Cities are at War

Last night I saw the film Urbanized, a documentary film by Gary Hustwit. The film takes a global look at cities and the issues they are facing moving forward. The overcrowding in India, the loss of identity through the explosive growth in China, transportation issues facing auto-centric South America, and the all-too-well-known sprawl and decay in the U.S.

New York, Detroit, and Phoenix. were chosen to represent America's good, bad and ugly. There wasn't a lot of new information here for someone who follows urban policy and issues with some regularity, but I did appreciate something that was said during the Phoenix, Arizona segment. An interview was done with a lawyer who dealt with real estate law and the topic was sprawl. Though the interview was likely more legal focused, the conversation moved to the idea of personal choice and the city v. the suburbs. The gentleman who was being interviewed spoke boldly and said, "I like the city, I can appreciate the small urban condo for about 2 months out of the year, but I've got 3/4 of an acre out here. I like my pool, I like my yard. This is what you get in the post war, automobile focused city. The roads, the housing, the space, it isn't "evil", it's the next evolution of the city.

Now, this may irk many readers, but the truth is he is right. Main street has been replaced with the highway, and distances of 15 feet between shops are now 1.5 miles between exits. The time it takes a New Yorker in Manhattan to walk from their apartment to their local grocery store might be the same as it takes an Ohio suburbanite to get from their living room to the parking lot of their grocery store. Convenience is often cited as the benefit of living in a city where "everything is so close you", but this is a flawed argument when you realize that the suburbs were built for convenience. This argument is especially true in Cleveland where one can get from a suburb 5 miles out of downtown to their East 9th street office in less time than many could walk or ride a bus from an Ohio City house or University Circle apartment.

As a native Clevelander, and someone who wants the city to thrive and grow, I look at the mentality of comfortable suburbanites and try to consider what benefit the city has over the suburbs -- to them.

This brings me to the second piece that stood out. During a sequence featuring Detroit and New York, the narrator came over the music to say "cities are at war with each other, they are fighting for the ultimate resource: people." I was instantly reminded of the long criticized comparison of Cleveland to New York. When people used to compare Cleveland to her bigger siblings that comparison would be criticized and a replacement of Cleveland v. Minneapolis would be offered.

But the war between cities does not discriminate by category or class. New York, L.A., Washington, Charlotte, Miami, and yes Cleveland are all battling to bring in new citizens. The most sought after population are college graduates in their 20s. Since the vast majority of
people growing up in the greater Cleveland area are from the suburbs, their perception of "Cleveland" is based on two images, their suburban communities, and their seat at Progressive Field. There are no urban streetscapes, mass transit routes, apartments, or local cafes in their vision of Cleveland. Instead they instantly think of Manhattan or Chicago when they think "the city". Some, while in college, will do internships in Cincinnati or visit a girlfriend's family in Boston. Over time the average (greater) Clevelander will have an unbalanced comparison in mind when deciding where to move at 23.

So, should we compare ourselves to New York and Chicago? I say yes. Should we develop policies, goals, and planning that are parallel? No. That is the key difference. We should not focus our limited resources the way a bigger city might. We need to work on attracting a core community to downtown, and offering services and lifestyle opportunities that young urban persons want. We need corner stores, grocers, walkable streets, and community events. We need yoga in the park, and urban religious centers. Though jobs are an essential part of the city, the community needs a much more elaborate set of amenities. If you compare the Warehouse District to Chelsea, the Gateway Neighborhood to Wrigleyville, or University Circle to Dupont Circle you can gain invaluable data on what works and what doesn't.

We need to ask ourselves what are we missing? From the smallest detail to the largest factors what does Cleveland lack that Dallas or Seattle have? The answers are all around us if we only look.

Cities Are At War. It is a global battle for young and talented entrepreneurs, it is a national battle for popularity, and it is a local battle to offer the best neighborhoods - the best daily quality of life. Cleveland can win the war by focusing on neighborhoods and lifestyle, by working from the sidewalk up to make every Clevelander's day better. Make the streets walkable, the jobs plentiful, and the bars manifold and we'll win the day.

In Pursuit of Human Capital

Early this month, Venture for America (VFA), a new philanthropic program that recruits talented college seniors to add capacity to business start ups in some of the most difficult American cities, opened its application process. With a mission similar to its near-namesake Teach for America, VFA seeks to improve existing businesses in ailing cities by injecting them with new talent and helping them attract college grads that might otherwise overlook opportunities at small, local startups. The program’s goal is to create a new class of entrepreneurs that will help grow the companies they work for or launch their own after learning the ropes, all in the hopes of creating 100,000 new jobs by 2025.

VFA’s launch comes less than a month after the White House announced its own urban capacity bolstering strategy for struggling cities. The Strong Cities, Strong Communities program—which will bring talent to Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, Fresno, and Chester, PA—aims to strengthen neighborhoods, towns, cities and regions around the country by increasing the capacity of local governments through technical assistance and access to federal agency expertise.

Despite the reality that metropolitan areas account for 86 percent of employment, 90 percent of wage income, and, over the next 20 years, 94 percent of the nation’s economic growth, many cities are experiencing human capital deficits adding to already diminished competitive capacities. Despite the ample opportunity that such dilapidated landscapes present for regrowth and redevelopment, too many are losing the race for human capital to their shinier, more established brethren.

Meanwhile, college graduates are having difficulty findings jobs to channel their skills through. In 2010, only 24 percent of college graduates who had applied to jobs had a job waiting for them upon graduation. In the United States, the official unemployment rate for college graduates is 11.2 percent, but for college graduates 25 and over it is only 4.5 percent. Clearly the level of unemployment for recent college graduates is significantly higher. In April 2010, 8 percent of college graduates under 25 were unemployed, lower than the national unemployment rate at the time of 9.9 percent, but up from the 6.8 percent of unemployed college grads under 25 in April 2009 and 3.7 percent in April 2007, before the recession began.

Anecdotally, in the months since colleges released their latest brood of grads in May, I have met many whose job application counts top 100, who hold unpaid internships and high rent payments simultaneously as they search for a more permanent spot, for whom the promise of education as a path to a brighter future seems fallacious unless they want to go further into debt to pursue a higher degree—now a pre-requisite in many fields.

Something is amiss. Already ailing cities are being crushed by the limits of their capacity and the lack of young blood coming in to both the public and private sectors. Meanwhile, young graduates are desperately seeking employment options that will be valuable both financially and professionally, with an emphasis on the latter. It only seems right then that programs like VFA and Strong Cities, Strong Communities do what they can to engage this group of youth and harness their talent to help rebuild areas in need of people of the streets and ideas in city hall. Like the Public Works Administration in the Great Depression, the Great Recession calls for an investment in our infrastructure, both the physical structures and the ideological purveyors that support great places. This means more than Americorps level funding to non-profits, which provides a barely livable wage and signals the degree to which we value putting young minds to work. This means true investment that builds public private partnerships and creates a competitive mutual selection process in which cities and young professionals clamor to find their best fit to increase their potential for progress.

Richard Florida has long written about how cities can reshape themselves to attract young professionals, the “creative class.” I believe we need to think more about how bright young minds can shape cities, and then equip both cities and young graduates to do so. Our cities are suffering from a human capital debt crisis, creating and supporting programs like VFA that seek to do something about this is an excellent first step to rewriting their futures.

The importance of "Place" and why we need to Market the City

Recently, the theory of “placed based” development and policy has grown increasingly important within urban discourse. It is a disarmingly simple idea: that Springfield, IL has completely different needs and exists in a different environment than, say, Mesa, AZ or even it’s northern behemoth brother Chicago, IL. The theory has gained traction with the Obama Administration, which has actively sought to ingrain a place based approach into their programs and budget analyses, requiring federal agencies to identify which programs are place based in their annual budget reviews. The idea is that focusing on place and on identifying the competitive advantages of a particular location will enable investment to target better what drives a region and have greater impact. Using much the same theory as regional economic clusters, placed based theory exploits the existing advantages of an area to spur economic growth.

While I think that this top down approach to place—understanding how place based strategy can grow an economic region—is a critical move in the right direction to fund our nation’s cities, I also believe that there is another way that local areas can understand and make use of a place based approach: through creating emphasis on neighborhoods.

It might seem a little cliche, but this gateway leaves little doubt that tourists have arrived at Carnaby Street in London.

A great city is made up of great neighborhoods. Indeed, neighborhoods that have a strong identity help cities thrive. They serve as their own form of marketing, drawing both locals and tourists to them because of what they represent. For example: In New York, SoHo (short for South of Houston Street) has become known as a mecca for artists and shopaholics alike. Its reputation draws people away from Times Square—perhaps a more famous example of wonderful neighborhood branding—and down into lower Manhattan to explore the small boutiques and await celebrity sightings boasted by the neighborhood’s lore. In Boston, if you want Italian you go to the North End. In New Orleans, travel to Faubourg Marigny for a low key jazz scene or the French Quarter for drinks and beignets. Interested in working in tech? Head to San Francisco’s Mission District. Jumping from city to city you see that neighborhoods with strong identities that define them culturally and economically thrive while those still in identity crises whither.

Moreover, what makes cities different from suburbs and more appealing isn’t just their concentration of people, place, and things that make economies of scale go. Cities are unique and qualitative improvements to suburban life because of their neighborhoods. Cities are neighborhoods in a way that suburbs can never be. They are distinct entities that abut each other each with a unique name, story, and identity, that bring people and economies crashing into one another instead of sitting at the distance between picket fenced yards and strip malls.

The French Quarter in New Orleans is unlike anywhere else. As soon as you enter the neighborhood the architecture, food, sounds, and people announce its distinction.

So when thinking about urban development and enhancing the economic stability of a city, we have to use a place based approach. We have to consider how businesses will play to the advantage or disadvantage of different neighborhoods, just as businesses are doing the reverse analysis. This means taking time to clearly define neighborhoods both already branded and amorphous. This means envisioning where development could go and helping it on its way. This means staking a claim to an identity and developing towards that identity in every way. For example, as Cleveland continues to entice youth into its core, it should seek to develop the downtown Warehouse District, so that its identity as a neighborhood of local businesses, boutiques, and eateries where urban dwellers can mingle will help seamlessly move people from one place to the next.

As the federal government works to increase the flexibility of available funding to promote competitive advantages, local governments must work to enhance the identity of their neighborhoods and define what those advantages are. By doing so they can draw in people and capital, reinforcing the cities existing advantage: its livability born from great neighborhoods.

Borders, and the City.

My mother called me the other day to ask me if I still liked the music of Ari Hest. It seems his CD was on sale at the local Borders bookstore, which was going out of business. I didn't have the heart to tell her I mostly download my music, so I told her "no, but thank you". Then she went on to talk about how sad it was to her that they were closing the bookstore. She told me she had met someone while perusing the aisles who agreed with her that it was sad that Amazon.com was the preferred store for book purchases. "I like to walk the aisles, get a coffee, hold the books in my hand. I like to be surprised by what the store has to offer, or maybe run into someone I haven't seen in a while. You can't do that online!" she said.

I agreed with her and told her it was a sad reality of the direction our culture is moving, then we went on to talk about the Indians recent loss, and my dog Sammy's most recent interaction with a skunk. After I got off the phone, however, I realized something: Borders' story is not unlike that of Cleveland. You see, what I didn't notice at first was that my mom's description of her experience at the bookstore offers a fantastic parallel to the city.

When one visits the local bookstore they might have a particular book in mind, they show up and enter a space filled with various books, CDs, assorted art, and miscellaneous items. As you move through aisles you come to intersections where new topics and merchandise is on display often with signs and decorations calling for your attention. The space around you seems dense and filled, you feel surrounded and at the same time immersed in the space you occupy. There are people around you, neighbors and strangers alike, who can offer conversations, opinions on a book you pick up, or simply opportunities to people watch. The entire experience might include an espresso, an hour of reading the recent purchase, bumping into old friends or making a new one.

Pull up a chair. This faux-living room in a Borders brings strangers close together.

...and then there's the internet store. You arrive before you've left your home -- your individual space -- and use a search bar to locate the exact book or section you need. After a few clicks you've completed your task and can log off. Done. It's simple, sterile, and anti-social. But it's efficient, and that's exactly why it's the suburbs of book shopping.

His and Hers anti-social centers. You even order pizza online!

A suburbanite is like the internet shopper, getting up and using their individual transport to get the from bed to office efficiently, quickly, and without any opportunity to browse, mingle, or shop. The highways of cement and asphalt move consumers from point A to B as quickly as highways of broadband cable move you from buying a book to buying your groceries.

The book store aisles and intersections are the roads of our cities and the corner stores of of neighborhoods. That positive feeling people express when they hold a book in their hand or run into an old friend -- that's simply not possible on the internet, and it doesn't work that way in our sprawling new world.

Jane Jacobs best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), in an interview commented that the "corner store was just that... a store found at the corner. Of what? Of your neighborhood, of your community". But the suburbs are literally and figuratively communities without corners. Our main streets are often highways, and the 8 lane intersections surrounded by malls, gas stations and office parks do not make for corner stores.

Cities all over the world have active vibrant streets. Above: Varanasi, India

My mother will miss the book store, not because she won't have a place to go and buy books but, because she will be missing out on a place to see, meet, and talk to people. We need these connections in our lives and the city is a place where connections thrive.

The story of the Surface Lot

You get a parking lot! And you get a parking lot! And you get a parking lot! …man I love Oprah. But in all seriousness the way some of our nation’s downtowns look today one would think surface parking lots were being given away. Like an invasive species they have crept into the cityscape, expanding and taking over lot by lot, block by block, until entire neighborhoods consist of a sea of asphalt with an occasional island of structure.

So how did this happen? How did the surface lot become a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape? To understand this we must go back to the time before they ever existed, before the car.

Mainstreet used to be a real place, not just a nostalgic term used by politicians. Cities had grids of streets branching out from an original artery of commerce often named “Main Street”. The main form of transportation was by foot and thus homes and businesses were built as closely as possible. In this form the city was a dense grid of roads and businesses with no space dedicated to transportation. As streetcars became more affordable cities built lines into the roads and connected the various mainstreets to a network. This transportation system would allow cities to expand while maintaining dense land uses. People still wanted to be close to their work or at the very least close to transit stations, and as such areas of higher density built up along the transit routes and cities’ cores grew more dense and vibrant.

Public transportation is, in essence, the natural progression of movement in a city. Take for example a city in the mid-19^th century. Horses, at the time, were the individual’s form of transportation, however they were expensive and difficult to maintain in an urban environment. This is why we did not see open fields for tying up dozens of horses built alongside commercial buildings in New York or Chicago. When public transportation became possible it represented a new piece of society. Much like utilities and roads, street cars were a part of the built environment and were fixtures of the city’s infrastructure. They were available to everyone and facilitated movement between the jobs and homes of citizens. Cars offered a similar payoff, but with a much steeper cost. Every form of transportation requires roads; pedestrians, cyclists, bus riders, car drivers, and light rail riders all require that roads and paths exist between the elements of the city. However, cars required additional area to be allocated to the car and, thus, parking lots were born.

As the car became more popular companies saw a need for parking infrastructure and built single-use parking lots wherever possible. As the economies of cities continued to grow into the 1950s most cities cut their public transportation services and removed their light rail infrastructure allowing cars to take over as the main method of moving citizens. But as highways were paved through our cities the flow of goods and people moved just as easily into the city center as it did move away from it. Firms began building their offices further away from the city and people and industry fled. Many landlords saw their tenants leave and with little reason to suspect the economic circumstances to change for the better had to consider alternative uses for their land. At this point it’s important to note that cities often determine property taxes based on the value of the land which includes infrastructure whether or not it is vacant. As such there was a disincentive for landowners to maintain their buildings and many beautiful old buildings were demolished and lost forever because of this. The empty lots were easily turned into parking space and the abundant parking made for cheap rates and perpetuated the car culture. Lastly an empty lot poses a bigger challenge for redevelopment than an old building. Repairing and repurposing old warehouses and commercial buildings into lofts and unique commercial space is very trendy today and yields strong returns to investors. However, building a new structure from scratch is more costly and, of course, lends no historic value.

Without an efficient public transportation option the car became the best method of moving around, or more appropriately into and out of, the city. As such, parking lots became staples of the new city filling in every gap left by demolition. The avenues that used to be walled in by store fronts, apartments, and office buildings became host to vacant buildings and open lots; they were deserted at night.

Today many of America's downtowns are covered in patches of black asphalt and to lend insult to injury many of these empty blocks used to support historic buildings complete with architecture that we will likely never see again. This type of land use, the lowest density possible with only a single allowable purpose, is the antithesis of what a city needs. The patches hurt the walk-ability of a city by creating gaps in the streetscape that increase distances between points of interest. The further apart things are, the less likely people will be willing to go between them. This, in turn, inspires others to use cars and drive between these places. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that by making singular places more accessible by car we in turn become more reliant on the car to get us there.

This kind of feedback loop runs counter to those which make the city vibrant and energized and instead serve to expand sprawl and destroy the dense and complex fabric of an urban environment. Cities must take steps to mitigate the presence of surface lots. Parking garages must be encouraged whenever possible, public transportation options must be enhanced and expanded, and taxes must be revised as to not penalize landowners who maintain their vacant buildings. If we could simply restore the empty buildings throughout downtown Cleveland, the current interest developers have in re-purposed units would make them much more attractive than surface lots.

Like a web, the city requires all the strands and connections to maintain its strength. By slowly removing buildings we not only lose parts of the web, but lose the connections these places made. The loss of a bank, tailor, or department store hurts the residents who live nearby. The loss of those residents subsequently hurts other commercial ventures and the decay continues until the web falls to pieces.

Public transit systems enhance the flow of people within a city and amplify its energy. Personal transit systems expand the flow of people into, and subsequently out of, the city, and dampen its energy. The surface parking lot is a symptom of the disease of car culture, and the more you see in a cityscape the more troubled the story. If a city is a beautiful pattern of interwoven activities, the parking lot is a dramatic blemish on the fabric.

Order in Chaos

As with all pursuits it's important to understand what it is your looking for -- in this case, what is a city? This question would yield endless debate, and so I won't try to offer any definitive conclusions, but there are a few elements of the city that most could agree on.

The city is a collective. A place where various communities, economies, and human-ecosystems layer and connect. These dense system of inter-connectivity could be home to many million or many thousands, the number is not important. In my opinion it is the ordered chaos of interwoven purpose that typifies "the city".

The interwoven activities of people and enterprises form the city's fabric.

Thus, a healthy city is one that exhibits a vibrancy in these qualities. The synergies and positive feedback-loops created within a city act as a catalyst for even bigger and more vibrant activities. The ability for a city to magnify the lives and actions of its inhabitants is a central element to my research.

To revive Cleveland, we must first isolate the strengths of the city. Examining the corridors of infrastructure, rivers, avenues, railroads and highways lays a framework for how goods, services, and people move about the city. Before we can offer lofty dreams of light rail and streetcar networks, we must see if we are using our current assets properly. Determining which economic engines are true anchors of productivity in the city should be followed by aggressive public policy to enhance and support these institutions. Small businesses are the engines of innovation and can feed off the success of major industry. This is the kind of synergy that a city can offer. Lastly identifying the resilient communities that have outlasted the sprawl-and-flight history of the city can give policy makers insight into which communities could serve as hubs of future residential activities.

However, we must do more than look at the current strengths of the city, we must look backwards through history to watch the rise and, in all too many cases, fall of institutions within the city. Did we lose jobs to globalization? Did they become obsolete? Or did the CEO move the jobs just a few miles out into suburbia?

The revival of Cleveland would mean its return to national significance. The best way to do this is to determine what assets brought about its initial "boom" and see how many of them can be repaired. Add in the new and burgeoning strengths of the city (read: the Cleveland Clinic was not a 19th century economic powerhouse) and top off with a look to the future to find which areas Cleveland has never taken advantage of, but could.

The Cleveland Clinic was recently named the #4 Hospital in the U.S. by US News and World Report

There are global, national, regional and hyper-local economies that a city can tap into, but there are also limiting factors such as barriers to entry. Cleveland may never be able to compete with Palo Alto, CA in the technology category, but the biotechnology field is ripe for development. Currently Cambridge/Boston is the American Mecca for this kind of research, but Cleveland could certainly take on and excel in this sector.

The city is the collision of everything that man has made; it is chaos with a purpose. There is a gravity that pulls toward the City the culture and advancements of a society. Only in 20th Century America have we seen Newton's famous apple break from its branch, and fly up toward the heavens.

Pericles, a famous politician of Athens, made a speech at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War in honor of Athens' fallen soldiers. In the speech he said, "all good things flow into the City, because of its greatness." Cleveland is surrounded by and filled with assets that provide incredible opportunity for growth. The current and historic institutions yield a framework, that if nurtured, can bring the flow of people, businesses, and all good things back to it.

The Revival

Last week I went to the National Building Museum in downtown Washington, DC to hear a lecture on the Gothic revival in architecture. During the lecture I was paused, for a moment, by the speaker's characterization of the term "revival". She described a "revival" as the moment when something becomes popular or important again.

I have long been searching for the best way to describe what it is that I want for my hometown, the City of Cleveland. Some have framed the mission I take on as one to "save" the city; others criticize this goal as a reinvention that neglects the past. I believe that the right goal, the right mission, is that of revival. We need to bring Cleveland back to the level of importance it once held. During the first half of the 20^th Century it was the fifth largest city in the United States and home to industry, affluent society, and massive economic activity. We cannot achieve that by following the playbook of 19th century America, but we also cannot allow our city to tear apart it's heritage and past in order to stage its future. The challenge facing new-urbanists and the policymakers in our cities is to balance the needs of the present with the goals of tomorrow and the infrastructure of our past. This country no longer needs a city whose horizon is populated with smokestacks channeling out the heat and soot from steel mills. Instead, America needs creative problem-solving citizens: entrepreneurs who can create the 21st century's new jobs and engage their fellow citizens with a new purpose and niche to fill. Both Cleveland and the American City need a revival.

Recently, I came across a series of photographs of Cleveland from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The photos were from a forum of dedicated urbanists who love the city. Posts followed each photograph expressing a sense of longing and, at times, anguish over seeing the glorious old images. One in particular showed the Warehouse District (WHD) of Cleveland, an area of roughly 50 acres just west of downtown's public square. The district was filled, block -by -block, with brick and stone warehouses, each with beautiful facades, window frames, doorways, and various other masonry details. On foot, one can only imagine that, the roads of the WHD offered dense and vibrant streetscapes. Its sidewalks were likely full of pedestrians, moving from offices to local coffee shops, dodging streetcars along the way.

Today the WHD is home to only a fraction of these buildings and more than half of the land has been converted into surface parking lots. The activity, vibrancy, and synergy of workers and residents has been lost to a veritable ocean of asphalt.

Above, the Warehouse District in 1940. Today more than half the land is suface parking lots.

This is one of many stories that have impacted the social and economic landscape of Cleveland. Once, the fifth largest city in the United States, Cleveland now struggles with a shrinking population and the echoing repercussions of white flight, suburban sprawl, and of carving highways through and around the region.

But can the city come back? Over the last two decades, Cleveland has seen a variety of signs that its streets have yet to be drained completely of life . Public-private partnerships have funded numerous large building projects, including three stadiums, the nationally renowned Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and a pioneering Convention Center/Medical Mart combo in the heart of the city, which is currently under construction. Shift to a higher powered lens and you'll see smaller, but possibly more important, projects underway. Developers have energized a corridor known as East Fourth into one of the top entertainment areas in downtown while hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into various projects around the University Circle, or Uptown, neighborhood.

But a full scale revival of Cleveland is far from upon us. The institutions that can perpetuate, or destroy, the energy of a city are manifold and they must be examined individually but understood holistically as well.

So this blog, in brief, is going to be a history of the things I learn while searching for keys to the revival of my hometown. I'll be posting various notes and findings from books on infrastructure, finance, economic development, urban planning, architecture, and just about everything else you can imagine. Though I don't expect to find a panacea for the city, I do believe that best practices exist, and by pulling together various notes and looking for synergies, I expect to find answers to my questions.

No, that's not New York City. Above, Euclid Avenue in the early 20th century.

Cities are imperfect. They are organic centers of human development and are able to magnify our greatest successes as well as our most horrifying failures. They are the peak of human achievement and represent a possibility that is only real when society comes together. Cleveland's story is not unique. The advent of the car and the age of highways and suburbia has taken its toll on every major city in the United States, but the oldest and most storied successes of America lie in the rust belt cities that, today, barely echo their former glory. A revival of their downtowns and city centers would bring about a return to the city, an economic boost that would generate the innovation and creative entrepreneurship this country needs. The pulse of life in the streets of a city can be felt throughout its entire region, and the successes of that city are reflected in the quality of life and quantity of opportunity for its citizens.

Cleveland's revival could be America's revival. So let's begin...