Schumann's Cleveland Pages archives

This archive article is selected from The Cleveland Pages, the city's only weekly independent journal of politics and opinion on the Internet. Find out all about the Cleveland Pages here, or check out the current issue.

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The Cleveland Pages is a somewhat-weekly commentary on what's new and why it's all happening in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. If what you read here is upsetting, you might prefer this simple-minded happy-talk instead.

Bookmark the Cleveland Pages at http://re.cleveland.oh.us. Bookmark this issue at http://re.cleveland.oh.us/archives/19990226.html.

A Cleveland Pages archive search will be available soon... Meanwhile, skip to the flat-file archive list! And read an overview of who's putting this thing out and what it's about.

The Euclid Shuffle (26 February 1999)

Oh, dear. The city is talking about spending twelve million bucks to move merchant and hotel establishments around downtown again. An investment group has offered to renovate the old Arcade, that glorious old mall that runs between Euclid and Superior as sort of a northward extension of East 4th Street. They'll just need $12.1 million in tax subsidies to turn the upper floors, now hardly occupied, into a hotel while also sprucing up the lower levels.

How I would love to see this great building improved and enhanced!

But the downtown hotel market is again near saturation. There is no need for additional hotel rooms, as revealed by the ambivalent comments of other hotel operators as quoted in the Plain Dealer of last Saturday, the 20th. The upside, if you could call it that, is that the increasing room count in downtown could at some point trigger more demand for that new convention center.

Here's the problem. First, in the late 1980s, we were told that the big office building tax abatements were needed to subsidize their adjoining hotels, which were in turn required to "jump start" (the planners' expression, not mine) a hotel and convention market. Then in the early 1990s we were told that the hotels will need big tourist attractions to be successful, so we funded the Rock Hall and Gateway. Here in the late 1990s, we have a three billion dollar spending plan that bypasses all cost-benefit analysis to push for a new convention center to support that darned hotel market. Just how far do we have to go to "jump-start" other people's businesses?

Just as the Tower City mall development drew virtually all the merchants off lower Euclid Avenue, expect to see the new hotel and retail development at the Arcade function as a drag on existing hotel and retail sites. Yet again, we'll be paying millions of dollars as taxpayers to shove around the same volume of business (and jobs) as ever.

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