Schumann's Cleveland Pages archives

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More on "Reverse Commuter Blues" (16 July 1999)

This came in from a guy named Alex, who liked the Reverse Commuter Blues installment from April 1999.

An excellent article! I particularly like the fact that you were not afraid to mention the race factor as a primary reason people move to outer ring suburbs. I personally know many people who were perfectly happy in their old houses until the neighborhood started to "get bad". One of my best friends moved from Shaker Heights to Westlake because the city border was too close for comfort.

I personally live downtown, a five-block commute to my office. The only time I ever experience traffic jams is on my way to visit friends in the burbs. Another close friend of mine who happens to be a White recent college grad just moved to Hough. I was really excited to hear that he had so much faith in the future of our city that he moved into one of its most notorious neighborhoods. He has a brand new two-bedroom apartment with 24-hour security and pays half what I pay downtown. His commute will be a 15-minute bus ride (or 10 minute trolley ride) down Eucild.

(Well, okay, the trolley is still science fiction and you might say that moving into the Church Square area isn't "really" living in Hough, but let's go on...)

As far as I am concerned, any commute of more than 20 minutes is a waste of time unless you have no other reasonable choice. Unfortunately, with continuing sprawl, commutes will only get longer. With so many commuters going in so many different directions, it will be impossible for any Transit agency to design a workable system to handle all that chaos. The best solution is to start building better communities and focus on repairing neighborhoods that already exist rather than building new developments on farmland. Make the best possible use of existing infrastructure rather than extending water and sewer lines. Imagine if instead of building a new tract development in Medina County, 100 stable families bought custom-built brand new dream homes in Hough. The results would be an improved city neighborhood with a stronger tax base and more natural beauty for our kids to enjoy. Now if we could only get the Cleveland School District fixed we might stand a chance...

Alex's dream is taking shape in bits and pieces, although I'm not sure it's turning out the way he expected. There are dozens of good-looking new houses on and near Chester Avenue, but the scale is such that you can't really say they're improving an existing neighborhood. It's more as if an entirely new neighborhood had been overlaid onto those blocks. That's better than no life at all, but it doesn't do anything for the people who were pushed out and it's a disaster from a historical preservation point of view. And of course the tax base improvement is trivial since owners of new houses in Cleveland are exempted from taxes other than on land, which in turn is undertaxed by about 75%.

As for fixes in the Cleveland School District, I'm still not hopeful. Ohio's charter school legislation, however, provides a neat way for concerned parents and activists to circumvent the District. Now organization trumps geography. A board of qualified people with a plan and a sense of purpose can operate a school without any local tax funding, free of interference from East Sixth Street.

Cheers, Alex. Maybe someday parts of Cleveland will adapt more closely to the carfree model. The problems are in taxation patterns, general car dependency, and, as you noted again, personal racial fears. None of these are easy to change.

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