Rust Wire has previously highlighted Donald Carter, the David Lewis Director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. (Take a look at our prior post on Carter’s efforts to trade the term “Rust Belt” for “Water Belt” and change “Sun Belt” into “Drought Belt.”)
Here’s a piece by Carter from Sunday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette discussing The Mayors’ Institute on City Design, which took place last month with mayors from Springfield, Illinois; Elkhart, Indiana; Canton, Ohio; Charleston and Huntington, West Virginia; Kenosha and Racine, Wisconsin.
See if you agree with …

Why not Detroit? Or Cleveland? Or a more compact, less-sprawled out city like Pittsburgh?
This Reuters story says Houston, the “petro metro” is aiming to be the electric car capital of America.
Stories like this make me so mad.
A city in the Great Lakes region would be much better suited to this, yet some folks in Houston are showing more leadership on this issue. For instance, Houston has signed a deal to build public charging stations. “Such agreements are key to easing skeptical consumers’ fears of running out of juice if their …

Greater Ohio and the Brookings Institutional have released their long-awaited report, Restoring Prosperity: Transforming Ohio’s Communities for the Next Economy.
Among the findings, Ohio should consolidate local governments and school districts to reduce the local tax burden. The state should redirect manufacturing strength toward new technologies and maximize federal investment.
To compete, Ohio will need to reinvest in its metropolitan regions, which account for 81 percent of the state’s population and 87 percent of its GDP, the report states.
“Ohio’s seven largest metro areas concentrate slightly more than 75 percent of the state’s …

The city of Cleveland’s residential tax abatement program has been a boon for the city, according to a study by researchers at Cleveland State University.

A series of tax abatements for new home construction and rehabilitation begun in 1987, jumpstarted new home construction in the city from a virtual standstill in the city. About 3,000 homes were built under the program, or 3.5 percent of the total housing stock in Cleveland. Including rehabilitations, about 5.7 percent, more than one in twenty homes, have been built or improved using tax abatements. This compared to 1980-83, when fewer than 20 new homes were built in the city each year.

Can “branding” a city through a snappy slogan and slick marketing campaign work?
A lot of cities apparently think so, including Dayton and Cleveland, as outlined in this USA Today story.
They point to successful and memorable slogans, like “I love New York,” and “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.” It’s also interesting to read the comments under the story- on mentions great success North Dakota has had marketing itself as a “Wild West” destination for bicyclists.
The story doesn’t mention less-successful campaigns. (I’m thinking of the Michael Moore movie Roger & …

Great article in the Plain Dealer about the city East Cleveland–Ohio’s poorest city–its new mayor and the seemingly impossible task of turning it around.

Gary Norton is young (37) and well educated (he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and earned his master’s degree in public administration at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs). And that’s a big change in a city that has been characterized by political mismanagement and corruption. Former Mayor Emmanuel Onunwor was convicted on bribery charges in 2004.

Norton’s election has injected fresh hope in the largely black, inner-ring suburb of Cleveland, which has lost more than 1,500 homes to foreclosure in the past two years–about 500 per mile, the highest in the state.

You may have already seen this USA Today story on a suburban Atlanta congregation that wants to purchase a closed Buffalo church, take it apart, ship it to Georgia and rebuild it there.
Some groups say it is a great way to preserve an otherwise vacant and unused structure. (The Diocese closed the church in 2008 because of declining enrollment - an issue many of our cities have faced that we’ve written about on this blog before.) You can see the web site for the parish that wants to bring the …

Read here what one Buffalo woman misses after moving to Florida.
-KG

Take a look at this CNN article about a Chinese firm with plans to build a “Chinese-style mega shopping mall” in Milwaukee.

“The cost of doing business there is very low,” Wu Li, president of Toward Group told CNN. “The people are friendly, the environment is peaceful and the pace of living is slow. It is a good place for Chinese enterprises to go abroad.”

The story explains Wu’s company recently purchased a dormant shopping complex in northwestern Milwaukee that was built in the 1970s, for $6 million. It will open the mall, renamed AmAsia, in August, according to CNN, part of a growing trend of Chinese investment in US real estate. That trend has mostly been in cities outside the Rust Belt –until now.

Cleveland residents,
The Great Lakes Urban Exchange is hosing its third annual conference in Cleveland this year.
The group, which aims to share ideas and best practices for revitalizing Great Lakes cities, has a survey about how how the conference can best be used for “ACTION, rather than agendas.”
The group is “issuing this preemptive survey to help us plan conference activities that will be immediately actionable, useful, and effective in answering the needs of the ‘do-ers’ who are making Cleveland a healthier, more sustainable, more equitable and successful city.”
Find out more and …