Reason tries to save Cleveland

From Nick Gillespie in Reason on an on-going project by Reason's video arm...

You want a quick indicator of urban decline in any city you visit? Ask a local what’s great about the place. If the top three answers include “a world-class symphony orchestra,” you’re smack dab in the middle of a current or future ghost town.

This orchestra axiom is something I divined while working on Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey, an hour-long documentary you can see at reason.tv/cleveland. Time and again, I’d ask Clevelanders to tell me what was still top-notch about their hometown. It didn’t matter if I was talking to a CEO or a homeless man, a bar owner or a barfly. The inevitable reply: “We’ve got a world-class symphony orchestra,” typically embellished with some transparently phony claim about how it compares to those in other cities (“It’s in the top 15 or 20 in the world!”), as if orchestras are regularly ranked like NCAA basketball teams.

Such are the thin straws at which residents in drowning cities grasp. Such is the psychic depravity that failed polities inflict on their residents, the mental tics and habits of mind that both compensate for and reinforce the steadily diminishing material conditions that drive down the quality of life....

Since its population hit a high point in 1950, Cleveland has lost more than half of its residents and essentially all of its economic and cultural capital. The Rapture happened here, but instead of going to the bosom of God in heaven, the elect ended up in Houston, Charlotte, Los Angeles, New York, and, most galling of all because of its proximity and broad-shouldered similarity, Chicago....

As Chicago was becoming the hog butcher for the world and tool maker and stacker of wheat, Cleveland peaked as the seventh-largest city in America, with nearly 1 million residents, before beginning a long, slow, steady decline underscored by race riots, the Cuyahoga River bursting into flames, and a 1978 default on its municipal bonds. This year Cleveland earned the dubious honor of being named “the most miserable city” in the U.S. by Forbes....

As befits a city built for twice as many people, Cleveland has a surplus of desperation, quiet and otherwise, but shockingly little sense that policies need a fundamental overhaul. At one point, I talked to City Councilman Joe Cimperman about the business climate. Cimperman’s no villain; he’s a good guy who clearly loves his hometown. Many local entrepreneurs, I said, felt the city was anti-business. “Who said that?” he asked defensively. “What were their names?” Cleveland does have a pro-business attitude, he insisted....

When leaders are not defensive, they are poignantly bereft of ideas....

Cities can in fact wake from the dead. New York, Boston, and Chicago all did within recent memory. Resurrected cities won’t look like they did in their heyday. Cleveland 2.0 will never again be home to dozens of Fortune 500 firms. The steel mills and refineries are never coming back; nor is the Great Lakes shipping traffic. But it can be a vastly better place to live, work, play, and love....

These are the lessons of Reason Saves Cleveland. If Oakland, the place about which Gertrude Stein quipped “there’s no there there,” can improve its education system by granting parents the right to pick their children’s schools, any city can. If Indianapolis can provide better service for lower cost through competitive contracting, if Chicago can sell off money-losing toll roads, if Washington, D.C., can take on its teachers unions, then anyplace can do those things and much more.

But before Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, or anywhere else can change the way it functions, its residents must sort through the emotional baggage of an urban life on the decline, a complicated, contradictory mix of feelings: that there’s nothing they can do, that there’s nothing really wrong with the place they call home, that one big win or one big stadium or convention center or sales tax or state or federal grant or magnet school or silver bullet will solve everything. Most of all, they must shake off the crippling nostalgia that tells them the good old days are gone forever, and that only a world-class symphony orchestra remains.