63rd Street was once a mecca of culture and business on Chicago’s South Side. Amelia Earhart went to a high school on the street. Duke Ellington confabbed with Tony Bennett between gigs. Hugh Hefner (only arguably cultural, but certainly a businessman) assembled the first issues of his magazine in a nearby apartment.

Today, 63rd Street is a tabula rasa. It’s a boulevard of grass, a razed meadow in the heart of America’s third-largest city. Not even drug dealers or gang bangers hang out here. There’s no place to sit, no stoops to command.

Monday evening I had the honor to join approximately 100 fellow participants, planners, partners, and stakeholders from throughout Greater Lansing at a kick-off meeting for the Mid-Michigan Program for Greater Sustainability at East Lansing’s Hannah Community Center. Partners in the program include the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission, Lansing Area Economic Partnership, Michigan State University Land Policy Institute, Michigan Energy Options, the Michigan Fitness Foundation, Greater Lansing Housing Coalition, the Mid-Michigan Environmental Action Council, and CAM-TV.
The four-hour event showcased the nine sustainability projects that will be part of the three-year effort …

It was inevitable. Once again the sale of the historic Cleveland school administration building is front and center.

Why? There’s big money to be made.

The historic public building sits strategically centered now. The building and open land sits in the prime location for a hotel with the construction of the $400-million medical mart/convention center at its doorstep. Right across the street in fact. With more than adequate parking facilities adjacent.

Perfect for exploitation. And exploitation is a going business in Cleveland, even with Jimmy in jail.

What makes it even more attractive to some developer is that the schools are controlled by the mayor of Cleveland.

Yes. I do believe this to be an accurate statement over the long run. Frankly, any major American city that solely relies on streets and highways for its transportation network will fail to remain competitive and will falter economically over time. That includes cities with bus transit systems that rely on the same streets and highways.
By rail, I am including subways, commuter rail, or light rail (tram, trolley, and modern streetcar). I am not including BRT (bus rapid transit), because they use the same thoroughfares as traditional buses and automobiles. …

You may have wondered, why is Ohio so screwed up?
Why are all its cities, Columbus excepted, dying?
Well one answer is manufacturing losses. The other answer is terrible, backward-looking, utterly embarrassing and depraved politics. It’s sort of a tough one to call.
Let’s examine the state’s nauseating “redistricting” process as evidence. Boring stuff! Except when told by Cleveland’s own Mike Polk, who you will remember from the infamous “Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video.”

Hey why don’t they teach this stuff in senior civics classes?
-A.S.
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Horse race journalism! Not even non-journalist bloggers without advertisers can resist it!
All kidding aside though, if I was a national political observer I would be watching Issues 2 and 3 in Ohio’s election tomorrow with interest.
Issue 2 seeks to repeal Governor Kasich’s Senate Bill 5, which restricts the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers.
I am going to go out on a limb here but I would bet my Netflix subscription that this one is going down in flames. Governor Kasich and his henchmen in Columbus could write a law …

Rust Wire is honored to have been given permission to reprint this article by Cleveland’s foremost muckracker, Roldo Bartimole, a former Plain Dealer reporter and local folk hero with encyclopedic knowledge of the region and the guts to tell it like it is.

He has written this piece about how Cleveland’s elites have enriched themselves at the expense of the Cleveland Public Schools as a matter of course for decades. He was inspired by a recent Plain Dealer article that reported 300 CMSD teachers have been given a stay from layoffs.

Civic corruption comes in many forms. We have been hearing a lot about corruption these days. However, the focus is very narrow. Unnecessarily so.

Missouri, I know you’ve been walloped by decades of deindustrialization and now the Great Recession. You’re being forced to make some terrible choices when it comes to your state budget. On the chopping block is your historic preservation tax credit. It may seem trite to cry for the potential loss of this program. I mean, shouldn’t you be spending taxpayer money on schools and roads and bridges? Yes, but hold on a second. You need to think this through. Where are your historic structures? In the middle of your cities! For the last 50 years, people have been abandoning your cities for the suburbs. In the meantime, you’ve had to build new roads, install new water and sewer lines, build new schools, and take care of this more spread-out infrastructure. Those buildings in the middle of your cities are worth keeping around. Worth investing in. They’re your history. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore and it’s not going to be cheap to fix them. But it’s worth it. Here’s why:

New York-based blogger Alon Levy shared this interesting insight in his latest post:
Urban politics in what’s now the US Rust Belt has been dominated by the same battle between the machine and the reformists since the machines first came into existence in the 19th century. Since the national partisan battles weren’t too applicable, especially after the cities became dominant-party Democratic, the battle lines cemented based on this reform vs. machine issue, creating the same intense partisanship as at the national level.
I have to say …

It’s no secret that Scott Walker is basically running for president of the Tea Party from the governor’s seat in Wisconsin. But the fact is when you examine his policies, they’re not conservative at all. In fact, they’re wasteful. On transportation in particular, Walker is a consummate borrow-and-spender (particularly if that spending benefits his buddies in the highway construction industry).

Case in point, last month we reported Walker was putting forward $400 million in new highway projects, despite his state’s apparent “broke”ness. To balance things out, this week we learn he has cut all funding for bike and pedestrian projects in the state, for a paltry $5.7 million in savings. He also cut $7 million from transit.

Fiscal problems, solved!