There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the point is that Hunter (and many others) had all the information I had at the time, and more. I and many others could figure out it was a scam from the beginning, but the guy with Harvard credentials couldn’t.

From Hunter’s official bio:

Under his direction, the department was responsible for the development of master plans for North Coast Harbor District, site of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Cleveland Browns Stadium; the Playhouse Square Theatre District, site of the country’s second largest performing arts center; and the Gateway Sports District, home of Jacobs Field and Gund Area. The Gateway project was awarded an Urban Design Citation from Progressive Architecture in 1990, an Honor Award for urban design from the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1991, and the AIA Urban Design Award in 1996.

Bottom line, I don’t think it’s silly to dump a share of the blame for Gateway… on someone who claims credit for its ostensible success.

If you were to study how redevelopment gets done, public investment virtually always leads the way. There are a number of reasons for this priority. First, much of public investment goes into infrastructure — sidewalks, curbs, utilities and so on: stage setting.

Second, public investment by its nature can absorb risks that the private sector standing alone is unwilling to absorb. So, publicly-led, privately supported investments are normally a key starting point. The trick, of course, is to measure public benefits from these public investments. This is always tricky, but the analysis can be done with a sharp pencil, strong analytics, and unbiased perspectives.

(I have no idea how well these economic analyses were done in Gateway’s case, but typically, these analyses fall outside the jurisdiction of a Planning Department and into the jurisdiction of the Economic Development Department. In most cases, because bond funding is involved, a public agency will contract with an outside economic consultant to construct these studies. As Haywood Sanders has documented well, these studies are often overly optimistic.)

Public investment is not enough for successful redevelopment, though. A successful redevelopment requires another category of economic development investment — privately led and publicly supported. Typically, business districts fall into this category.

These types of investments are — by their nature — more market driven. So, for example, in Indianapolis, heavy investments by private developers (supported by public subsidies and expedited permitting) followed the publicly-led investments in infrastructure and public buildings.

The same is true in Oklahoma City. We devised two, complimentary strategies: one publicly-led and one privately-led. It turns out (not surprisingly) that the job generation (beyond construction jobs, of course) comes from the privately-led investments. In Oklahoma City’s case, the City (led by mayor Ron Norrick) guided the public strategy. The Chamber (guided by the Gaylords and Burns Hargis now president of Oklahoma State) led the private strategy.

In Cleveland, there has been no privately-led strategy beyond trying to figure out how to use public money to bail out private investments. We see this pattern repeating.

With Tower City, the investment languishes because Forest City was unable to do any kind of private deal to develop anchors to its downtown mall. And without anchors, the mall is dead.

I have seen no real strategies coming out of the Greater Cleveland Partnership over the last five years. Instead, the GCP seems overwhelmingly project-driven. That’s not surprising, given the passivity of the GCP board and the overwhelming influence of real estate developers in the business leadership.

To blame the City’s planning director for the failure of Gateway is just silly.

Justin:

My comments lead me to your response. In the past few years, I have seen the dysfunctional politics of Cleveland playing out in everything from the casino fiasco and to the convention center/Med Mart. You may be right. The politics of Cleveland may be too far gone.

Until there is a wholesale house cleaning, it seems fanciful to think that much of a transformation will take place anytime soon. In their report of Cleveland a few years ago, the Brookings Institution warned that this was a possibility.

This took place in Youngstown when they slammed the big green door on Traficante. Now the city is well on its way to recovery.

On the surface it makes sense, but it is far too late to have any effect. There is no strong independent press in town to publicize such issues. The only entity that can take action is law enforcement. Expose the cozy relationships, call in the feds, and take cover as the conv center disappears into the ether.

But alas, Gateway was yet another implementation of the Cleveland Way: commit the public funds first, then do the project, then find a justification, and finally start on a plan. That’s why it took ten years!

Remember the slogan, “Build it and they will come”? Turns out, if all you do is build it, no, they won’t come.

I don’t recall Hunter getting out in front of this thing when it was happening and saying “Hey, let’s hold this up until we have a master plan for the south side of downtown, an honest projection of its costs and benefits, and the resources to follow through on it. As Planning Director I’m telling you this is going to be a financial disaster if we go through with it now.”

No, AS PLANNING DIRECTOR Hunter supported the project even though there was no real plan, and the jobs figure (the linchpin of selling the sin tax vote) was known to be a fantasy.

Gateway was (is) a scam. Calling it “downtown redevelopment” when it was in fact no such thing is intellectually dishonest.

There’s strong evidence that downtown redevelopment can generate significant job growth. As I said, I spent seven years working with Oklahoma City, starting in 1993, and the results are proving themselves.

We built a baseball stadium, re-vitalized a convention center, and a new library. We attracted downtown hotels and built a canal where only a stream existed. We used launched a business district to create a shared stake in the downtown by the business community. We attracted Sonic to move their headquarters, and built an entertainment district.

Do not tell me (or the good folks of OKC), please, that downtown redevelopment does not work, because it no one will believe yoou.

Exhibit B: Indianapolis.

The failure is not in your planning director; the failure is in a private sector unable to capitalize on an opportunity that public investment creates.

The failure was in pretending that a project like Gateway would ever create 28,000 jobs. “Good paying, permanent jobs!” like the ads said. It’s simply implausible, business district or no business district.

Hunter was wrong, wrong, wrong about Gateway.

A planning director does not create jobs. A business sector does.

The main failure to create jobs falls to the private sector (the Greater Cleveland Partnership). It took them ten years after Gateway for the private sector to create a business improvement district downtown. Talk about slow.

Check out how a downtown redevelopment strategy works in a place that I had something to do with: Oklahoma City. We developed a coordinated investment plan — with both public and private sectors. And the results are there for all to see: http://snurl.com/3ucn6 and http://snurl.com/3ucst

Milken Institute ranks OKC as one of the fastest gaining cities in its Best Performing Cities list for 2008, ranked 50 overall. (Cleveland by contrast is not moving: 193 of 200 last year; 193 this year.)

Or, check out how Indianapolis (also one of the fastest moving cities) supported its downtown mall with aggressive private sector investments in downtown housing. (Never happened in Cleveland after the investment in Tower City. What did the development community do? Built more shopping malls in the suburbs.)

In Cleveland, you have a business community simply focused on public subsidies and little else. They do not really know, frankly, how to pull off a downtown development strategy. It’s a bit more complex than a strip mall.

You might want to blame the planning director, but, boys, you are aiming at the wrong target.

Where the heck were you when it was Gateway? When your guy Strnisha gave the “analysis” behind the claim of 28,000 jobs?

And you were, um, “Planning Director.”

Your complaints, though accurate, are disingenuous in the extreme.

If the convention center is to be stopped, it will take direct pressure upon decision makers. At this point, even a federal criminal investigation can’t derail our political bosses from derailing the convention center. By all accounts, it’s a done deal.