Brewed Fresh Daily

Those of you who've read BFD for a while know that every month I report what Otis White's publication say about Cleveland. Wep, the bottom dropped out:

What's the worst news a city can receive? Here's a candidate: Learning that it's now considered the poorest big city in the country. Welcome to Cleveland. When the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual calculations of population and income recently, it gave Cleveland the unhappiest designation of all, the poorest city in America. "Oh my God," exclaimed one local academic when she heard the news. The Census Bureau numbers are grim indeed: 31.3 percent of Cleveland's households live below the poverty line, which is $18,660 for a family of four. Cleveland's median household income of $23,000 is also the lowest in the nation, and nearly half of children there live in poverty. (Other desperately poor places: Newark, N.J., with 30.4 percent of households in poverty; Detroit, with 30.1 percent and Fresno, Calif., with 28.4 percent.) Mayor Jane Campbell was so upset with Cleveland's ranking that she called for a "poverty summit" of business, government and non-profit leaders to address the problem. "We want to know what are the best ways to move children out of poverty, and what we can do in this community," she said. Meanwhile, civic leaders in Miami are breathing a sigh of relief. For the prior three years, it had been the nation's number-one city for poverty. In the most recent rankings, Miami moved to fifth place. City officials say this probably has more to do with middle-class families moving in than poor families suddenly prospering.

Emphasis mine. That begs the question: what did Miami do to get middle class families to move in? Or did they just redraw the city limits?