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George Nemeth · Shrinkage
July 10th, 2008
Er, it hasn’t so far:
The chief of staff to Cleveland’s mayor says high-profile hospital construction and riverfront development projects will improve the city’s image and reverse the population decline.
WKYC: Cleveland leads U.S. in big-city population loss
Last 5 posts by George Nemeth
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July 10th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Cleveland will not reverse population decline until the business and civic leadership works collaboratively to improve dramatically the performance of Cleveland’s school system.
The high school graduation rate for Rep. Tubbs Jones’ congressional district is about 50%. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that bold steps can quickly have an impact.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I agree. I also think that its never one concerted effort in Cleveland. It’s news for the day and it goes away until the next batch of figures come out.
You can’t hire the best young employee for pennies and say “cleveland’s cost of living’s cheap…take the offer”.
You can’t get anything done when some 10-term incumbent entrenches him self with “office assistants” that are political connections rather than talent.
You can’t get them in a room together to REALLY talk about solving an issue without watching fists fly.
July 11th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
We have all the ingredients already. We don’t need to do anything but make what we already have function properly, which is the one part of that chief of staff’s job he hasn’t yet done yet because he is focusing on high-profile window dressing–investing in a dying industry based on sickness rather than on wellness and in another industry based on recreation and spending discretionary dollars when those dollars are on the wane.
The school system needs to come back to where it was in the 1960s–should be simple enough, with competent leadership, and putting education first, ahead of contracts and personal relationships and unions.
Government needs to stick to its knitting and quit thinking its in the real-estate development and economic development business; it also needs to get way leaner.
The housing and food are great values and quite affordable. They need to be part of the compensation package. With these new tech jobs, the salaries are so noncompetitive compared with those in other regions that employers are going to start to have to throw in a house on the buslines, seriously.
In brief, we have it all right now, we just have to work it better and quit wasting time, money, and effort on all this glitz and chasing old, tired models. We need leadership, not tentative project managing.
July 14th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Until the school system is turned around, county taxes are lowered and the same incentives for new building are offered for home rehabs in our neglected neighborhoods, the gains that are publicized will remain a small ding in the loss of population.