Congressional Quarterly has released its annual report on America’s most crime-ridden cities. This year St. Louis topped the list, upping last year’s leader: Camden, NJ.

Also, Detroit was No.3, Flint, No. 4. Cleveland ranked in at No. 7. Gary, Ind. ranked 9th.

The National Conference of Mayors called the report a “premeditated statistical mugging of America’s cities,” saying the rankings are “bogus.”

St. Louis mayor Francis Slay said on Twitter yesterday “Crime stats reflect crimes. Crime stats rankings reflect how we draw our boundaries.”

This is a very big deal. Big.

The city of Cleveland was chosen as one of five cities to share $80 million in grant funding through the Livable Cities Initiative.

Funders were impressed, specifically, by the city’s efforts to establish cooperative workplaces to serve the region’s major employers–including the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospital.

We’ve written before about the Evergreen laundry, where workers from the Hough neighborhood are earning a stake in the company for hours put in doing laundry for local institutions.

Good news out of Cleveland! (God, it feels good to say that.)
Cycling is up 50% in the county, according to a study by the regional planning agency NOACA.
Because Cleveland is awe-some! Or, if you ask the experts  …
A news release from NOACA said reasons for the increase may include the downturn in the economy, higher gas prices, buses being outfitted with bike racks and the growing number of bike lanes.
There really aren’t too many bike lanes in the city, actually, I have to add, as a bike commuter. But now …

A joint application by the regional planning agencies in Cleveland, Youngstown and Akron has won a $4.25 million grant under the President’s Sustainable Communities program.
The money will be used to conduct land-use, housing, environmental, transportation and economic development planning on a region level. You may recall, we wrote about how badly this type of planning is needed in the Cleveland area on this blog before. In fact, I would venture to say, there isn’t a community in the country that needs land use planning more than Cleveland.
So, Akron, Youngstown, Cleveland, …

We’ve been writing a lot about sprawl and race relations lately. I think that is because these issues are tremendously important to the discussion of the current conditions in Rust Belt cities.

Well, I’ve got to thank UrbanSTL for pointing me to this illuminating interactive map that shows how white flight and sprawl transformed the metro area over the course of decades.

You have to visit this site to see it unfold. I think this really mirrors development over the past six decades for Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, Youngstown, Buffalo and many other Rust Belt cities.

Notice how the application is called Mapping Decline.

I think this is the most important article I have seen on the Rust Belt urban condition since this blog began.
Kain Benfield of the Natural Resources Defense Council has raised questions about the wisdom of mass demolitions in “shrinking cities.” In this article, he points out that leading urban thinker Richard Florida has joined him in this perspective.
Benfield makes the point that Detroit, Cleveland and other shrinking cities are being hollowed out, not by regional population loss, but by sprawl. Returning urban areas to quasi-rural will simply lengthen commute times …

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but nevertheless:
#1. Detroit
#2. Cleveland
#3. Buffalo
#4. Milwaukee
#5. St. Louis
#6. Miami
#7. Memphis
#8. Cincinnati
#9. Philadelphia
Poverty workers in Cleveland blame the increase on unemployment.
This should send a message to the federal government. If we’re serious about addressing poverty in this country, we need to address the way the economic restructuring has affected Rust Belt cities. Taking tax dollars from the people in these cities and giving it to bankers in New York isn’t much of a solution.
-AS
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If you want to get a sense of how devastating sprawl has been to the urban areas of northeast Ohio, head over to Woodlawn Avenue in East Cleveland. Between the rows of boarded up buildings, a house collapses onto itself. Graffiti pays homage to dead loved ones — “R.I.P. Fife.” Nearby, stuffed animals have been stapled to a telephone pole in a memorial, presumably, to a dead child.

Travel thirty miles west to Lorain County, and they’re laying sewer pipe for a new housing development. The housing market is strong in exurban Avon, where a new highway interchange has spurred a rush in commercial real estate development on what was once forests.

These photos were taken by Cleveland-based photographer Billy Delfs. A little about the Cleveland Ohio Surfers in his words:

“Cleveland Ohio Surfers surf the shores of Lake Erie. From what I learned, unlike the west and east US coasts where the waves are pulled by currents, the wind is what makes up waves on Lake Erie. It is usually cold when they surf, windy and wet; either in a storm or just before the lake freezes over. They wear wet suits to keep warm, to make the situation tolerable. I was cold this day.

Billions of dollars of infrastructure investment are needed to stop untreated sewage from Great Lakes cities that flows into the Lakes, according to a study released earlier this month.
From January 2009 through January of this year, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee and Gary, Indiana, discharged 41 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water into the Lakes, according to data analyzed by the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.
“The Great Lakes are under siege from sewage overflows,” Jeff Skelding, campaign director for the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition, …