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New Ways to Govern Our Cities 2 The University Circle Story On the afternoon of May 9, 2003, a former graduate student named Biswanath Halder, sixty-two, wearing a wig, helmet, and bulletproof vest, smashed through a glass door at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Once inside, Halder shot the first three people he saw, wounding two and killing a thirtyyear -old MBA student from Youngstown named Norman Wallace. Halder kept scattering shots as students and faculty ran or barricaded themselves in offices. Police arrived, and there was a sharp exchange of gunfire. Halder took advantage of the curvy walls and hidden recesses of the Frank Gehry–designed Peter B. Lewis Building to slip deeper into the interior. But the near-immediate arrival of the police had forced Halder into a defensive posture; and instead of a Virginia Tech–style massacre with dozens dead, the only other person wounded was Halder himself, who hid in a closet during a seven-hour standoff before finally surrendering to police. He later told authorities he did not know the people he shot; he was upset at another person in the building who had hacked into his Web site for entrepreneurs from India. Convicted of multiple counts, he received a sentence of life without parole. A tragedy, and one that could have swelled into something much more horrible; but the rampage also lets us glimpse something important about how municipal governance may be evolving today. The first responders to enter the building were police officers named Staff Sergeant Kenji Kurokawa and Sergeant Daniel Stein. They wore the uniforms and badges not of the Cleveland city police, nor the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s SWAT team, nor the nearby suburban Euclid police, nor the FBI, all of which responded during the seven-hour siege. Instead, they served as members of the University Circle Police Department, a unit formed by and reporting to a nonprofit community group called University Chapter 2 | 34 Circle Inc., which operates, if not as a mini-government, then certainly as a significant overseer of a square-mile chunk of Cleveland’s east side. UCI gets its name from the neighborhood itself, a district that dates to the 1800s and is now home to not only Case Western but a cluster of other schools, hospitals, and museums; it is one of America’s many Eds-and-Meds-and-Arts districts, roughly equivalent to Detroit’s Midtown district. Of course, numerous well-todo neighborhoods in American cities hire private security firms to patrol their streets, and colleges and corporations often have their own security forces; but rare is the nonprofit community organization that operates a police force, armed and with full arrest powers, under contract with the municipal government and wielding an array of municipal-like powers. Chris Ronayne, a former mayoral chief of staff and chief development officer for Cleveland and now president of UCI, told me during my visit in mid-2011 that the organization acts more and more as a small-scale city government for its district: “We cut the lawns on the public realm, we maintain the public parks here in the district, we sweep the sidewalks, we deal with graffiti abatement, we’re the eyes and ears on the street with hospitality advisers. We are also the marketing arm for this part of the city. We’re one part community development corporation, one part special improvement district, and one part chamber of commerce.” And, he added, their police force does everything from rescue cats from trees to confront lunatic gunmen. In the introduction and chapter one, we saw that the tax base of many great cities has mostly fled to the suburbs. Detroit today, as mentioned, holds only six percent of its regional tax base, a sliver that is too little to generate the kind of revenue needed to operate a full range of municipal services over Detroit’s 139 square miles. The City of Cleveland’s plight is not quite so dire, but almost: Cleveland today contains just twelve percent of its regional tax base, and the meager resources that provides has had Cleveland officials nipping and tucking almost as desperately as Detroit’s elected leaders. It is this book’s contention that our cities have mostly moved beyond the point of no return here; that no amount of cutting can fix the municipal corporations that run our cities, or bring them back to a state of fiscal health. And so we need to evolve some new...

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