How to save Cleveland: turning around America's dying cities is difficult, improbable, and necessary.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey - Cover story

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You WANT A QUICK indicator of urban decline in any city you visit? Ask a local what's great about the place. If the top three answers include "a world-class symphony orchestra," you're smack dab in the middle of a current or future ghost town.

This orchestra axiom is something I divined while working on Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey, an hour-long documentary you can see at reason.tv/ cleveland. Time and again, I'd ask Clevelanders--a proud breed beaten down by decades of lake-effect snow, economic degradation, population decline, and gridiron disasters worthy of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland ("I had not thought death had undone so many")--to tell me what was still top-notch about their hometown. It didn't matter if I was talking to a CEO or a homeless man, a bar owner or a barfly. The inevitable reply: "We've got a world-class symphony orchestra," typically embellished with some transparently phony claim about how it compares to those in other cities ("It's in the top Is or 20 in the world!"), as if orchestras are regularly ranked like NCAA basketball teams.

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Such are the thin straws at which residents in drowning cities grasp. Such is the psychic depravity that failed polities inflict on their residents, the mental tics and habits of mind that both compensate for and reinforce the steadily diminishing material conditions that drive down the quality of life. The job losses, the economic stagnation, the grim depopulation of downtowns and residential neighborhoods have a psychological dimension that is every bit as punishing and effective in keeping terminally ill cities in their sick beds as high taxes, stifling regulations, and municipal corruption. Talk to the people left in cities on the skids, and you'll quickly hear some variant on one or more of the following: If only heavy industry hadn't gone south, if only Standard Oil or Boeing or Consolidated Fuzz or the Browns hadn't moved, if only the weather were different, if only the blacks or the Puerto Ricans or the Italians or the bohunks or the unions or the Jews or the Bilderbergers or air conditioning hadn't ruined it all.

It isn't hard to understand why certain burghs go bust: Crime goes up, schools go down, taxes go up, services go down, the hassles and costs outweigh the opportunities and benefits until the population leaves in a steady trickle or mass migration. But it is far more difficult to figure out how to shock a pulse back into a place that once thrived.

No Hope, and No Plan

Part of the solution is changing the mind-set of the residents, replacing the alternating feelings of inadequacy, hopelessness, passivity, and defensiveness with more productive emotions and cogitations. The prerequisite for change, the economist Ludwig von Mises once said, is a felt need for change. That's only part of the answer. Fatalism must give way not to delusional optimism and boosterism but to a sense of longing for something better--and, equally important, a belief that it can be achieved.

That sensibility is almost completely absent in Cleveland and many other cities today. Since its population hit a high point in 1950, Cleveland has lost more than half of its residents and essentially all of its economic and cultural capital. The Rapture happened here, but instead of going to the bosom of God in heaven, the elect ended up in Houston, Charlotte, Los Angeles, New York, and, most galling of all because of its proximity and broad-shouldered similarity, Chicago. There was a time, at the turn of the 20th century, when Cleveland and Chicago were real rivals, but that competition long ago devolved into a sort of lopsided Clippers vs. Lakers fiasco in which the clear winner need not even acknowledge that a competition ever existed.

As Chicago was becoming the hog butcher for the world and tool maker and stacker of wheat, Cleveland peaked as the seventh-largest city in America, with nearly I million residents, before beginning a long, slow, steady decline underscored by race riots, the Cuyahoga River bursting into flames, and a 1978 default on its municipal bonds. This year Cleveland earned the dubious honor of being named "the most miserable city" in the U.S. by Forbes. "Cleveland nabbed the top spot as a result of poor ratings across the board," wrote Kurt Badenhansen. "It was the only city that fell in the bottom half of the rankings in all nine categories." Consistently one of the country's poorest urban areas, Cleveland had double-digit unemployment long before it was commonplace in the rest of the country. Some two dozen Cuyahoga County officials are under federal investigation for...