And yet again the 800 pound gorilla gets ignored at the table
URL below goes to a nice multipage survey in today's WP on how attracting educated young people ties directly into a city and a metro's economy and prospects. Part is kind of obvious - young people pick where to live for reasons other than economics. Jobs matter but so does dating scene, buzz, perceived kewl, kulture...
However in using Seattle and Cleveland as poster children they had to do the PC thing of ignoring the intersection of race-crime-welfare-class-schools-politics. Similar size cities. One is advancing into the 21st century while the other is dieing. All true. However you cannot rationally discuss why without admitting that the 800 pound gorilla is there.
Cities such as Cleveland were essentially nuked by decisions made during the Second Reconstruction [1948-1980 more or less]. The resultant bantustans created [Cleveland, DC, Baltimore, Newark...] all suffer from the same defects.
1. a political leadership locked into a civil rights era siege mentality
2. Too much of the economy that remains locked into government employment - welfare payments
3. Too much of what business sector remains consisting of big corps playing corporate liberal by leaving facilities in the city while the Suits live in gated suburban enclaves
4. a set of embedded cost structures - crime, insurance, politics, unions...-such that these become expensive places to do business as well as inconvenient and dangerous
5. Crime as a form of intifata against people with the wrong color skin
6. Turning the school system into a jobs program where results are socially defined away
7. Insisting that fixing these things are a national or moral problem instead of a localized political one
Now it may well be that it is too painful to address the 800 pound gorilla. Letting the Clevelands wither away as those of any race who educate themselves or have the gumption to better themselves leave may be the least bad choice. However Cleveland's problem is not just the social and educational unpreparedness for being the next San Jose or Austin but is very specifically that it is a black majority city with these problems in a white majority state and nation. Until we can be at least honest enough to say THAT we are in a bottomless world of PC hurt.
Scott
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17201-2003Nov8.html
Cleveland's population in 1950 was 914,808, but it lost 30 percent of its residents in the 1970s, 15 percent in the '80s and 5 percent in the '90s. Rockefeller left early, moving to New York before the turn of the century.
Although Seattle is mired in its worst recession in three decades and hobbled by the loss of about 17,000 jobs at Boeing Co., it is an altogether different story.
The city has succeeded in shifting its economic base over the years -- from lumber and fishing to airplane manufacturing to high-tech enterprises and specialty retail. Its school system, although far from perfect, never collapsed. It does not have intractable pockets of poverty. It does not have to clean up the festering environmental legacy of the industrial age. It is 70 percent white, 13 percent Asian, 5.4 percent black and 5 percent Hispanic. (Cleveland is 51 percent black, 41.5 percent white and 7.3 percent Hispanic.)
The success of U.S. cities, demographers agree, is not related to racial composition but rather to education levels. High levels of immigration by nonwhite college graduates in the 1990s to such cities as Seattle, Austin and San Francisco have been a major factor in their prosperity. At the same time, the relative dearth of college-educated immigrants of any race to cities such as Cleveland is viewed as a key reason for their decline.
posted by scott 9:06 AM