Lackawanna, just outside Buffalo, wants to tear down this beautiful building.

–David Steel, Buffalo Rising

Jim Russel, from Bar Mleczny in the Cleveland Review

***

Salon’s Will Doig wrote a thoughtful, nuanced piece detailing the concept of Rust Belt Chic as a way to revitalize America’s broken legacy cities. The story is getting play, and so the concept—while bantered around in Rust Belt circles for a minute—is bubbling up in the country’s zeitgeist. At its most basic, Rust Belt Chic is about defining the factory coast’s culture and aesthetic as a means to attract those longing for a dose of authenticity and usable space. Miami we are not. Buffalo doesn’t need to be.

Buffalo's Art Deco. Courtesy of Art Deco Architecture

But Rust Belt Chic is more complex than that. And it’s high time the concept—as an economic development strategy—gets spelled out. This is perhaps the first attempt to do so. Consider it a working manifesto.

But first let me say what Rust Belt Chic is not: a gentrification tool—or a white-breading of the post-industrialized landscape with a homogenized group. In fact it’s loose and lazy to pigeon-hole Rust Belt Chic into the message: “come hither; we’ve got coffee shops in our ruin porn”. Because if that’s all it was then it would be nothing, as true economic development is derived from cities that integrate the breadth of life’s experiences by ensuring the presence of those with varied life experience.

Here’s what else Rust Belt Chic isn’t: playing in decay—drinking PBR with a temp tat on your neck— and attracting cool by acting cool.

Instead, Rust Belt Chic is churches and work plants hugging the same block. It is ethnic as hell. It is the Detroit sound of Motown. It is Cleveland punk. It is getting vintage t-shirts and vinyl for a buck that are being sold to Brooklynites for the price of a Manhattan meal. It is babushka and snakeskin boots. It is wear: old wood and steel and vacancy. It is contradiction, conflict, and standing resiliency. But most centrally: Rust Belt Chic is about home, or that perpetual inner fire of longing to be comfortable in one’s own skin and one’s community. Yet this longing is less about regressing to the past than it is finding a future through your history.

Courtesy of Cleveland Press. h/t: Cleveland SGS

Now let me take a step back to delineate the history of Rust Belt Chic’s arrival—an arrival, mind you, that was created by no one, but rather evolved by macro-cultural and economic shifts much bigger than an idea.

Rust Belt Chic leverages a person’s attachment to place to get them reinvested in that place. And no doubt, folks in the Rust Belt are attached: to their place and culture, to plain-spoken talk and mannerisms secured by red blood restraint, to blue-collar values and roots. Granted, it can be a restrictive attachment, one primarily defined by separation.

You see, this attachment—it fostered a complacency that held the region back. We became too secure in our way of life. We held onto old industry, and innovation passed us by, and so went the jobs. We were kind of like the dude who loved the thing so much he held it until its suffocation. So many people left because they had to. The Rust Belt diaspora cannot be regionally matched. But this forced separation has served to strengthen the attachment over the decades, albeit across space. America’s Team became Steeler Nation. And many want to come back. From Changing Gears, some letters from the diaspora on a series called Midwest Migration:

After university I explored several different career options but found none fulfilling. Therein lies the true reason I ultimately left Michigan: the opportunity to explore a far deeper pool of creative and career opportunities. After living in New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, I can definitively say this: the grass is NOT greener…I would move back in a heartbeat. If a good job opportunity presented itself, I’d be out of Los Angeles before I could blink.

But then many prefer to stay away.

My high school is now a vacant lot…and the cold wind blows old papers in the same spot where I had to study algebra. Yet my mind goes back to the room where Miss Edith Pollock taught me how to write.

I love Sioux City so much it hurts. I wish to hurt it back.

Would I move back to the Midwest? Not if they made me the governor of Iowa. Not for a million dollars in cash. Not at gunpoint. Not if I got to relive it all, and be a teenager again. But the memories of that place and time are precious.

Both of these stories illustrate the split nature that is Rust Belt attachment: it can be played out in an all-hands-on-deck desire to come back, or it can exist in nostalgia which—as defined in a recent Paris Review piece—“asks you to long only for something that no longer exists.”

And both are useful in terms of attraction, believe it or not. Because if Rust Belt Chic is informed by anything it is this: that Rust Belt city built on a restrictive legacy is not the future of the Rust Belt cities. Cities are built on flow: the ins and the outs of a variety of people. So attract those wanting back, but also encourage those who stay away to tell the story to those who are up for the challenge to rebuild America.

Which brings us to the second main tenant of Rust Belt Chic: the attraction of mythical geography—or that land of opportunity and usable space.

America is broken. Not just the Rust Belt, but everywhere. Income disparity. Unemployment. In the past those who were shut out—in particular the immigrants and the yet-minted young—would do what Americans did best: Go West, and build something of your own. But now we have saturated the coasts. Many are looking around for a geographic workshop where a new American way can be built. Some are beginning to turn inward to find that “out there” is really in here: the Rust Belt.

There are a few reasons for this. First is the opportunity that comes with usable space. Artists are being priced out of established cities like New York and L.A. Cheap space to live and work is becoming attractive. First- and second-generation immigrants are getting the itch too, and they are finding that Rust Belt cities can be the “America” within America. Take the case of Allentown, the fastest growing city in Pennsylvania. After years of shrinking, this is shocking. And the city has Hispanics to thank for it.

Where are they coming from? Major East Coast cities. Why? From The Prospector:

“A lot of the growth has to do with the Puerto Rican community. They tend to be moving from New York and Philadelphia, areas with high rent,” said Emilio A. Parrado, sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania…

“This historically is the way people move up socially. You move up by moving out of the [big] city, by following better opportunities and better housing.”

But while cheap space is a big plus, it isn’t the whole story of Rust Belt Chic’s attraction. Part of it is psycho-geographic. And here is where ruins and the idea of the urban frontier comes in.

Courtesy of Sean Posey via Details Magazine

Urban ruin is a dirty word in America—so dirty that it has been referred to as “ruin porn.” The thinking goes that decay invites gawkers in the same way celebrity funerals attract scumbag journalists. But this says more about those censoring American evidence of failures than it does about those willing to frame failure via ruin. It is the latter that’s embodied by Rust Belt Chic. Says Cleveland painter Amy Casey in a San Francisco Chronicle piece:

“It’s not too uncommon to find people [in the Rust Belt] who sort of love the broken-down industrial history of the area. It’s very bittersweet, which may be a Midwestern thing. There are people here transforming leftover remnants – old manufacturing commercial buildings into…interesting projects. It’s a pretty slow process, though I find a great deal of inspiration from the landscape.”

Be it artists, urban agriculturalists, immigrants, infill developers, architects, or the sweat equitable worker, vacancy is often less about emptiness than it is about space. But saying that’s the end of it is selling the aestheticism of decay short. Decay shouts that things don’t last forever, so don’t hold on. Be open as a culture—a city—lest you be fooled again.

In fact the best revitalization efforts occur by bringing the past into the present—or by seeing what was there, understanding how it failed, and then integrating those mistakes into a plan for the future. This is how individuals revitalize broken lives. So why is it not apropos for a collection of individuals in their attempts to revitalize a broken city?

The Rust Belt is a region steeped in both great rising and great decline, and in that regard it’s ahead of the curve. There is a trending sense in American consciousness that here is where the country’s creative destruction is centered. We have been like a splattered seed that has been sitting to stew. Now it is time for the creative part of our destruction.

And there is space for everyone. Even the hip.

–Richey Piiparinen

Source: ribike.org

At the end of this post is a list of those communities in the Rust Belt that have been designated by the League of American Bicyclists as a “Bicycle Friendly Community” on its 2012 list. A total of 210 communities have received this honor nationwide, including 47 (22.4%) here in the Rust Belt.

Nine communities that are shown in italics were added to the list in the past year.  Another 11 communities in the Rust Belt where named honorable mentions. Please note the list does not include several communities in the Boston, New York City, and Washington, DC metropolitan areas. Some feel these cities should not be considered part of the Rust Belt.

More details about criteria and how your community can be designated a “Bicycle Friend Community” and are available through this weblink to the League of American Bicyclists website.  The five categories (or E’s) which are used for judging a community’s bike friendliness are:

• Engineering
• Education
• Encouragement
• Enforcement
• Evaluation and Planning

Separate designations are possible for states, college campuses, and businesses.  Congratulations to all those communities so designated, especially to those in the Rust Belt.

PLATINUM (0)

• None (only three communities nationwide – Boulder, CO; Davis, CA; and Portland, OR)

GOLD (2)

• Madison, Wisconsin
• Minneapolis, Minnesota

SILVER (5)

• Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Bloomington, Indiana
• Burlington, Vermont
• Chicago, Illinois
• La Crosse, Wisconsin

BRONZE (40)

• Baltimore, Maryland
• Brunswick, Maine
• Carmel, Indiana
• Cedar Falls, Iowa
• Cedar Rapids, Iowa
• Cincinnati, Ohio
• Columbus, Indiana
• Columbus, Ohio
• Dayton, Ohio
• Des Moines, Iowa
• Eau Claire, Wisconsin
• Fort Wayne, Indiana
• Franklin, Pennsylvania
• Goshen, Indiana
• Grand Rapids, Michigan
• Greater Mankato, Minnesota
• Houghton, Michigan
• Indianapolis/Marion County, Indiana
• Iowa City, Iowa
• Keene, New Hampshire
• Lansing, Michigan
• Marquette, Michigan
• Morgantown, West Virginia
• Naperville, Illinois
• Newark, Delaware
• Northampton, Massachusetts
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Portage, Michigan
• Rochester, Minnesota
• St. Louis, Missouri
• St. Paul, Minnesota
• Schaumburg, Illinois
• Sheboygan County, Wisconsin
• South Bend, Indiana
• South Windsor, Connecticut
• State College, Pennsylvania
• Traverse City, Michigan
• University Heights, Iowa
• Urbana, Illinois

HONORABLE MENTION (11)

• Detroit, Michigan
• Dubuque, Iowa
• Elmhurst, Illinois
• Gahanna, Ohio
• Hagerstown, Maryland
• Huntington, West Virginia
• Middleton, Wisconsin
• Monroe County, Indiana
• Portland, Maine
• River Falls, Wisconsin
• West Des Moines, Iowa

Rick Brown

There are many histories of Cleveland. Not just one history of the city. No history that would tell us, “This is the way it was.”

There are many ways to report history. It could be from the view of different people. Different movements. Different economics. Different heroes. Different villains. Different reasons why the city went this way or that way.

Now, there is a new history examining this city through the eyes of what many people might see as odd or unusual.

Daniel Kerr’s “Derelict Paradise – Homelessness and urban development in Cleveland, Ohio,” does this. It is a remarkable testament of how – through the city’s history – the poor (especially black poor) have been pushed aside to make way for what the wealth of the community deemed Progress.

It tests the matter of who enjoys Progress and who doesn’t.

As Cleveland media hail and promote casino gambling and a new convention center as the latest city comebacks, Kerr has some reminders that there are losers and winners. We pretty much can bet on which will be which in this contest.

Even with the Group Plan of the early 1900s, Kerr says, the demand for Progress came at a great cost to low income Clevelanders. “In 1899 the chamber (of commerce) urged the city to eliminate ‘a notorious slum’ known as the Hamilton Avenue vice district” to make way for a civic center.

“The plan the architects argued would alleviate disorder and promote harmony: ‘The jumble of buildings that surround us in our new cities contributes nothing of valuable to life; on the contrary, it sadly disturbs our peacefulness and destroys that repose within us which is the basis of all contentment,” he wrote. Speak of elitism. Whose repose is destroyed? As whose expense?

Kerr writes “Neither the architect nor the political and business leaders that backed the plan indicated any concern for the people who would be displaced by the project.” Business as usual. Past is present.

We love to idealize past leaders. They did such magnificent things, we are told. Kerr cites one business leader complaining that people uprooted by new construction didn’t move where they should have moved, but “destroyed the value of the Erie Street Cemetery.” Such a shame! How inconvenient.

The past echoes through the years. Today we see Mayor Frank Jackson and downtown cheerleaders eager to swipe everyone without a suit and tie from Public Square for the casino owners and players. It was ever so.

“The proliferation of panhandlers on downtown sidewalks provided the most immediate challenge to Cleveland’s boosters at the onset of the Depression. The sheer numbers of people begging or selling apples, pencils and other items on the streets threatened the general sense of order that Cleveland politicians, businessmen, and civic leaders wanted to project,” Kerr writes. Yesterday and still today. Whose streets are these?

Even the 1930s had its Joe Romans and Joe Marinuccis doing the bidding of corporate leaders.

And Mayor Jackson has pledged some $800,000 to keep the casino area cleansed.

Kerr takes us through the years of rousting those who have no place to call home. In the early 1930s Whiskey Island was such a place, called at that time a “Hooverville” after the Depression President. In 1934 Mayor Harry Davis ordered eviction of the shanties built as shelter by the homeless. The Convention Bureau, he reports, wanted to sell Cleveland as “a summer spot.” Thus the bulldozing. Even the pr dreams don’t change much with time.

The book gave me a peek into Cleveland before I got here in 1965. I learned first-hand about the urban renewal disasters here. As a reporter I got to travel through some of its tragedies in Hough and other East Side neighborhoods. The Plain Dealer in the mid-1960s had full-page pieces on such problems under the title “The Changing City” and I was assigned to many of them.

One aspect of this period that has escaped notice and it may be responsible for the advances possible now in Ohio City, Tremont and Detroit Shoreway was the lonely fight Al Grisanti made to keep the destructive urban renewal from damaging the west side. Grisanti, a former downtown councilman, fought urban renewal most of his life. He was often a visitor at the PD news offices, trying to alert reporters about urban renewal dangers. One of his favorite sayings was “We got to organize the confusion.” Someone from the street couldn’t walk the news offices of today’s PD. Tight security.

Grisanti stopped urban renewal before it crossed the Cuyahoga River. It never did to the west side what it did to east side. Essentially wrecking it. Kerr tells of this disaster, too.

Cleveland, as usual, was pushed beyond its limits by an active corporate and foundation community. It had, writes Kerr, more acreage (6,060 acres) under urban renewal than any other American city.

Indeed, Upshur Evans of the Cleveland Development Foundation (CDF was created by $5 million from the Leonard Hanna fund, routed through the Cleveland Foundation) pushed or went around city government, helping cause a disaster that still reverberates. Evans, a former Sohio executive, said this, according to Kerr about urban renewal: “It isn’t a matter of social consciousness – it is a matter of plain, ordinary, practical common business sense. In short, we believe it will pay out. It means ‘pay dirt’ for Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, and northeast Ohio.” It didn’t pay out or off. Not to those who pushed it and surely not to those pushed.

I remember interviewing Evans when I was at the PD. He revealed that the business community gave a hefty sum to the City Planning Department to “plan” downtown. At the same time – behind the scenes – the development foundation was planning urban renewal. It would render the city’s plan irrelevant. I remember this because when we (me and the late Don Sabath) wrote it in an article, city editor Ted Princiotto, a lunch companion of Evans, challenged us that Evans couldn’t have said that. Both of us agreed he did. The information was muted in the published account.

One of the clearest assessments of this time was made by banker Tom Westropp who sat on the city plan commission. “For some the urban renewal program worked very well, indeed. Hospitals and education institutions have been constructed and enlarged. So have commercial and industrial interests and many service organizations, all with the help of urban renewal dollars. With respect to housing, however, the urban renewal program has been a disaster.” His last remark was most telling: “I wish I could believe that all of this was accidental and brought about by the inefficiency of well meaning people – but I just can’t. The truth, it seems to me, is that it was planned that way.”

Kerr covers one of the most despicable moves of this time. Many blacks were being uprooted by urban renewal. Little if anything was done to provide relocation for those displaced.

“Living up to its promise, CDF found a solution to the city’s urban renewal doldrums, build the relocation housing on a dump. Using slag from the blast furnaces of Republic Steel, the infamous Kingsbury Run would be filled and new housing constructed,” writes Kerr. It was a decision that highlighted the racism that helped produce protests and riots in the 1960s. People began to realize what was happening to them. They were being treated like garbage.

Kerr writes that the PD editorial board “threw its support behind the plan.”

Little changes. The ideas of the big shots are always A1 at the PD.

“Amid this state of euphoria, Cleveland’s disastrous headfirst foray into urban renewal began,” Kerr concludes. As one federal official said, “Cleveland is our Vietnam. We’d like to get out but we don’t know how.” That summed up the game played on the city’s citizens by its highest level corporate leaders.

Now, I can’t forget that this book addresses homelessness – in the past and present. His personal experience with the homeless in Cleveland prompted Kerr to embark on this book, he told me. He began this project in the fall of 1995. He started having free weekly picnics on Public Square. He reports what the homeless told him. Their remarks remind one that they know what is happening to them. And have ideas of why it is happening and by whom.

I believe he makes a strong case for why we have so many homeless people in our cities today. Anyone working in the city should read his take on this phenomenon.

Why is there and why has there been so much homelessness in Cleveland. Is this a new phenomenon, as many seem to believe? Or is it endemic, always a part of our city and how it operates?

How does homelessness happen?

If Kerr’s assessments are right – and I think they are – a lot of so-called “homeless” people are going to be especially hurt by the opening of the Higbee building casino.

From the 1880s to the 2012s little has changed. The modus operandi remains the same. Get those people out of sight. It hurts business.

Kerr reveals with strong evidence how a combination of vast destruction of cheaper housing, the development of day labor businesses that provide cheap labor at such reduced income that it makes housing unattainable. Combine this with the horrendous climate of jailing people, especially blacks, and you have a recipe for more and more guaranteed homelessness.

“The massive expansion of the penal system benefits the careers of politicians, provides profits for prison contractors, and offers secure employment for guards, while it leaves ex-offenders unable to access stable jobs or housing. Non-profit organizations that run shelter and social service for local governments benefit from the contracts they receive.

“They are not charged with eliminating homelessness; their role is to contain it,” he concludes.

Kerr notes that former Mayor, Governor and Senator, George Voinovich’s family profited handsomely by prison expansion. The family business, the V Group, between 1980 and 2000, Kerr writes, constructed over a dozen state, county and city jails in Ohio. “The firm grabbed some $100 million in contracts” in that time, Kerr writes.

With 20 percent of the state’s inmates from Cuyahoga County, “Mayor Voinovich helped support the family business by keeping his brother’s new prisons filled beyond capacity,” Kerr writes.

Voinovich also helped increase the number of homeless by eliminating general relief. Kerr cites other Gov. Voinovich moves that contributed to these problems.

Kerr also reminds us of the Arthur Feckner case when Mayor Voinovich and Council President George Forbes helped police in a botched sting deal that the PD labeled as instituting a “drug plague” at a public housing complex. It put 30 pounds of cocaine on the street.

Kerr convinces me that rather than mental illness or drug or alcoholism the prime reasons for homelessness are the conditions he cites and we have allowed and perpetuated them.

Shelters, say Kerr and the homeless he talk with, are not an answer, though they have become the institutional solution for government.

“For many, sheer existence of homeless shelters is ample evidence that our society is making a concerted effort to address the issue. This assurance allows cities like Cleveland to pour public resources into subsidizing project such as new professional sports stadium, corporate construction, and condominium and townhouse developments. This confidence in the shelter system allows the market to run smoothly,” Kerr writes.

“When un-housed people resist the conditions within shelters and the policies designed to keep them there, their actions are incomprehensible for many other citizens. The efforts are seen as further evidence that the homeless are insane,” Kerr writes in his conclusion.

One homeless man explains to Kerr: “They have torn down nearly all the low-cost housing in the city. At one time downtown Cleveland was a haven, almost a utopia, for lower income people. There were a thousand cheap hotels, and cheap rooming houses, etc. They have torn them down for different stadiums. And they’ve raised, instead of $3.00 a night hotels, there are $150, $300 a night hotels.” He says they have tried to make downtown a “playground for the rich.”

He continued: “They wanted to create a complete new image for downtown Cleveland of everyone prosperous, of everyone doing real well, so they really made a sweep on all the poor people there.”

I can personally attest to the cheap housing that no longer exists. In 1965, I came to work for the Plain Dealer, having left my family temporarily back East. I took a room on E. 18th Street not far from the PD on Superior. The street had numerous rooming houses. The cost was $10 a week. Cheap enough for even the lowest paid worker. I lasted one night. Too depressing for me. Then I went to the New Amsterdam hotel, a block or so away, for $22 a week. That too was cheap housing. But it was cheap housing. It has all been destroyed for Cleveland State University.

Kerr writes, “With billions of dollars being invested downtown and with the lakefront and Gateway projects nearing completion (now it’s Horseshoe Casino and Med-Mart Convention center), Mayor White, county officials, local foundations, and area business leaders scrambled to keep the shelters open throughout the summer to prevent 300 homeless men and women from sleeping on the sidewalks and in the parks downtown. Within days of the scheduled closing, the White administration announced that the city, county, and local foundations had raised $215,000 to keep the shelters open throughout the summer. Community Development Director Chris Warren, bristling from the criticism of advocates of the homeless, defensively maintained: ‘We should not apologize for taking on the task of keeping people off the street.’ The concerns and criticism of social service providers dissipated that winter when the federal government increased its shelter grant for the city from $309,000 to $884,000.” But to hear Kerr’s homeless voices – shelters were not the answer – unsafe, dirty and often run by people who demeaned them.

Nothing like your own home; even if a shack.

We obviously need more affordable housing, an alternative to day labor businesses that rob workers to provide other businesses with cheap labor, and a much higher minimum wage.

* * *

Daniel R. Kerr lived in Cleveland Heights, is a graduate of Heights High; has a BA from Carleton College; MA & PhD from Case Western Reserve University; taught five years at James Madison U. in Virginia and is now interior director of public history at American University in D. C. He is married to Tatiana Belenkaya, also a graduate of Heights High; a BA from CWRU and a law degree from Cleveland Marshall. They have a 14-month old daughter, Elsa Kerr. The book is published by University of Massachusetts Press and is available in hardback and paperback.

If you didn’t have a chance to attend, but are curious, you can view the whole presentation here:

Video after the jump

(Fun fact: intro comes from Rust Wire founding editor Angie Schmitt, a Streetsblog employee.)

The spring of 1968 ushered in one of the most tumultuous years in modern American history–a year that nearly saw the fabric of the country split apart as assassinations, riots, and protests rocked cities from coast to coast.

Much ink has been spilled over the lingering cultural and social fallout from that year. We have largely remembered the impact of the icons who were martyred in ’68. Much less attention has been paid, though, to the lasting side effects of the massive riots and uprisings that followed the assassination of Dr. King.

In the days after April 4th, 117 civil disturbances broke out in inner cities across America. In 18 of those, the National Guard was called in to put down the rioting. Federal troops ultimately marched into three cities: Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington D.C.

America’s industrial belt was hit particularly hard. The rioting there was no brief moment of chaos and disorder, but the beginning of a prolonged decline in inner city neighborhoods that continues to this day

These images are from the Oak Hill and Hillman area on the South Side of Youngstown.

In the days after King’s assassination, the National Guard was called in to put down rioting in the Hillman area of the south side. A year later they would return. The neighborhoods surrounding Hillman today are in a state of swift decline—a decline that has spread to almost every part of the south side of the city.

In my days of wandering the Hillman area, I have used my camera to try and understand what has happened here and to document the complicated legacy of inner city disinvestment. For what words can not always describe, the camera can name.

-Sean Posey

So when I was presented with the chance to tell a Cleveland story for the D.C.-based Urban Institute I knew what I didn’t want to do: a piece on vacancy, and joblessness, and the general malaise of the Rust Belt condition. That story is being told. I did one a month prior myself.

The data story I began investigating was of growth—albeit slight growth, there was growth nonetheless. Our downtown’s population is growing, particularly with the young and empty nesters. And while the neighboring ‘hoods of Tremont and Ohio City are still shrinking, the losses have decreased continuously for some time now, and this isn’t simply because fewer people are leaving, but because the losses are being offset with young people moving in. I saw the inflow into the city’s heart as important—a trend not to neglect. (Note: through other research I am finding more inflow trends—the uptick in Hispanics, for instance.)

The report got press. First a Plain Dealer spread by Robert Smith. Then Richard Florida over at Atlantic Cities wrote a piece recently called Cleveland’s Downtown Rebound. In all, it felt good to get a narrative out in the echo chamber that had nothing to do with needing to revert Cleveland into a series of hamlets that will be interspersed with strings of heirloom varieties—and that will be tended to by men in biblical cloth.

Of course, many are unconvinced. And they have the right to be: Cleveland’s (and the Metropolitan Statistical Area’s) numbers are overall in the red. We shrink, therefore we are. So any good signs must be tempered. We temper here.

But it would be a mistake to overlook the possibility that this moment brings us. Some reflection on the past will help. I remember going to Great Lakes Brewery with my dad after the Browns beat the Bills in the 1989 playoffs to grab a burger, and it was just a room. West 25^th was a street we went to buy beer and Mad Dog illegally as teens. Detroit Avenue was a no man’s land. University Circle was for field trips. Downtown in the ’80s—well, my dad’s buddy Lenny recently told me a story about when the Yankees were in town. Billy Martin was the manager and he was driving around near Public Square on a weekend day looking for a place for lunch. There was nothing. Lenny, who was a cop and was on duty, told him so. Billy Martin shook his head and thanked him for being a man in blue.

Now, contrast it all with what’s currently happening. Cleveland is hurt. But it is walking, and in a way I haven’t seen for some time. Yet it is easy to lose sight on the thread of inflows when outflows are blanketing your face. And when you see status quo, you act status quo. And so nothing changes. Ever. The energy, opportunity, and urgency are lost.

Ohio City's West Side Market on a recent Wednesday afternoon.

In fact we’ve been here before, as our inability to tease the trends out of the big picture killed us. It was the 1940s and the heart of the city was losing population. Much of everywhere else was growing, so nobody paid any mind. The loss echoed out like a wave taking people with it: the inner core ‘hoods were next, then the outer core ‘hoods, and now the suburbs have finally gotten caught up in the wave. That initial trend of a shrinking core turned out to be the canary in the coalmine. And so why can’t the current trend of human infill turn out to be the canary in the coalmine in reverse?

1200 AD. Native peoples begin settling into villages in river valleys.

1500 AD. Mound builders start to disappear.

1600s. Iroquois take over Ohio in a bloody war with various tribes.

1700s. Iroquois move east to fight the French and English. Wyandot move into region (most artifacts near Sandusky). They were known for their “rough hair”  (read: mohawks—my husband is a descendant.)

1799. Doan family builds tavern at E. 107th & Euclid Avenue in East Cleveland township.

1854. Area settled as a farm by Oliver and Eliza Hough.

1860s. Oliver and Eliza die, and their land is divided into parcels.

League Park railway car

1872. Hough incorporated into Cleveland, which doubled in size in 10 years.  Millionaire’s Row built on Euclid Avenue.

1890s. Two electric streetcars run down Hough & Euclid Avenues.  League Park built at E. 66th and Lexington as home of the Cleveland Spiders (now the Cleveland Indians). Eliza Bryant built the first “Retirement home for Colored Persons,” later moved into Hough. Area filled with single family homes and exclusive schools like Beaumont School for Girls, University School, Notre Dame Academy, and East High School.  Houses of worship built include St. Agnes Parish and Congregational Church.

University School (Cleveland Memory Project)

1900s. Hough Bakeries founded at 8703 Hough Avenue and Rainey Institute on E. 55th.

1920s. Apartment buildings constructed as wealthy residents migrate to the Heights to avoid air pollution from their own factories.  Millionaires destroy their homes before moving out.

1930s. Hough fills with middle class immigrants and laborers.  Homes take in boarders or split into multi-family dwellings.

1950s. Urban renewal and highway development force African-Americans from Central into Hough, increasing from 14% to 75% of its population.  Realtors threaten reduced home values; Polish, Irish, and Spanish-speaking immigrants move out.

1960s. Mounting racial tension caused by deteriorating and overcrowded housing owned by whites and occupied by blacks. (Tip: Don’t be a slumlord).

July 18-23, 1966. Hough Riots cause massive property damage and four deaths until the National Guard takes over. A grand jury ruled that the Communist Party organized the uprising.

1970s. Middle class families flee the neighborhood while activists work hard to rebuild with little outside support. Religious communities collaborate to provide food and other social service programs. Nonprofits like Hough Multipurpose Center, Fatima Family Center, Famicos Foundation, and Hough Salvation Army are formed.

Reverend Jesse Jackson at East High

1976. Jesse Jackson speaks at dedication of new East High School building.

1985. Lexington Village opens, signaling a new era of residential development.  Crack and AIDS weaken the community.

1990s & 2000s. Population continues to decline while large number of new, single family homes and townhouses are built.  Church Square Shopping Plaza built and visited by President Clinton.

2010-2012. Euclid Avenue significantly rebuilt with Health Line bus connecting Downtown to University Circle. Deteriorating schools replaced with new buildings. Funds dedicated to maintain and restore portions of historic League Park.

If you’re looking for an even shorter (and slightly inaccurate) history of Hough, check out The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

A huge thanks to Christopher Busta-Peck, Founding Editor of Cleveland Area History for fact-checking my dates against the primary records.

And here we are. Learning the history of the neighborhood helped me appreciate Hough as a community that has pulled itself up by its own bootstraps. It also taught me never to be a slumlord. What are your lessons from Hough’s history?

This is part of a series on being a white person living in Cleveland’s African-American Hough neighborhood. You can see the first posts here and here, plus Mansfield Frazier’s response.  Next up: things black people say to white people.

Meagen Farrell is an educational consultant, adventurous mother of two, and proud resident of the Hough neighborhood. You can connect with her via blog, Facebook, or Twitter.

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.

You can find similar swaths of no man’s land in inner cities all over the country: Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo. Unlike these cities, Chicago has the money to rebuild 63rd Street. But will it? Not if it can get someone else to foot the bill.

The conundrum can be summed up by a wonky phrase on the lips of mayors nationwide, “public-private partnership,” which codes for getting corporate America to pay for something once funded by tax dollars alone.

By chance, the crown prince of this neoliberal school of government is Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Almost every month, the former White House chief of staff and Obama chum launches a new public-private partnership.

Just this spring, he announced a $7 billion plan to modernize the city’s infrastructure. Under the plan, investors and private companies would pony up for improvement projects, most to be determined in return for interest, profit shares, or both.

In pushing to privatize once-public assets, Emanuel is widely seen as a role model. He sounded the gospel during a recent mayors roundtable on Charlie Rose.

“We have great corporations in Chicago who are, in my view, the best of corporate citizens,” Emanuel said. “I couldn’t achieve anything I’m trying to do without their participation.”

Agreed Mayor Alvin Brown of Jacksonville: “[These partnerships are] the wave of the future. Government can’t do it alone.”

The problem is that the public-private “partnerships,” as Emanuel outlines them, are tilted toward the private side. They let corporate interests drive public investment. Projects that fail to align with the interests of private funders go begging.

63rd Street shows how big that hole is. What company is going to invest in building affordable housing and livable communities here? These honorable causes stand to be big losers in the era of the public-private partnership.

Not only has Emanuel refused to invest here—he’s actively cutting back on the city’s role in the neighborhood. For instance, he wants to close half of the city’s mental health clinics, including one just off 63rd Street. The reason? Insufficient funds.

Perhaps Emanuel can make everyone happy by swinging a deal to lease the street to the highest bidder, just as Chicago has leased its Skyway and parking meters. Imagine it–Coming to the South Side: Boeing Boulevard (formerly 63rd Street), brought to you by Boeing, builder of bombers and bungalows. Also, a new mental health clinic, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline.

Realistically, City Halls in Chicago and nationwide must invest in depopulated districts like 63rd Street because no one else will. The community that 63rd Street runs through was home to 81,000 residents in the 1960s. Today, it has less than a third of that, just 26,000. This is prime real estate, an easy commute from the Loop.

If it and similar neighborhoods aren’t repopulated, and soon, there won’t be much of a city left.

–Christopher Weber (christopherweber.org) is an environmental journalist in Chicago.

Imagine for a moment: there is a spot not far from where I live. It was the stockyards. It had money and movement; now it has shells of buildings and gaps in the street line. What’s still there are scrapyards. Into these scrapyards go people’s collections of junk metal. They are getting paid a pittance from the metallic crumbs that represent touchable symbols of their own economic demise. That, folks, is conflict.

Now what do scrapyards and junk metal and the consequences of post-industrialization have to do with attracting creative types? To answer that we step back to a more basic question: what does conflict have to do with creativity? Here was John Dewey’s answer to that:

“Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.”

Yes, conflict can kill. But it can also ignite production—and less like the paper-pusher and more like the artist or entrepreneur. And conflict stirs creation one of two ways—from within and from without.

Within. Life is wild. So is inner-life. We are presented with dichotomies from childhood (e.g., be a kid but act like an adult) to adulthood (e.g., be happy but be very afraid), and these paradoxes create pressure. The pressure needs to be navigated or suppressed. Creativity is one main tool for those willing to transgress the mountain of life’s messes.

For example, in thinker Arthur Koestler’s creativity theory he coined the term “bisociation”, which means to join conflictual information in a new way, usually through a blend of intuition, feeling, and novel thought. This is akin to creative destruction in economics. This does not mean creativity solves the conflict per se, as that leads to stasis, the antithesis of creativity. Rather it means “graduating” into the new insight or challenge, always, then, a constant flow of conflict—insight—and creative repair.

Perhaps that’s why creativity is so hard, because it is much easier to coast than it is to being aware of the struggles settling inside. It’s much easier to bury the conflict in conformity, and to join the crowd of those pointing fingers at those who don’t engage in that Puritan wholesomeness of counting beans. From a recent Salon article titled No Sympathy for the Creative Class, artist Peter Plagens described this kind of societal stigmatization thus:

“There’s always this sense that art is just play. Art is what children do and what retired people do. Your mom puts your work up on the refrigerator. Or the way Dwight Eisenhower said, ‘Now that I’ve fought my battles, I can put my easel up outside.’”

Of course many just say fuck it. Life is much more interesting in between the lines. And there’s perhaps no more of an ambiguous and conflicting geography than the Rust Belt.

Courtesy of Photographer Sean Posey

Without. Paradigm breakers are reaching the factory coast. Why here? Well, there’s that canvas in vacancy metaphor—and cheap rent—and this overall sentiment to start a wave instead of hopping on Seattle’s or Miami’s or New York’s crest, but there’s something more, as the region is the fault line to coastal tectonic plates. And what’s broke is being pushed up into the breaks of the post-industrial aesthetic. It’s in our cereal, on our TV. Conflict lives here like the sun. And those who practice life by sublimating struggles through creativity are coming here to feed off the energy like old folks feeding off the Sarasota silence and heat.

In fact, people don’t live in a vacuum. The things we see and smell, the objects we touch, the conversations we have–they all drive into us like a force that is released by how we feel and behave. By what drives or placates us. By what we confront and what seeps into us. And so the Rust Belt is becoming a center of confronters.  Because we live not so much in the heart of darkness as in the heart of reality.

All across the country people are fleeing their illusions freely. Many are coming here to live in so-called death. What they are finding is freedom to accept life as it is. And with that comes creative powers that may point us in a direction of where life needs to be.

The future of the Rust Belt is in its conflict. Call it the agglomeration of the conflict economy.

By Richey Piiparinen