Another look at the Neighborhood and the City.

This week has been pretty calm.  Saturday, I walked up the street to the Humphrey Store and later drove to Gus’ East 185 Diner for a late lunch.  Business is good for both and everything seems like it always has been.   Now, the next day it was time to do something different.  I decided to finally stop in at the Standard Restaurant for the first time since it has been under new management.  It was quiet but then again it was four in the afternoon.  However, the food was really good; a filet mignon with mashed potatoes, green beans, and carrots.   They don’t have valet parking at night for no reason! This all may seem like a lot of eating out but there are other ways I try to support this community.

Filet Mignon at the Standard.

It was with this attitude in mind that I attended our monthly neighborhood watch meeting Tuesday evening at the Lithuanian Hall next to the post office.  While I did learn, to my surprise, of the incident at Lansing and East 185^th this weekend, and the bust of a drug ring that nabbed 22 people, there were other things that would be put on the pro side of the ledger regarding the fate of this area.

For starters,  Collinwood won this year’s Cleveland Chain Reaction contest and the Dev. Corp is going to target East 185^th St., not just retail but light industrial and the like.  Not only that, the East 185^th St. area is now part of one of the Opportunity Zones in Cuyahoga County.  According to the Economic Innovation Group, this is a new tool established by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 to bring investment into low-income and rural communities.  While the idea that this area is now considered a low-income community is kind of depressing, nevertheless the funds offered will come in handy especially with other projects underway or soon to be around here.  The boundary of the one East 185th St. is now part of is from East 169^th St. (and London in S. Collinwood) all the way to the Euclid Border and in fact all of Euclid West of East. 200 St.   Finally, the Cleveland Metroparks has taken over the Wildwood Marina and is upgrading the docks and concession facilities there.

I write this as a counterpoint to some of the things I’ve read in the papers these past two weeks.  Cleveland Plain Dealer Columnist Phillip Morris wrote something on March 31st about reactions to the trial of the ring leader in the shooting of the owners of Mr. Car two years ago and now being put on trial.  While I know it’s a losing battle to let people know that the East 185th neighborhood isn’t really Collinwood, Mr. Morris does hit it on the head regarding  a ‘resistance’ to urban decay by locals here (kind of like what happened in Slavic Village in the 1990s) and that it’s a combination of local people and Councilman Polensek, rather than City Hall, that’s leading the way.  However, it would be pollyannaish to not see that the problems that have usually affected the inner city have now spread even beyond the city limits.  For example, the fatal shooting a man in in his car at Villaview and Nottingham in February began with a party in East Cleveland and a  car chase leading not only to this murder here but the suspect eventually hitting a tree in Euclid after trying to flee the cops. Let’s not also forget the car chase last year by the Willowick police of a suspect that lead to a house on Waterloo being knocked off it’s foundation (and that’s city’s chief  of police telling the owner of the house that his insurance would cover the damage).  So, when we grumble about why City Hall doesn’t spend part of that $73 million budget surplus to hire more cops than they have, perhaps there is some grounds for it.

However, as shown by this week, there are some really encouraging things happening in this corner of Cleveland.  For all those former neighbors who moved out to Willoughby, Mentor, or even Rocky River (and beyond), things are still promising in your old neighborhood; and not just north of Lake Shore Boulevard.

Photograph by James Valentino.

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A look at Cleveland’s HQ2; or a look at where once again my tax dollars were going to go to.

I was intrigued, like many others, on what the City of Cleveland’s proposal to land the second Amazon Headquarters was like,  After all, the Plain Dealer editorial board wrote in May 2018 that it was “more feeble than expected”.  From what we knew at the time, it looked like Amazon was being offered all the empty space vacated by Forest City Enterprises in the Terminal Tower.  However, as the local media has put out there last weekend, the unredacted version of it was a lot more than that, and I still have to read the copy I downloaded myself to figure it all out.  However, Sam Allard in Scene Magazine wrote a piece that in a way sums up what I think so far.

He’s right, the incentives WERE insane, and you kind of wonder how, for Cleveland’s part, it could afford it.  What intrigues me the most is what Cleveland was willing to offer in tax incentives, more than $800 million and a $50 million tax credit.  Where did they plan to get the money?  One can safely assume that the income tax increase people voted for in 2015, which was for better services like police protection, went into this pot of gold.  It was going to be a city within a city, or a downtown within downtown so to speak with a few things that were way over the top. The new electric grid, was that at least going to be operated by Cleveland Public Power?  In the case of Google moving to the Bakery Square project in Pittsburgh, one can safely argue that they got a lot more bang for their buck; and with lower tax breaks and dollars too.

CSU was to offer 10 acres for an Amazon University to train a local workforce.   Now what would an employee of the Amazon HQ2 do differently that would warrant something like that? Couldn’t CSU’s college of business come up with a program let’s say Amazon HQ2, a fast track degree to excellence sponsored by the Cleveland Foundation?  Where the heck were these ten acres going to be located, next to Cuyahoga Community College’s Metro campus where there is probably is ten vacant acres to house such a thing?  How about the still empty former Juvenile Court complex on East 22^nd St?   Let me read that proposal again.

It wasn’t surprising to see the names of the two Joes, as in Joe Roman (of the Greater Cleveland Partnership) and Joe Marinucci (President of the Downtown Cleveland Greater Alliance) popping up in this and many other articles regarding the proposal I’ve heard these names, and even met them, as far back as twenty years ago when I was working on my Masters and Cleveland State University.  Admittedly, looking at the finished product, this is the type project that, back then I would have dreamed working on right now.  But, that not the point, it’s just that those tax dollars Cleveland (and Cuyahoga County for that matter) was going to throw away at this pipe-dream were meant for something else, like keeping our neighborhoods safe which this year seems apparently a tall order to do. As of this writing, Cleveland is carrying a budget surplus in the millions while potholes are popping up on neighborhood streets and the sporadic shootings continue.

One last thing, Sam Allard’s article ends with what I call a bit of a warning:

“And while the Amazon bid is among the more extreme imaginable cases, packages of this nature, thatched in private by mostly private leaders, with the potential to radically reshape the contours of the central business district while crippling the city and county for years in the future) are a rotten plank in the region’s economic development platform.:”  (People are Mad about Cleveland’s $3.5 Billion Amazon HQ2 Bid for the Wrong Reasons ). 

However, as seen by Gateway, Tower City Center, Brown’s Stadium, money for the Gund Arena..I mean Q…renovations, this is just the logical progression of what so many of us living here have seen before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some thoughts on leftists calling for radical measures on climate change

This is a very well written, and thought out, piece by a good guy north of the border. Worth reading.

Smart People I Know

I see that leftists are calling for radical measures to fight climate change. I have a few issues with this:

1. You have to be careful for what you wish for. When they talk about radical measures, they are likely thinking that the line of what is radical is where they get to draw it. I don’t think this is true. To me, radical is things like geoengineering. Or nuclear proliferation. Leftists should not assume they get to draw the line as to what radical is. And leftists should not be surprised if they don’t like what they ask for.
2. Some of this seems to be a way to score points against centrists and rightists. It may be true that centrists and rightists have bad solutions. They are not bad solutions because they are associated with anyone of a certain political stripe. They are bad because they may not be…

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The State of the Blog: A Quick Little Post.

For anyone who has happened to stopped by more than once on this blog over the years, you must have noticed that there has been a drop in the number of posts, and I must admit the quality of the content.  Since the fall, I have struggled with a bit of writer’s block that had made me just start things and give up after a few pages.  One thing you cannot see on this site are the number of drafts I started in the past four months that are incomplete on a range of topics.

So far this month, Mad Man on a Great Lake has received 94 views which is surprisingly good.  However, the total of views in 2018 was lower than the year before.   We will see what the rest of the year has in store for this site

Anyway, it’s a sunny day here on the North Coast and it should be nice to enjoy some of it. For those who do enjoy exploring this site and looking at some of the pieces thank you.

Getting through a Polar Vortex: A Quick Little Post.

They say it’s colder now in parts of the mid-west than it is in Antarctica.  With wind chill numbers around minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit, I’m not at all surprised.   The few minutes I stepped outside to start the car and refill the bird feeder yesterday showed me how brutal the weather is.

They say that 300 households in the Detroit-Shoreway area were without power until recently, and there already was that situation in Rocky River where workers are trying to fix a broken water pipe that’s pouring water in a gas line; and that started before this Arctic blast hit.   Of all times to not have power or be able to stay warm.   However, the worst has passed and many of us will be back to work tomorrow since the high will be a balmy twenty degrees.

It’s going to be flirting with sixty degrees on Monday.   Go figure.

Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. with the Cleveland Orchestra; A Quick Little Post.

For the first time in my life I actually got to attend something that is a big thing here in Cleveland, the Cleveland Orchestra’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert at Severance Hall.  Someone I know called me up earlier in the day to ask if I would like to go with him and his wife and I naturally said yes. 

The auditorium was packed (after all, it’s a free event) and along with works ranging from Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” to of course “We Shall Overcome” (where the audience stood up and held hands with each other),  were recordings of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to students at Glennville High School in 1967.

As Andre Gremillet, President and CEO of the Musical Arts Association said in a speech before the concert, it’s good to know that, in days like these, we can have something special like this.

Richey Piiparinen Leaves CSU: A Quick Little Post.

Thursday, I came across on my cell phone a piece from Cleveland’s Scene Magazine about Richey Piiparinen, the Director for the Center of Population Dynamics at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State, leaving CSU to get a job with the non-profit Unity Project.  He, in partnership with geographer James Russell, has written many very interesting studies related to the city, including From Metals to Minds: Economic Restructuring in the Rust Belt (which was reviewed on this blog) and of course Preparing for Growth: an Emerging Neighborhood Analysis Commissioned by Mayor Frank G. Jackson for the City of Cleveland.

While his work is interesting, I still don’t know how it translates to real mortar and brick matters in Cleveland, let alone for East 185th St.  All the best in him in the non-profit world.