President Barack Obama will speak in Youngstown today, seeking to highlight successes from his $787 billion stimulus bill, according to the Plain Dealer.
The president will make a private appearance at the VM Star steel plant, which is set to undergo a $650 million expansion. The stimulus bill helped pay for improvements that will pave the way for 350 new jobs.
The big joke in Youngstown is that the city is a popular place for presidential candidates to visit once every four years, so it’s meaningful that the president is visiting. The …

Here’s a movie I can’t wait to see: Cleveland vs. Wall St.
The documentary will be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Reuters reports, and follows victims of foreclosure facing off against banks.
-KG
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Ohio Governor Ted Strickland yesterday signed legislation that will make it easier for cities to take control of vacant and abandoned properties.
The land bank legislation was championed by Cuyahoga County officials and urban policy advocates alike. It will allow county governments to establish land banks to clear the title to foreclosed homes and begin the process of returning the property to productive use.
Many Ohio Cities have long operated their own land banks. However, without a strong legal framework, local efforts have been challenging.
The state law is modeled after a program …

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 …

Isaiah Thompson, staff writer at Philadelphia’s City Paper, is reporting that Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell is considering authorizing the leasing of more state lands for natural gas drilling. According to Thompson, the Governor and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources are ignoring “warnings from former DCNR Secretary Michael DiBerardinis, who wrote in May that too much leasing would “scar the economic, scenic, ecological and recreational values of the forest,” and that “a rush to drill threatens the certification of our state forests as sustainably managed.””
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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.

Youngstown residents have launched a campaign against the Department of Housing and Urban Development after losing out on grant money to help deal with the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis.
Local activists are circulating a petition protesting the region’s denial of the second round of Neighborhood Stabilization Funds–a program of the Stimulus Bill which provides funding for demolition, rehabilitation and landbanking efforts.
The denial came as a surprise after the Youngstown area was praised by the Brookings Institution for its application, which brought together city and suburban leaders.

-AS
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President Obama will visit this Ohio community on Friday.
Hear more about what Lorain is -and was- on this in-depth radio piece from WKSU news.
When Obama visited during the 2008 campaign, he spoke quite a bit about jobs and trade.
I imagine jobs and the economy will be on everyone’s mind there now as well.
-KG
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Take a look at this column, published in Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice.
It reviews a book, Hope and Despair in the American City by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press 2009), which examines school desegregation through metropolitan-wide school reorganization.
The premise? This work “compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, New York with the glad success of Raleigh, North Carolina. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools, and has been growing by leaps and bounds,” writes reviewer Bruce Fisher. (Fisher is …

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has recommended the city of Gary merge with another political entity to ward off financial shortcomings.
The recommendation comes as a new state law will lower the allowable tax rates in the state, threatening the impoverished city’s revenues.

Which begs the question, what city, county or other political entity is going to voluntarily merge with Gary, Indiana?
When are midwestern states going to stop treating their cities as enemies?
This isn’t leadership, this is negligence.
-AS
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