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5. THE CLEVELAND EXPERIENCE: MUNICIPAL-LED ECONOMIC AND WORKFORCE INITIATIVES DURING THE 1990S
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CHAPTER FIVE THE CLEVELAND EXPERIENCE: MUNICIPAL-LED ECONOMIC AND WORKFORCE INITIATIVES DURING THE 1990S Norman Krumholz and Daniel E. Berry INTRODUCTION This chapter describes the implementation of Cleveland’s Supplemental Empowerment Zone (SEZ) begun in 1994. Building on the city’s legacy of equity planning and the strengths of Cleveland’s CDCs, city leaders focused the EZ application and long-term neighborhood improvement strategy on two main components. First, CDCs would lead a variety of housing and economic development initiatives designed to entice new businesses and jobs into the neighborhoods. The second major component of the EZ was to turn to the private sector, including area education and training organizations as needed, for help in shaping job training and placement initiatives. The Jobs and Workforce Initiative (JWFI) of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association was an important part of this second component (Berry, 1998). Cleveland is an example of a declining or weak market rust belt city. But it is also the home of equity planning, a product of the 1970s; one of the most well-developed community development sectors; and a civic community of business and foundation leadership that has led the country (Henton, Melville, and Walesh, 1997). This chapter discusses how a city with significant economic challenges tries to rebuild itself and create its own equity pathways 133 134 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN AMERICAN CITIES to mobility and neighborhood revitalization. In addition, this chapter points to the challenges of implementation—how to organize a complexity of stakeholders and funding streams to connect harder-to-employ individuals and scarce jobs. ABOUT THE CITY, 1950–2000 The early years of the twentieth century saw the City of Cleveland emerge as one of the world’s most important manufacturing centers. Iron and steel mills, oil refining, chemicals, clothing, automobile, and other industries provided jobs for an exploding population, mostly immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, that shot up from 381,768 in 1900 to 560,663 in 1910. Cleveland was one of the nation’s fastest-growing boomtowns, the home of industrial millionaires and workers who enjoyed a relatively high standard of living. Since there was little development outside the city, rich and poor lived relatively close together, in the same city with the same political leadership and the same institutions. World War I put an end to the flood of migrants from Europe, but Cleveland industries recruited southern blacks to man their machines. In a single decade, from 1910 to 1920, the city’s black population increased by 308 percent—from 8,448 to 34,451. With the end of the war, many of those jobs were lost to the black community, which was subject to increasing racial animosity, limited housing choices, and persistent discrimination in hiring. Most of the black population settled in the Central Avenue ghetto on the city’s east side (Kusmer, 1978). Suburbanization increased, and by the 1930s, there were growing differences between the city and its suburbs—differences in race, ethnicity, employment, and wealth. With the end of World War II, the exodus of Cleveland’s population accelerated dramatically. Between 1960 and 1970, the city lost more than 125,000 residents, including 25 percent of its families with incomes over the metropolitan area median (Hill, 1995). A racial riot in the Hough neighborhood in 1966 and another in Glenville in 1968 convinced many Cleveland residents, black and white, to leave the city. By the 1970s, Cleveland was losing 20,000 people a year, and by 2003, the city had lost more than 50 percent of its 1950 population. Between 1950 and 2003, the city’s population dropped from 914,000 to 424,948 (Northern Ohio Data Information Services [NODIS], 2004). Cleveland’s jobs joined the exodus, with more than 200,000 jobs lost between 1950 and 2000. Manufacturing jobs were particularly hard hit as manufacturing as a proportion of Ohio’s gross state product dropped from 37 percent in 1977 to 22 percent in 2001. Unemployment in the city typically ran three to four times that in surrounding suburbs. Average incomes in Cleveland between 1986 and 2001 fell from $29,935 to $27,681, a 9 percent drop (Gottlieb, 2002). In 1978, Cleveland became the first large American city since the Great Depression [3.95.233.107] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:07 GMT) 135 THE CLEVELAND EXPERIENCE to default on its fiscal obligations, although observers charged that the default was driven more by politics than by finances (Swanstrom, 1985). Poverty and racial isolation in the...