If you build it, we will stay: baseball holds a city hostage.

AuthorBartimole, Roldo
PositionCleveland, Ohio

Here's some cautionary advice from Cleveland: Hold onto your pocketbooks because Jesse James and Al Capone working as partners couldn't do a better job of cleaning out your city's treasury than a major-league sports entrepreneur. Cities across the country are being seduced by promises of tax riches and jobs made by developers of all stripes - but the worst offenders are in the business of sports and entertainment.

First, I want to mention the change in Cleveland. The city elected Dennis Kucinich as mayor seventeen years ago, and he had a meteoric ride as a new urban populist, only to burn up with the assistance of local business leaders. Fortune magazine credited the city's image-conscious corporate leaders with having "organized the troops and devised a strategy, setting in motion a benign conspiracy" to dump Kucinich in 1979. And they have been attentive ever since.

Cleveland now is hailed as a "comeback city." This spring it displayed its publicly financed Gateway sports complex for national television audiences. And next year it will open the $92 million Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, publicly financed as well. In 1996, Cleveland's 200th birthday, more projects are slated. Downtown are new office buildings and hotels, spurred by twenty-year exemptions from all property taxes and financed with multimillion-dollar Federal grants fashioned with interest rates of zero, with no money due for twenty years.

Cleveland has been drinking from the same gold-plated spigot that quenched the thirsty downtowns of many other cities - the public subsidies that have made welfare clients of their wealthiest denizens. American cities since the 1980s have engaged in a vicious form of triage to embellish downtowns and special theater districts and leave their residents to the carious death of crime, poverty, and disease.

At the same time that mayors are begging for Federal help, they are pouring local resources and local taxes into facilities for sports, theaters, marinas, aquariums, museums, and other forms of entertainment - even restaurants - that are out of the financial reach of most of their residents. Hotels in Cleveland have been subsidized to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per room. Office buildings that house the biggest law firms and the largest banks have been subsidized in the hundreds of millions. All in the name of "saving the city."

Cleveland has become a model for resurgent cities, based on false measurements. In 1989, Fortune devoted five pages to How Business Bosses Saved a Sick City. In 1991, Newsweek credited Cleveland's business leaders with a Reversal of Fortune. Similar stories appeared in major newspapers around the country. There were so many stories, in fact, that civic leaders produced a booklet full of copies. The city won four All-American City awards in recent years.

If others are looking to Cleveland for the path to saving their city, however, they are lost. The city's vanishing populace - down to 500,500 from about double that figure in the 1950s - is 40 per cent impoverished. In some neighborhoods, the rate soars to 80 per cent. Manufacturing jobs in the four-county metropolitan area are fewer than they were in the 1930s. Governing magazine rated the top 100 American cities recently and found Cleveland to be seventh-highest in unemployment and second-to-last in personal income; only Newark and Detroit had more households receiving public assistance.

But if you read the press here and elsewhere, Cleveland is "the Comeback City."

Mayor Mike White, one of the new generation of pragmatic...

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