Switch to the mobile version of this page. Cleveland Scene. Jump to comments Speaking of Cleveland Scene on Social Media. Most Popular Most Read. November , Newsletters Never miss a beat Sign Up Now Subscribe now to get the latest news delivered right to your inbox. Calendar Events. Is Cleveland one of America's worst cities to live in? Lisa DeJong. After naming Cleveland among the cities "Americans are abandoning," the site has placed Cleveland near the top of another gloomy list.
Cleveland comes in at No. It might be the only city in the Midwest where I don't know of a web site that has linked to me. It doesn't appear to just be me either. Jim Russell over at Return to Pittsburgh says , "A better definition of Cleveland is a cul-de-sac of globalization". He excoriates their lack of regional thinking. He also reminds us that Richard Longworth, author of the seminal work on the challenge of globalization in the Midwest, " Caught in the Middle ", found Cleveland an odd place indeed.
Per Longworth: "In all my travels through the Midwest, Cleveland was the only place, big or small, that seemed heedless of the global challenge. Only 4 percent of its population is foreign-born, in an era that demands new blood; the city government isn't sure it wants more. One of its leading economists told me, 'You can't kill manufacturing—that's stupid,' but manufacturing is fleeing and cities need new ways to support themselves. It's not really that surprising that the region has launched some remarkably unproductive efforts.
I don't know Morrison, but he works for Purdue University and commutes from Cleveland, where he also founded an open source economic development organization called I-Open that appears to be one of the few things keeping Cleveland's economy in business.
I'm alert for such things, but I don't think I've heard Morrison criticize Indiana's economic development, or anyone else's, like that. He actually sounds a bit like a woman scorned, so I'm sure there's a story in there someplace, but it's pretty telling nevertheless.
Neither Morrison nor Russell care much for the site selection consultant tours Cleveland has been doing. You can see coverage of them here and here. Russell hits us with an interesting excerpt from the Plain Dealer: "To distinguish its red-carpet tours, Team NEO crafts attention-grabbing invitations. For the tour during the Rock Hall's induction weekend, invitees received small guitar cases with invitations tucked inside.
Michigan is economic kryptonite these days, so that's no problem. Pittsburgh is a much tougher competitor for jobs these days than a lot of people give them credit for but is still a rather slow growth place dependent on "eds and meds". Those are easy cities to measure yourself against. But let's look at Indianapolis and do a quick comparison of the two cities. On any relevant measure, Indianapolis beats Cleveland.
Most notably, Cleveland's population is shrinking meaning that the labor force situation is deteriorating over time.
Like almost all other cities, Cleveland is chasing dreams of life sciences, high tech, and green industry. That's totally undifferentiated, though there is no denying that the Cleveland Clinic is one of the absolute best in the entire world, so anyone in a health care related company that could leverage the Cleveland Clinic connection would have to take a serious look at Cleveland.
But beyond that, I couldn't find much else, nor any indication that there is any strategic depth to the thinking in these spaces, and I spent a lot of time looking. Grass roots organizations like I-Open and E4S seem to be thriving, but it looks like they are just filling the vacuum left by the establishment. Indianapolis, like most places, also has the same list of industries, but to that you can add things like motorsports and the sports events industry.
Also, where that city is shooting for the target sector du jour, it has, in some areas, really taken a look at where it can win and tried to be focused on its target. For example, in the green industry segment, the Energy Systems Network is looking at some very focused areas, with a largely private sector funding model.
Interestingly, Ed Morrison helped develop this. In the high tech space, it isn't just scattershot here and there, but there's a mini-cluster in internet marketing companies that is one of the nation's biggest, with over 1, employees. The era of the large, megalithic corporation as the engine of growth is coming to a close.
Early information suggests that federal assistance, such as stimulus payments and extra unemployment benefits, kept many of those people from falling into poverty during the first months of the pandemic. But as that extra help expired over the summer and thousands of Ohioans are still unable to find work, we suspect that poverty may rise quickly.
Similar data for will not be available until next fall. September 21, September 18, More than 6, of those adults in poverty in Cleveland worked full-time for the full year.
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