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.
The Free Times, in an article no longer online, called Cleveland Pages "Spicily independent... in the best tradition of citizen-journalist."
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/19990402.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.
It's pretty neat to live in the city while working in the farther-out suburbs. You can get up late, drive the "wrong" way on the freeway, and still make it on time.
Yesterday's Free Times article brings attention to the specific problems of Cleveland's poor people who are attempting to get to entry-level jobs that are outside of the city. Half of current AFDC recipients are not within an 80-minute public transite ride of the new jobs.
It's not just entry-level jobs that are relevant though. As my neighbor Bill says, Cleveland people need jobs that are all over the pay scale. It's not realistic to expect a single mother to take care of even one child on a minimum-wage job. The first rung of the pay ladder is important, and some people are just never going to have the ability to go much higher, but it's also important for the more capable people to have somewhere "up" to go.
Around 1989 I had a job downtown, a house just north of Denison, and no need for my own car. The company moved to a new office park by the Cedar-Brainard exit off Interstate 271, and I still didn't feel like spending money on a car. For months, I got up about an hour and a half early for the three-legged RTA ride:
Even when everything went my way, it was going to be an hour each way. I tolerated it because it was my first job out of college and I was learning way too much about the insurance industry to quit. The following April I backed down and bought a little Chrysler that I finally traded in just a few months ago.
At that time, I was carless by choice. I was cheap thrifty to
buy a car and just didn't like them anyway. (A coworker asked about this once:
I became notorious around the office by telling him that "cars are a fad.")
Most days I met up with several of my coworkers at that Cedar Hill station. Most were new employees recruited through the welfare-to-work programs of Cleveland Works and the Urban League, and they just didn't have money to spare for individual cars. One day, when there was some kind of problem with the RTA schedules, one of the regular group, let's call her Janet, missed her regular bus and decided to walk the route instead; she showed up for work a little late but had to walk from 40th and Qunicy to make it to the East 105th Street and Qunicy Avenue rapid station. Is that dedication? Yeah. Is it too much to ask for a minimum-wage job? I think so. Why aren't the jobs somewhere decent and accessible?
At some point we have to ask ourselves why all the jobs are so far away from where so many people live. What causes corporate decision-makers to plant their suites and buildings and office parks farther and farther away from the center? Why did my coworker Janet have to walk from 40th to 105th just to catch a train?
The answer is more difficult than it is complicated. I believe that the drive towards bigger yards and motorized convenience is powerful, but less powerful than the racial reflexes of many whites. If you like having a lot of grass, you can have it in realistic inner suburbs like Shaker Heights or Parma; for the isolation afforded by the neoburbs of Geauga County you have to go, well, to Geauga County. I suppose folks out there don't actually hate dark people; maybe they just dislike everyone. Certainly they've chosen to avoid running into anyone different at home.
Alex Marshall, a writer on urban affairs for a Norfolk newspaper, describes the attitude this way:
[I]t's common to hear talk about areas that are getting "more urban"--and this doesn't mean the proliferation of quaint cafés or homes close to the street. Rather, the term is used to describe places where minorities are moving in, affluence is declining, or where crime is on the rise. Alex Marshall, "Suburb in Disguise", Metropolis Magazine: http://www.metropolismag.com/july96/ken.html
Urban, to these speakers, is bad. The wide open spaces of the rural neoburbs are good because they're far away from minorities, poor people, and street crime. But they're also removed from commerce and jobs. Developers and planners compromise with that impulse; they locate office parks a little farther outside the 480/271 ring to enable short driving commutes from places like Brunswick, North Ridgeville, and Russell Township.
The cycle goes on. Enable higher-income Brunswickians to work in Strongsville, next thing you know they'll move to Medina and work in Brunswick. Then someplace like Mansfield becomes the next outer target. People with money will, as a group, keep moving farther away from the city center until it gets too inconvenient.
Marshall's article concludes on this topic that "Cities are primarily products of transportation systems." So are neoburbs. But transportation systems are products of land values.
While there are still AFDC recipients seeking to work their way up the system, it's important to maintain reasonable public transportation options for them. But that's not the real answer.
We underwrite the ongoing sprawl phenomenon by building, maintaining, and expanding freeways. There is nothing wrong with new and improved roads, but why should everyone pay for the roads that benefit only a few? It is really only the current landholders who profit financially from a highway improvement; the value of that improvement, as a land-value increment, should be recaptured by the public. The only right way to underwrite major road projects is through land-value taxation, which neatly matches financial burdens to the windfall benefits.
It's not RTA's fault that the jobs are clustered around freeway exits. We have to blame wrongheaded policies that are biased towards laying down asphalt to solve all problems. But those policies are the result of incentives to buy and hold land farther and farther from the city center. Take away the incentives and watch sanity return to our transportation patterns.
This document's template was last modified on Wednesday, 09-Nov-2005 18:51:58 EST. There is a new Cleveland Pages more or less every weekend. The entire Cleveland Pages website is © 1997,1998,1999,2000,2001,2002,2003 by Mark W. Schumann, all rights reserved. Copyrights belonging to others on individual items are noted. Nobody else would take the credit or blame for these opinions anyway.
Go to the front page
Last validated 02 April 1999:
![[ Valid HTML 4.0! ]](/images/vh40.gif){kind=small}
![[ Valid CSS! ]](/images/vcss.gif){kind=small}
![[ Bobby Approved! ]](/images/approved.gif){kind=small}
![[ Made with Cascading Style Sheets]](/images/mwcts.gif)
The W3C validator verifies that documents on this site conform to the Strict HTML 4.01 specification, which is a step towards consistency, accessibility, and interoperability.
Bobby checks for opportunities to improve access for users regardless of disabilities or special needs.