We often speak about sprawl at Rust Wire, and how it’s eating the region inside out like a tapeworm made of pavement and cheap building materials. Below, a prime example follows.

The place is Strongsville, a made-for-automobile city that was once trees and farmland. Now it is a series of box lots and tall, car dealership-like streetlights dotting the main drags. There, a Giant Eagle sits at a place called Westfield South Park. The store is newer, yet the franchise wants to close it. Instead, they “want to clear 13.5 acres that are now occupied by Strongsville Golf, Honey Hut Ice Cream and a residence and construct a “signature store” [down the street] that would be about 25,000 square feet larger than the current one.” Yes, the store will be huge, block-out-the-sun big: 92,600 sq. ft.

I grew up in the 1980s in Bradford, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city where the largest employer is the Zippo lighter factory. My memories are probably similar to those of a lot of Rust Wire readers — learning to ride my bike in the parking lot of an unused factory, trick-or-treating in the snow, the closure of our last department store. At 23 I moved to Buffalo, which was the “big city” to someone from a town whose population had dipped below 10,000.

Two years ago, after being semi-unemployed for a year following being laid off from the real estate department of a law firm, I gave up on my life in Buffalo and moved to New York City. Here, despite the lingering economic malaise, I’ve not only found work in affordable housing, which is what I really wanted to do, but I can even say that my career is finally taking off.

This is the first in a series called Lies Cleveland Tells Itself (That Hurt It). This is based on my belief that Cleveland has a number of unhealthy delusions about its position in the world. Feel free to fire back in the comments.
Ok. I’ve lived in Cleveland for three years. And over that time I have been sort of amazed by the level of consensus city residents have on a few key issues. It’s almost like every resident went to Cleveland loyalty confirmation classes where they were forced to repeat …

Recently, I became aware of one woman’s inspiring effort that is underway here in Greater Lansing. Ariniko O’Meara plans to walk (saunter) every single street in the City of Lansing and relay her thoughts and impressions about them across the net on her City Saunter blog, Facebook page, and on Twitter. There is also an interview on YouTube about her project.

While I had heard some previous references to this ongoing project, I never fully realized the scope and scale of it until the past week or two. There are over 600 miles of streets in Lansing, so her saunter will be continuing over an extended period of time. Instead of me trying to express the spirit of her grand crusade, here’s the summary Ariniko provided on her terrific blog found on wordpress.com.

There periodically arise big moments in urban development—moments that can affect a city’s life course. Here in Cleveland we are at one of those moments. The issue is whether or not we can finally break through the walls that have divided us from the Lake.

Though ODOT—and by extension, the Governor—are of the position of protecting these walls (as we will see), it is a pleasant reality that Cleveland’s leaders have found vision and political will to take a hammer to them. This was not always the case, as Cleveland itself bore historical culpability in constructing industry, rail, and a highway along the length of our shoreline. The resultant landscape has served as a colossal block, or a virtual vice holding back the economic potential of our lakefront. Yet as a community we are determined more than ever to release the grip.

Below are some clips of vintage Cleveland scenes. These images capture the city’s essence well.

In a few words …

Shirt off with a belly and a cat and a need for comfort. Walking through the oft-seen caged arcs of the highway overpass. Slice of blue above the chain link. Memories of people that make home home. And the realism of Harvey that is that reality rooted from hope.

The Rust Belt is poor. It’s not news. The Rust Belt is also heavily segregated. Both facts are related. Zones of extreme segregation and poverty serve to siphon potential of a city’s limited human capital, and they create negative externalities that sap a city’s limited resources.
That’s one perspective. Here is another:
It’s the ghetto. That’s how it goes.
The latter is a belief. Beliefs are filled by preconceptions. Preconceptions exist historically, but they are also refreshed from generation to generation through subtle and not-so-subtle messages that infiltrate mass mind and mass culture. Said …

Ok. In case you missed it, the city of Cleveland lost 17 percent of its population in the last decade. Nearly one in five residents packed up and left in just ten years. That’s almost 2 percent a year, or one in 50 people, that decided to leave Cleveland annually.

Where did they go? The overwhelming answer is the suburbs. The Cleveland metro region lost a relatively minor 2.5 percent of its population over the same time period, so we can be assured manufacturing losses aren’t impacting all our communities equally.

Exurban Medina County, over that time period, grew 14 percent. Exurban Avon grew 85 percent.

We often talk about cities being rebuilt on the cheap. Like casinos and convention centers and urban strip malls becoming catchalls to the reasons our societies are crumbled. What’s less talked about is how we build our humans on the cheap. “Football as a way out” is an example of this.
From eHow, in article entitled “How to Escape from The Ghettos and Poverty”, Instruction 4 states:
If you have a talent or gift, use it to your advantage. If you can sing really well or if you are a star football …

The results of the Brooking Institution’s report on poverty chronicling the changes of the previous decade were released last week and not surprisingly they proved to be staggering, particularly so for the Rust Belt.

In the Detroit Metropolitan area, the number of poor people living in a designated census tract of concentrated poverty grew by 30%. An area of concentrated poverty is defined as any census tract where 40% or more of the population is below the poverty line. Toledo led all cities with the largest increase in this acute condition. In general, after a steep decline during the 1990s, Midwestern metropolitan areas saw a nearly 80% increase in extreme poverty during the previous decade.