.
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