Courtesy of Spicy Biscotti

There are interesting developments being played out in the Rust Belt. Some cities, like Detroit, seem to be embarking whole hog down the creative class path. Others, like Pittsburgh, have their own thing going on, a thing loosely delineated as the “Rust Belt Chic”model of economic development, with no modest amount of success. How a given Rust Belt city reinvests will have a large say in its future.

Part 1 of this series examined the nascent creative classification of Detroit. Part 2 analyzes whether or not there is a new way forward for post-industrial cities, using the lessons from Pittsburgh and Cleveland as a guide.

Rust Belt Chic

Rust Belt Chic is the opposite of Creative Class Chic. The latter [is] the globalization of hip and cool. Wondering how Pittsburgh can be more like Austin is an absurd enterprise and, ultimately, counterproductive. I want to visit the Cleveland of Harvey Pekar, not the Miami of LeBron James. I can find King James World just about anywhere. Give me more Rust Belt Chic.—Jim Russell, Talent Geographer and economic development blogger at Pacific Standard.

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Pittsburgh has been referred to as “hell with the lid taken off”. It’s not a compliment, with the moniker originating from an 1868 travelogue written in The Atlantic Monthly. But the reference is a misquote. From the piece:

On the evening of this dark day, we were conducted to the edge of the abyss, and looked over the iron railing upon the most striking spectacle we ever beheld … It is an unprofitable business, view-hunting; but if any one would enjoy a spectacle as striking as Niagara, he may do so by simply walking up a long hill to Cliff Street in Pittsburg, and looking over into — hell with the lid taken off.”

As stated, the context of the piece has been lost to the narrative of the Rust Belt malaise, with one Pittsburgh local writing: “It was practically a love letter to the city, yet that damned ‘hell with the lid taken off’ line is all that survives”.

This Rust Belt notion of “hell with the lid taken off”, “Shittsburgh”, and Cleveland as the “Mistake by the Lake” flows from a certain reality, as the post-industrial transition hasn’t exactly been a sun-bathing. But the lore is also partly contrived, since it’s derived from a stubborn stereotyping of the Rust Belt as a backwater you go to die. Such rigid yet malleable beliefs are “mesofacts”, or cognitions which—while not necessarily reflecting reality—nonetheless influence reality, particularly the act of migration. Writes Samuel Arbesman, the founder of the term:

[I]magine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid.

Mesofacts are an issue for Rust Belt cities. But the  resultant civic booster pandering comes off as desperation, with the image makeover usually but a process to “hip” your city into something, anything else. In fact there has been ample shame in being Rust Belt. Shame for having been post-industrialized. Abandoned. Idled from what the culture is known for: hard work. The collective sense has affected how the future is plotted.  Buffalo, St. Louis, Dayton yearn to be Las Vegas, Miami, Portland, New York. In fact, as we speak, Cleveland is planning a “transformational” vibrancy effort that entails hanging a Rodeo Drive-like outdoor chandelier in its theatre district. It will hang not a mile away from a neighborhood, Central, with a 70% poverty rate. Such dissonance-ensuing efforts kills recovery efforts. Said Jean de la Fontaine:

“Everyone has his faults which he continually repeats: neither fear nor shame can cure them”.

The alternative is for a city to know itself,  to chart its own way. Let others copycat their way to oblivion, or to become, according urbanist Aaron Renn, some “sort of mini-Brooklyn instead of who they really are at heart”. But this isn’t easy. It requires a collective and sustained effort, and a conceptual frame that can guide the process. This, then, is the central driving tenant of Rust Belt Chic economic development. It is not a process of “kumbaya-ing”, but a strategy sourced through that basic wisdom of the ages: “Know Thyself”.

Courtesy of Red, White, and Blueprints

Below details the experiences of Pittsburgh and Cleveland using the Rust Belt Chic lens, particularly showing how an awareness of its legacy costs and legacy opportunities can be used to build emerging economies and evolving societies.

The New Economy: Neither Extraction nor Retention

A reality for the Rust Belt is that people left. Cleveland’s population declined by one-third in the 1970’s. Pittsburgh’s exodus occurred in the 1980’s. In fact, the whole of the region exported people, with states like California historically benefiting. Commonly, domestic outmigration has been viewed akin to leprosy, with angst-ridden brain drain initiatives haranguing people to stay put. This is a prime example of a mesofact-driven policy that does more harm than good. Rather, understanding how to leverage the fact your citizens are everywhere would be wise in an economy where connection matters more than place. This is the view in international economic development. Rust Belt cities should get wise. How Sweden thinks:

Swedish Foreign Affairs Minister Carl Bildt believes it’s essential to embrace globalization. “I want to have more of the world in Sweden and more of Sweden in the world,” he told me. Sweden isn’t afraid of brain drain, he said. Instead, “we encourage our young people to study abroad and to work abroad.” Many return, but even those who don’t help to connect Sweden to what Mr. Bildt calls “the global flow of ideas.”

This “global flow of ideas” is not just talk. It has legs. Writes leading Rust Belt Chic thinker, and colleague, Jim Russell: “Moving from one place to another is an economic stimulus. People leaving Cleveland promotes growth.”

Courtesy of the Census.

How does this work exactly?

Think of an act of migration as a lying down of fiber optics, with each trip thickening the network between two points in space. Often, cluster relationships begin forming. Take Los Angles and Pittsburgh. For years, the best talent would be poached at Carnegie Mellon. On the surface, this meant Pittsburgh would grow the talent and California, though an employer such as Disney Labs, would reap the rewards.

Brain drain, right? Thus, spend money to herd the nerds, and make your talent inert for the sake of a Census count. Or, as Russell writes: “Pittsburgh is dying. Time to pony up the jingle and get Richard Florida to save the day.”

Well, as Ernest George Ravenstein wrote in “The Laws of Migration, 1885”, “Each main current of migration produces a compensating counter-current”, and this is exactly what happened between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. For instance, as the cost of attracting talent into “spiky locales” started becoming prohibitive, alternatives were sought. For Disney Labs, one was locating an R&D center near Carnegie Mellon, with the decision influenced by the networks formed through by Pittsburgh’s “brain drain”. Count Google and Apple as two others bellying up in the Rust Belt backwater. As is Schell Games, an educational gaming company with a founder born in Jersey, educated in Pittsburgh, and refined in Los Angeles. Located in the South Side neighborhood of Pittsburgh, the company totaled a quarter of a billion dollars in sales in 2011. A similar process is being played out in Cleveland between Case Western, University Hospitals, and Philips Technology in the field of medical imaging. These are just some of the  relational opportunities across the whole of the Rust Belt.

Digging further, there is something else going on here, particularly as it relates to the Rust Belt’s legacy asset of growing talent. To wit, other regions, like Portland, attract talent, but their educational ecosystems are less developed. The Rust Belt educates. It mines talent. Exports talent. For instance, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the top 10 states for out-of-state freshman enrollment reside in the Midwest (Pennsylvania is 1, Ohio is 7).

Why does this matter? Because much like the industrial epoch before it, the innovation economy—to buy a term from Economist Enrico Moretti—is converging; that is, it is becoming less “spiky” and looking for leverage. Thus, the “rise of the rest”. From the Harvard Business Review:

It goes without saying that no matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. Yet all too many companies focus solely on acquiring talent, on bringing talent inside the firm. Why not access talent wherever it resides?

The overall lesson here is this: Rust Belt cities need to get over lamenting the Chicken Little-like strategy that is plugging the brain drain. Let your people go. Let them grow. Concentrate on the network.  The trend of jobs constricting its supply line to talent is likely to grow. Welcome to the “talent economy”.

“Cool” Exhaustion

Venture capitalist Brad Feld recently said, “The cities that have the most movement in and out of them are the most vibrant”. The statement speaks to the reality that Pittsburgh et al. won’t shrink their way to growth, as in-migration is needed. On that score, there’s some indication of Rust Belt demographic inflows, indicating changes of a mesofact shift.

For example, people are returning to Pittsburgh, with a positive net migration for the past five years. In fact, U-Haul’s latest annual survey marks Pittsburgh as the top growth city in the U.S. There’s some movement back to Cleveland as well. My past research for the Urban Institute showed a net inflow of 25- to 34-year olds in the city’s downtown, as well as its surrounding inner-core neighborhoods. Other Cleveland neighborhoods and inner-ring suburbs are seeing a net inflow of young adults as well. Also, migration patterns from 2005 to 2010 flowed net positive to Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County from the “spiky” counties of Chicago’s Cook County and Brooklyn’s King County.

Will the trend grow? Here, it’s necessary to infer why it is occurring, so as to emphasize the inherent competitive advantages Rust Belt cities have to offer.

Part of the psychogeographic attraction that Cleveland and Pittsburgh have is the fact they are not Portland, Brooklyn, or any other variety of venerable hot spots engaging in an  arms race of mod. Industrial cities maintain distinct cultures comprised of unique histories that are manifested by both elegant and unpolished bones. In short, the Rust Belt is real places, with real people. Wrote a New York City cyclist and author on his recent trip entitled “It’s Monday, I’m Back, And Cleveland!”:

Portlanders ride around on bespoke bicycles wearing artisanal fanny packs and eating kimchi quesadillas out of food trucks.  Clevelanders watch “The Deer Hunter” and eat rabbit and tubular meats while basking in the warm glow of their leg lamps…

…Cleveland has its own unique take on the whole “artisanal” phenomenon.  For example, in Brooklyn people open stores where they only sell olive oil or mayonnaise, or where some Oberlin graduate will give you an old-timey shave with a straight razor and a leather strop for $75.  In Cleveland, this guy sits outside his shop making bats.

Courtesy of Bike Snob NYC

Rust Belt cities, then, got their own thing going on, something at variance with the universal creative class typology said to attract “young and the restless”. To engage in copycatting would be a tragedy for Cleveland and Pittsburgh to adopt—like re-branding a flower by eroding its scent.

Joi Ito, the head of MIT’s Media Lab, agrees, saying city making is not about heavy-handed creative class endeavors, but about backing off, letting things emerge. But again, this requires city self-awareness, which, according to Ito, “has to do with the character of the city, the character of the people, the character of the mayor”. In other words, the answers for a city are inside of it. Not inside the idea of outside programming.

And by being self-aware, Cleveland and Pittsburgh could position themselves as places for the “cool exhausted”, or places about community, affordability, and family. Places that contain good single-family housing stock. Places with coffee shops, taverns, and backyards. Places not prone to the dichotomy of micro-apartments v. McMansions but rather rest in a middle-grounding sweet spot that is projected to be attractive to the next generation of homebuyers. Says a newcomer to Pittsburgh from Brooklyn:

Moving to Lawrenceville was one of the smartest things we’ve done.  It’s a visually, historically, and socially stimulating neighborhood with a stronger sense of community than I’ve experienced anywhere else.

No doubt,  in-migration of all types is needed—i.e., Pittsburgh’s and Cleveland’s foreign-born rates are at historic lows— but the low-hanging fruit is Rust Belt refugees, or “boomerangers”, many Global City graduates. Russell, who has been examining the phenomenon for years, sees this variant of return migration as a potential game-changer for historically declining Rust Belt cities, particularly because it represents a counter flow to the donut hole-patterning of urban decline. “This is happening, and it’s on a scale much larger than expected,” Russell says. “We are busy catching up to a trend. The Rust Belt Chic migration is a particular form of return migration: Rust Belt suburb-to Big City-to grandpa’s neighborhood”.

Economically speaking, such migrants pack a wallop, as the act of migration is primarily an entrepreneurial act. Such is illustrated in a recent New York Times piece called “Replanting the Rust Belt”. In it, they profile Cleveland chef Jonathan Sawyer who moved back home from New York to raise his family. Yet he was also determined “to help the city transcend its Rust Belt reputation”. Once there, Sawyer “foraged for people”, eventually setting up a local food ecosystem that “connects mushroom farms, bean gardens, Italian bakeries, Amish dairies, noodle makers, butchers and the basement and backyard of his own house”.

Migrants like Sawyer are economic change agents. Pittsburgh and Cleveland need to scale them up, and then do everything they can to eliminate barriers so they can forage properly.

Bowling with Strangers

As the middle class re-enters and gentrifies inner city Rust Belt neighborhoods, consequences will arise. Still, desperate city leaders are happy with any trade-offs, as is evidenced by Detroit’s economic development czar George Jackson recent declaration that: “I’m sorry, but, I mean, bring it on [gentrification]. We can’t just be a poor city and prosper.”

Such conceptions are common in government, institutionalized even. Notes Neil Smith:

Gentrification became a systematic attempt to remake the central city, to take it back from the working class, from minorities, from homeless people, from immigrants…What began as a seemingly quaint rediscovery of the drama and edginess of the new urban “frontier” became in the 1990s broad-based market driven policy.

It is widely understood gentrification does little to eliminate the systemic problems facing not only the Rust Belt, but most communities: that of segregation and inequality. There needs to be a prioritizing of the underlying neighborhood dynamics that offer both hope and challenges for a path forward. To that end, given the rapidity of demographic and housing change in the industrial Midwest—i.e., it’s “brokenness”—consider the Rust Belt as good a living “lab” as any.

For instance, certain demographic shifts in various Rust Belt cities are going against longstanding patterns, particularly the organic evolution of mixed neighborhoods. The integration is coming from several angles, which is largely due to the “benefits” of a depressed housing market  . For instance, in Ohio City, one of Cleveland’s gentrifying neighborhoods, the percentage of black residents increased from 24% of the population to 34% from 1990 to 2010, whereas the percentage of whites declined 58% to 50%. Given that Ohio City is one of the areas seeing an inflow of 25- to 34-year old residents, there appears to be  a meet-up of lower-to-middle-income black families that have migrated from the East Side of Cleveland with younger suburban and exurban whites. The same demographic patterns are occurring in other Cleveland neighborhoods such as Edgewater, Old Brooklyn, and Kamm’s Corners, as well numerous suburbs, suggesting a “shake-up” of social capital paradigms that have kept Cleveland not only geographically segregated, but psycho-sociologically segregated.

“Social capital”, you say?

Yes. Most often social capital is talked about in good terms only, a la Putnam’s seminal book Bowling Alone But as illustrated in the paper “Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown”, too much social capital kills. For example, too much trust in others like you can parallel not enough trust in others unlike you, leading  to immobility, insularity, and stagnation of ideas.  What is needed in Cleveland and Pittsburgh is less social capital, or more movement, more outsiders, and more crossing of such psychogeographic divides as the Cuyahoga River, which has served to divide the  city of Cleveland between the East and West Sides. These “shake-ups” that are occurring fosters the heterogeneity necessary to reverse Cleveland’s declining, patriarchal course.

“My Hometown”. Courtesy of Plain Dealer

But simple diversification of neighborhoods won’t do the trick. For instance, a white teen may go to a diverse high school but it doesn’t mean she will have black friends. This filtering along entrenched historical fault lines happens in neighborhoods as well. The scene in D.C.:

Both groups [whites and blacks] feel entitled and resent the other’s sense of entitlement. Over time the neighborhood’s revitalization engineers a rigid caste system eerily reminiscent of pre-1965 America. You see it in bars, churches, restaurants and bookstores. You see it in the buildings people live in and where people do their shopping. In fact, other than public space, little is shared in the neighborhood. Not resources. Not opportunities. Not the kind of social capital that is vital for social mobility. Not even words.

What is partly occurring here relates to a controversial finding of Putnam’s, or that diversity can decrease social capital—perhaps too much. “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’”, writes Putnam, or “to pull in like a turtle”.

Why?

Part of the reason is that neighborhood diversity can equate to living “by” each other and not “with” each other. As such, neighborhood integration is still raw in the American zeitgeist, with heterogeneity, according to Putnam, engendering mistrust and too little social capital. A next step is needed. Here, community leaders should heed lessons from the concept of creative destruction. From the article “The Downside of Diversity”:

If…diversity, at least in the short run, is a liability for social connectedness, a parallel line of emerging research suggests it can be a big asset when it comes to driving productivity and innovation…

… In other words, those in more diverse communities may do more bowling alone, but the creative tensions unleashed by those differences in the workplace may vault those same places to the cutting edge of the economy and of creative culture.

This, then, represents a key opportunity for Cleveland and Pittsburgh to reconstitute a new American neighborhood model by harnessing the potential inherent in its integrating neighborhoods. This opportunity is perhaps greater in Rust Belt communities given—as of yet—the absence of housing market pressure that tends to filter people along similar demographic lines. The mission is simple: how can cities foster mobility without a complete sacrifice of trust? This entails thinking about social capital in a new way: neither a presence nor absence of it, but a continuum of social capital with insularity based on comfortability on one end, and insularity based on mistrust on the other. The sweet spot of social capital is somewhere in the middle, which entails not bowling with your buddies or bowling alone, but bowling with strangers—until they no longer aren’t.

Why is this so important?

Where people live informs them no less than where they go to school. Neighborhoods are factories of human capital. America needs to go past the gentrification model of revitalization. The cities that still have a fighting chance, like in the Rust Belt, should lead.

Courtesy of the Plain Dealer

Hang an outdoor chandelier Downtown and call it “transformational”. The dissonance that illuminates as it hangs like a fib not a mile away from the Central neighborhood, with a poverty rate of 70%, will be nothing short of despairing. Said Daniel Boorston:

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.

We can do better. I mean, we have to.

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(Via author Anne Trubek)

Belt: Where culture and economic development meet. Long-form journalism and commentary. For Cleveland and around the rust belt.

“Belt” will build on the astonishing success of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology, which proved there is a need for thoughtful, in-depth reporting and commentary on culture and economic development in Cleveland and other industrial cities. The book was produced, start-to-finish, in three months. It drew volunteer submissions from more than 80 writers, was profitable within weeks of publication and is onto its second printing. “Belt” will continue the momentum.

One comment we keep hearing about the success of Rust Belt Chic is that It puts words and images to what people are feeling in the city. Cleveland has few journalistic outlets producing meaningful culture or economic journalism and its only daily newspaper will soon lay off a third of its staff. There is a need for the kind of storytelling Belt can produce.

We have run a beta-version of this magazine over at rustbeltchic.com for a year. We post a mixture of commentary, blog posts and guest contributions. We are ready to start running longer, commissioned articles and essays, and we have a staff in place ready to edit and write.

But first we need a full-fledged website, one that can showcase writing, images and videos, and allow visitors to search for and contribute to the topics we cover. This will cost us about 2/3 of our funding goal. Another 1/3 will go towards our first commissioned pieces. Anything more will go to writers and editors. Your support will help us fund our first issue.

Belt will produced by Clevelanders, and the city will be our primary audience. But what is happening in Cleveland is pertinent to people in other Rust Belt cities–and what is happening in the Rust Belt is pertinent to anyone following the revitalization of post-industrial cities. So those interested in urbanism and cities will find us interesting. So too will anyone who values narrative journalism with a strong voice. Our writers and columnists are experienced professionals with national publications under their, um, belts. We will run original, quality writing that does not shy away from controversy We will belt.

Courtesy of img.ibtimes.com

“[T]he most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” Writer David Foster Wallace

The story of the three Cleveland women kidnapped over 10 years ago and recently found alive in a house on the city’s Near West Side has captivated the national imagination. There is the miracle aspect from the fact that such situations rarely end this way. There is the hero aspect that is Charles Ramsey, the raw dog, uber-Cleveland man that tells it like it is (e.g., “Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms.”) But that is not what this essay is about. Rather, it is about our failure as a city, particularly a failure of priority.

On Monday, May 6^th, the feeling in the air as one of the girls-turned-women emerged into her freedom was torn. There was elation from the miracle that the supposed dead were alive, yet there was also a collective unease that comes with the reality that Cleveland can be a violent city, and that there was a need for a miracle in the first place.

Worse, the fact that the decades-long captivity occurred in the shadows of Cleveland’s revitalization success story, Ohio City—the city’s artisan district and home of the West Side Market—well, let’s just say it was enough to give many in this city pause. Including myself.

Specifically, the week’s events left me acutely aware that Cleveland is still comprised of remnants of a post-industrial community. For it is a city still reeling. Still struggling. Still failing the most vulnerable. And it is a city still culpable, if only through fostering a continued failure in leadership that refuses to build the city the right way.

Yes, like many cities, there are pockets of reinvestment, such as the gentrifying neighborhoods of Detroit Shoreway, Downtown, University Circle, Ohio City, and Tremont. And reinvestment in inner-city neighborhoods is needed, as concentrated poverty and segregation is no path forward. But Cleveland is not going to consume and play its way out of this. Re-treading the entertainment district into whatever urban revitalization fad appears to be going on in any given decade (hello microbrews) will only lead to what we always got: a perpetual state of “revitalization”. What will work is a real reconstitution of Cleveland’s neighborhoods; that is, a reconstitution of people, and not simply of place. To that end, think of the city as a net. No amount of investment will stick until we re-thread our community fabric, which involves growing the people that comprise a community in the first place.

How does a city do this? Well, the first step is to not get too cute, and to do the obvious realities right. No amount of beautification projects will save a post-industrial city. A city needs to focus on the basics, as you develop a city like you grow a child. Here, the psychologist Albert Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can help.

To wit, city leaders must prioritize physiological needs: eradicate food deserts, curb environmental threats, etc. Then, focus on safety. Not just manning safety force slots, but making sure those protecting us respect their duty. There are big questions about this in Cleveland. Also, shelter. Real local housing policies are needed, as are innovative educational and workforce development strategies. If you want to get creative, you can even leverage and strategize various needs together, like utilizing a glut of vacant storefronts into small business/entrepreneurial initiatives. Next, encourage social and cultural attachment so the benefits of community capital can be had. Don’t worry. If persons can breathe, eat, work, feel safe, and go home, they are likely to do this on their own. In fact that is the beauty of a hierarchy approach, as investment at the bottom turns into a self-fulfilling process up top. And then the icing on the cake: actualizing individuals, perhaps through fostering creative capital programs. That said, creatively classifying a city is doing it backwards. Said Maslow:

“A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.”

Of course while this makes intuitive sense to regular Clevelanders, it is confusing for the local leaders, if only through the advice of “revitalization” experts. For instance, in an article addressing concerns over whether or not Detroit’s investment should go to a bike path initiative, the author references an expert as to why the answer is “yes”:

As Peter Kageyama argues in his book For the Love of Cities, “In the city making ‘hierarchy of needs’ we see most communities focused on bottom-line, core issues of making cities functional and safe. There still are many communities that struggle to even deliver functional and safe but that is not the problem. The problem is when communities only focus on the functional and safe and never raise their aspirations.”…Ultimately, places that do not engage us emotionally do not feel worth caring about.

Clicking on the link above to Kageyama’s page, the expert details his thoughts and his audience:

I focus primarily on American cities though the ideas are relevant to any place. I pay particular attention to some of our most challenged places such as Detroit, Cleveland and New Orleans as they have become hot beds of social innovation as government and the “official” city-makers have struggled to reconcile shrinking budgets and diminished capabilities. Into this vacuum has flowed a new breed of city-maker – usually young, independent, unofficial, creative, rule breaking and entrepreneurial. These are the new “frontiersmen” and “frontierswomen” who are rebuilding these cities from the ground up.

There are a few problems here. First, while attachment to place is important, the logic is a bit flawed. A person insecure in various aspects of livability, like food and shelter, is not going to have their concerns addressed via an emotional connection to a given place. I am not saying developing place is bad. I am only saying such an approach is akin to investing in nice drapes as your house is on fire. Put the fire out. Protect your people. Grow your people. After all, according to economic developer Jim Russell, people develop, not places.

Second, local leaders are elected for a reason. To lead. And to serve and protect. “Frontiersmen” or “Frontierswomen” are not going to protect the preyed upon—notwithstanding Charles Ramsey, though I doubt that is what Kageyama had in mind.

No doubt, the events in Cleveland have shaken the city—yet another tear in an already torn city. And while the local and national news media is branding the escape of three women and one child as the “Miracle in Cleveland”, it wasn’t. At least not for us. We failed these young women. We failed the women before them. I hope this serves as our wake-up call. We will not play our way out of this. And if we continue to try, there will always be shame in the shadows of our revitalization.

“Pittsburgh Old and New” by Cynthia Cooley

“Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing”–Aesop

There are interesting developments being played out in the Rust Belt. Some cities, like Detroit, seem to be embarking whole hog down the creative class path. Others, like Pittsburgh, have their own thing going on, a thing Economic Geographer Jim Russell has delineated as the “Rust Belt Chic” model of economic development, with no modest amount of success. How a given Rust Belt city reinvests will have a large say in its future.

Part 1 of this series, below, examines the nascent creative classification of Detroit. Part 2 analyzes whether or not there is a new way forward for post-industrial cities, using the lessons from Pittsburgh and Cleveland as the building blocks to developing an alternative set of strategies for struggling cities.

Detroit Rock (Ventures) City

In Detroit, the scene is playing out as such: rampant disinvestment in the core and extreme poverty around it. To help fix this, ties between Rock Ventures head and real estate billionaire Dan Gilbert, urbanist Richard Florida, and the non-profit Project for Public Spaces have been initiated. The goal, laudable enough, is to reinvest in downtown. And while the renewal formula planned is not new, the extent that the milieu is a controlled environment for an urban experiment is perhaps ahistorical, if only because Detroit’s level of disinvestment has created a vacuum that, naturally, power abhors.

To wit, a recent New York Time’s article entitled “A Missionary’s Quest to Remake Motor City” hints at the level Dan Gilbert—who  has bought $1 billion in downtown property in what has been called a “skyscraper sale”—and his advisors have been handed the keys:

“My job,” said Dave Bing, the Detroit mayor and former National Basketball Association star, “is to knock down as many barriers as possible and get out of the way.”

And:

“Mr. Gilbert met in a conference room for his twice-a-month Detroit real estate meeting, with about a dozen people who work for him, plus a lawyer and leasing agent. If Detroit 2.0, as this group often calls the effort, has a planning committee, this is it.”

And:

“[H]e and his staff will apparently have a largely free hand.”

Now, the plan, and how the plan for Detroit’s future came about.

A wealthy investor, Dan Gilbert, buys downtown properties. That investor goes on the record as to the importance of reinvesting into the urban core. That investor moves his mortgage company’s employees from suburban office parks into his own downtown real estate. Then, the investor, taking cues from his consultants, throws in something about innovation, which, at its lowest common denominator, means designing your way to a “culture of innovation”. Thus, the investor encourages that Romper Room-style office setting complete with what some would say is tacky décor wholly out of line with the soul of “the D”, but yet which is said to fun-birth inspiration—i.e., “[A] karaoke machine sat in an aisle. Guys threw footballs to one another; one employee shot at colleagues with a Nerf gun”; and “A Quicken promotional video solidifies the company’s attempts at over-the-top marketing, prominently featuring the space’s inexplicable Pac-Man theme”—despite the fact that your primary product line, i.e., mortgages,  needs far less innovation than it does a modicum of conventionality and ethics. Nonetheless, the sentiment of creative destruction is there.

The Qube in Detroit. Courtesy of Glassed Door.

This basic process, then, is multiplied out from the office setting into strategic urban space, particularly around Gilbert’s real estate. The idea here is to design space so as to create vibrancy so as to galvanize commerce so as to ignite broad economic growth.

Enter the partnership with the Project for Public Spaces, who is working with Gilbert’s group to do a set of “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” placemaking interventions, including pop-up shops. The conceptual girth behind the plan, according to a recent article “Detroit Leads the Way on Place-Centered Revitalization”, is described as such:

“We proposed developing a Placemaking vision for the major public spaces, and refining the plan through the Power of 10 concept,” says Meg Walker, a Vice President at PPS who worked on the project. “…A lot of developers aren’t as enlightened as Dan Gilbert…they wouldn’t necessarily think about the glue that’s holding this all together.”

“The Power of 10 framework suggests that a great city needs at least ten great districts, each with at least ten great places, which in turn each have at least ten things to do. Great public spaces produce an energy and enthusiasm that spills over into surrounding areas…

With the conceptual description as a guide, this is a classic case of the urbanists’ version of trickled-down economics, in which an influx of capital into finite corridors is meant to attract wealth that “spills over” into surrounding areas. Unfortunately, there is little by way of evidence that this works, as was recently admitted by Richard Florida himself. What it may do, however, is fill real estate supply by pursuing a select target market, as placemaking can act as a grease to create pockets of creative class demand to support condos or retail and office space. And while one can certainly argue it beats rampant core disinvestment, it’s not the path of a bold new way that will measurably change the trajectory of Detroit, so says U of M Professor Michael Gordon. In effect, it’s simply shifting people from one set of real estate to another, with nothing undertaken on a systemic level to tackle Detroit’s real problem: poverty and disenfranchisement in its neighborhoods. Worse, re-urbanization as such is likely to exacerbate class and race divides that have plagued Detroit for decades, thus worsening Detroit’s real problem: poverty and disenfranchisement in its neighborhoods.

Besides, we have been here before. Michigan via its Cool Cities campaign had a plan based off the same Detroit 2.0 premise, switch out the window dressing. Design place, accrue vibrancy, growth wealth. Obviously, the multi-million dollar economic development initiative didn’t work. Neither have similar initiatives across the whole of the Rust Belt.

So, where’s the beef? What makes Detroit 2.0 different?

Naturally, this is where the economic development buzzwords “start-up” and “tech district” enter into the Detroit 2.0 lexicon; that is, creating dense city areas will nurture spontaneous interactions that will foster Detroit’s innovation community, putting it firmly on the path to be the “Silicon Valley of the Midwest”. But every city wants this (or at least they are informed they do)—e.g., “Miami Wants to Be the Next Big Start-Up City”—and so the effort ultimately comes off as anything but visionary, rather visionless, trying.

Cue the Onion. From an article entitled “St. Louis Mayor Has Sad Little Plan For Turning City Into High-Tech Hub”:

In what appears to be a completely earnest attempt to revitalize a sluggish local economy, St. Louis mayor Francis G. Slay unveiled Thursday a detailed, ambitious, and truly depressing plan to turn his city into a major technology hub. “We’re going to show America, and the rest of world, just how innovative and cutting-edge St. Louis can be,” said the mayor, who displayed genuine optimism as he outlined a desperate strategy to woo major players in the high-tech sector with a sad little series of subsidies and tax incentives his city cannot afford… The mayor ended his presentation by pleading with reporters to dub the hopelessly untenable project “St. Louis 2.0.”

In all, the current Detroit economic development approach is copycat urbanism at its finest, as there is nothing inherently “Detroit” about it. Nothing that intrinsically builds off its only true competitive advantage: itself.

For instance, Motor City is Motor City for a reason: it builds things. It designs things. Like, for instance, cars, which, by last count, are still being used, with over 254 million registered passenger vehicles in the US in 2009 alone. And while technology-based automation is increasing manufacturing output at the expense of jobs, production is still huge business in the Rust Belt, with automotive-related STEM jobs (i.e., science, technology, engineering and mathematics-related employment)—i.e., the creative class before the “creative class” became the “creative class”)—aiding Detroit’s regional resurgence, with its 10.5% STEM job growth leading the country from 2010 to 2012. And no, this is not to say Detroit will recoup manufacturing jobs lost from its heyday. But it’s absurd for Detroit to neglect training and flexing its muscle—or its legacy of concept, design, and production—for a future with no middle between start-ups and baristas. I mean, advanced manufacturing isn’t nostalgia. It exists.

Courtesy of Funky Seven

So, why this path? Why pretty Detroit? Why make it culturally less distinct? Why embark on a plan of hyper-modern ephemerality when your distinction is resilience, making things, and hard work? Why? Where is the evidence that this even works? What in the hell is even going on here?

To get to the bottom of this you need to be aware of parallel events in Cleveland. There, Dan Gilbert has hands in that city’s Downtown redevelopment as well. But it is not what you think. And therein lies the problem.

You see, if the Detroit Dan Gilbert is the urbanists’ Dr. Jekyll than in Cleveland he becomes the anti-urban Mr. Hyde. In fact, the Cleveland Dan literally embarks on nearly all the urbanists’ seven deadly sins, including owning and running a casino placed right beside the city’s iconic Public Square, demolishing historic buildings for the creation of a VIP valet center, planning to ruin the iconic Terminal Tower by connecting an enclosed pedestrian tunnel from a parking garage into its face—the Plain Dealer architecture critic stated it was akin to “poking a straw in Mona Lisa’s nose”—and, more generally, pissing off Millennials.

From a recent Atlantic Cities piece entitled “If Other Cities Are Demolishing Skywalks, Why Does Cleveland Want a New One?”, the author, who omits Dan Gilbert’s name, writes:

“In the last decades of the 20th century, many American cities built skywalks in a desperate attempt to seem modern, hoping to create a sanitized urban experience that would compete with the sanitized suburban experience of indoor malls.

For the most part, it didn’t work, and now cities…are tearing down the skywalks…in an effort to return pedestrian life and vitality to the street.

Meanwhile, in Cleveland, the owners of the year-old Horseshoe Casino downtown are planning to build a brand-new skywalk…For many of the young people moving to Cleveland in search of a 21st-century urban experience – pedestrian-friendly, with lots of people out and about – it seems like a step backward in time.”

Proposed Casino Skywalk. Courtesy of the Plain Dealer.

Why is Gilbert going all anti-urban in Cleveland, then? In a word: money, as Moody’s just issued a report saying a walkway would help the casino reach predicted income streams, as it has been underperforming. Obviously casino ownership is a no frills money-making operation, as is real estate. With each: immediate financial return trumps the nurturing of human and community capital to support a vision of long-term economic growth.

But Detroit Dan is different, right? He is a walkability guru’s guru. One of the “enlightened developers” as was stated above.

Well, you be the judge. Here’s a blog post excerpt covering the recent Placemaking Leadership Council hosted in Detroit, with Detroit 2.0 taking center stage.

Dan Gilbert, head of Rock Ventures and Quicken Loans, genuinely seemed to defer to Kent [the Project for Public Spaces head] when it came to his part of the presentation Thursday. Gilbert, who has millions of hours of public-speaking practice behind him, often turned to Kent to fill in the details on the upcoming renovations to Campus Martius, Cadillac Square, Capitol Park, Grand Circus Park and Paradise Valley.

“Genuinely seemed to defer” is right. Or just bored as hell.

And then there is this. This. Courtesy of a Curbed Detroit blog post called “Development In Downtown Detroit Is Playing Out Like A Huff Po Blog Post From 2009”. The referenced Huffington Post piece is by Detroiter Toby Barlow that is called “How a Billionaire Can Make a Billion Dollars”. The strategy? Buy Detroit, not “metaphorically” but “literally”, yet do it “very quietly, so as not to inflate any prices”. Then, according to Barlow, since a billionaire owns thing, he moves his employees to his buildings and gives them “incentives to live down near their work so that they’ll buy your residential property”. Barlow concludes:

So, I don’t have to spell out the rest, do I? Real estate values will quickly soar as other companies, encouraged by your brazen move, make similar leaps into what will still be an incredibly affordable market. The momentum will build as the ever-frenzied media piles on.

Yes, Detroit’s plan for the future pre-dated by a Huff Po blog entry from 2009.

The big revelation here?

Look, in the end, the Dan Gilbert’s of the world are in their line of work for one reason and one reason only: to make money. They will don whatever mask they need to play the part, be it the urban-loving Jekyll or the anti-urban Hyde. That’s the problem with creative class urbanism. It is dependent on developers who could care less. It is a means to an end for those who implement it.

Too bad this end is not the beginning of a true path forward for a real Rust Belt recovery.

Detroiters, like most Rust Belters, have been through enough. They deserve better.

Courtesy of the film “Red, White, and Blueprints”

A city can be a catch-all for personal junk. Here, the mechanism is a psychological one, and it’s one called “projection”, which is defined as “a defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own negative attributes by ascribing them to objects or persons in the outside world instead”.

The comment section on Cleveland.com, and other metropolitan comment sections, is perhaps the ultimate proving ground for excavating interpersonal crap onto the other, be it a community, a race, or a group—such as immigrants—who are defined by a shared attribute, in this case by an act of mobility.

Delineating the immigrant angle further, I recently have come across a commentator whose handle is called “My Dad Lost His Job to an Immigrant” on Cleveland.com. The person’s handle, and the body of his comments—i.e., “This idea that America needs immigrants to better America is one giant canard” or “Taking talented workers away from their home countries is a crime”—serves not only to give the commentator a big giant “F” on the basics of international economic development, but it also informs on the “why” of the comment outside of grounded economic theory.

The “why” is xenophobia, or the “irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries”. In other words, the source is an interpersonal one, one from a pit of problems tied to fear or anxiety that’s not being dealt with through self-awareness, but through projecting it onto the immigrant who in all likelihood is bettering his or her own life, their host city’s life, and their native country’s life.

Meanwhile, the xenophobic act of tearing apart what is an act of community building under the auspices of community building is doing nothing but encouraging—indeed—a culture of joblessness. But not because the commentator’s dad lost a job to an immigrant, rather to a generational perpetuation of small mindedness.

As was stated, a city, or a collection of people tied by geographic proximity and culture, can take the brunt of interpersonal projection as well. Take this rant from a site called Leaving Pittsburgh entitled “Pittsburgh Sucks”:

I hate Pittsburgh. Everyone there is an idiot and thinks it’s the best city in the world. There is life outside of the Steelers. I went to school for film, and even though there’s a movie shot there every once in a while, it’s not enough to warrant me living there for the rest of my life. The city itself is fucking pathetic. No matter where you go, it’s either alcoholic, brain dead Pittsburghers who have lived there their entire lives or young, brain dead Pittsburghers who will never leave. Most of my graduating class from high school went to Pitt, most of them won’t leave PIttsburgh even after graduation. No one wants to know what else is out there. It’s a closed city. There might as well be a fucking wall surrounding it. It’s misery. It’s gray. It’s dying.

It’s clear the comment is coming from a not-so-nuanced take about the city—which is actually doing quite well and statistically getting younger!—and more so from a source of anger and/or loathing. What the person loathes who knows. It’s enough here to say the so-called critique is not constructive, instead adding to a long history of “woe is us” talk that so easily tips from self-assessment to self-deprecation.

And so the decades-long post-industrial chorus line continues: “The Rust Belt is dead. Long live elsewhere”.

Now, does this mean as a city or a region we cannot be self-critical? Hardly. That’s absurd. Especially given the economic and sociological struggles the Rust Belt is still facing.

What it does mean is that the motivation behind criticism should be checked, as criticizing your community through projection will mean a criticism that never ceases, as it is less about a community’s needs or progress—less about a city’s assets or deficits—than it is about a constant internal urge to dump on a thing outside of oneself if only because there is no honest self-assessment as to what is going on inside oneself.

To that end, there are few folks in the Rust Belt who I think are toeing the balancing act of simultaneously critiquing and celebrating the region nicely. With both, you could tell there is care there. Missing is the vitriol that comes with projection. Present is a sincerity that just wants a fucking Rust Belt progression.

Courtesy of Sean Posey

One is Phil Kidd of Youngstown. Phil is both a civic leader that fights the city’s status quo as well as a champion of Rust Belt identity as a means of attempting to progress the city out of its self-defeat. From a recent Atlantic Cities piece:

Phil Kidd stood below the veteran’s monument in Youngstown’s Central Square most every Friday and Saturday night during the summer of 2006. Kidd, whose civic spirit channels the fervor of a street preacher, held a sign to engage passing motorists: “Defend Youngstown.” People started to talk to him. Then came t-shirts, which he sold first on the corner, and later online—in the thousands and for just slightly above cost.

The solitary stand became Defend Youngstown, “a movement dedicated to the advancement of the city of Youngstown.” Its logo is a Soviet realist-style worker wielding a sledgehammer, expressing, perhaps, both an enthusiasm for demolition and a willingness to strike hard against external foes. For Kidd, it’s a marketing campaign to get the city to believe in itself.

“This guy says, ‘I built this place. Do something.’”

Another is Cleveland’s Jack Storey. Storey, a community advocate, is also a filmmaker, having recently finished up a Rust Belt documentary called “Red, White, and Blueprints”, which is currently screening at the Cleveland International Film Festival. Storey, like Kidd, is a Rust Belt defender, with his heel-digging a means to push forward and away from a mindset stuck in a state of all that is lost.

Does that make him a booster? He doesn’t believe so. Nor does he care. He has work to do. Community capital to produce.

Speaking recently to WCPN’s David C. Barnett, Storey responds to the question of how he addresses the inevitable boosterism charges when it comes to making a movie that celebrates a struggling region:

“I will tell that person ‘you are absolutely entitled to your opinion. I appreciate your thoughts. Now get out of my way’…

I have sat through some incredible discussions—public debates—on boosterism versus what they will call ‘realism’. To me, there is a vast difference between calling something ‘boosterism’ just to call it ‘boosterism’ and trying to deflate progress, and when you are just negative constantly about where you are, what value does that add?”

Very little. In fact, though the Rust Belt has a poverty of a multitude of things, negativity-fueled criticism isn’t one of them. It has been around for a while, with a poor track record of fostering an environment for change.

That said, here’s to a new generation that can accept the good with the bad, and that doesn’t fall into the trap of all this or all that. Cities, like our insides, are ambiguous and conflicted. Honestly recognizing this can allow the discourse to be freed from projective screams of anger to a yelling because you want your region to have a voice.

This post originally appeared at Cool Cleveland.

I co-wrote an op-ed with Eric Wobser that appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The gist is that cities cannot simply develop for young professionals, but for families as well. The key, though, is to reinvest into existing community capital as opposed to develop neighborhoods at the expense of city residents that have remained. Not an easy task but one I am excited to examine over the next year. An excerpt:

Achieving this involves developing a city for people, not for demographics of preference. To that end, the best community building cuts across age, class and racial lines, with quality of life coming in a number of forms, be it schooling, safety, public transportation, waterfront access, walkability, affordability and various place-based amenities. By investing in people — a variety of people — the city can continue to grow a pipeline of young professionals seeking a city experience and also help retain those individuals as they age and procreate — not to mention make the city more livable for the diverse mix of Clevelanders who never left.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s recent comment about immigration has drawn some local ire. At his annual remarks on the state of the city, the Mayor—in response to a question of how Cleveland can end its population decline by attracting immigrants—stated: “I believe in taking care of your own”.

To be fair, the Mayor contextualized the statement by inferring that the best attraction strategy is to build a city that works for those who reside in it. In some respects I agree. In fact America attracts immigrants not because of “attraction strategies”, but because it offers the prospects of a better quality of life. So, if a city can nail that down, well, that is a hell of a pull.

The problem, though, is that historically inward-facing legacy cities such as Cleveland have had a hard time moving the needle toward progress because fresh blood is lacking, and so a “taking care of your own” strategy often devolves into policies that simply further fossilize the status quo.

Why?

Because such cities—with low rates of inmigration, and a long lineage of social capital that can tip to the side of insularity and territorial encampment—have too much inertia, which is defined as “the resistance of an object to change its state of motion or rest”.

Inertia is real, not simply in physics, but in organizational behavior, such as city politics and policy. And the more historical it is, the thicker the status quo, and thus the harder it is for a city to change—meaning the future, or the momentum of the city, can be like a train chugging to constant stops of stagnation unless a “force outside the system…act[s] upon the system for a long enough period of time to have any effect on changing the momentum.”

Enter the importance of outsiders, be they immigrants, returning expats, or just new people from other parts of the country. Without them cities get stuck. People see the same things, talk the same things over. Bullshit territorial divides like East- versus West-side of the Cuyahoga River reign, effectively cutting a city’s “brain” in half. Business is business as usual, then. Hence the post-industrial-sixty-year decline.

Writes Aaron Renn over at Urbanophile:

I previously noted how it generally takes a critical mass of outsiders, enough to create a constituency for change in its own right, to drive real disruptive change in a community. These are the people who aren’t invested in the status quo. Absent that, getting reform that works will be a difficult challenge.

Echoes migration expert and blogger Jim Russell:

Without migration, there are no cities. An urban landscape is more than a draw for talent. Metros thrive on churn, both the influx and egress of people…

… The very act of moving, particularly to the top tier of global cities, is entrepreneurial. You are surrounded by risk-takers and innovation. The competition is fierce. The cream of the crop is seeking any edge, looking for any opening.

I am learning about the power of migration first hand. You see, I am a lifelong Clevelander, a West Sider, one well-versed in the how things are customarily done around here, and what thoughts and words are commonly produced if only through a Rust Belt inertia that can be cloaked in “tradition”. My partner, Andiara Lima, is a relative newcomer from Vale do Aço, or the “Steel Valley” of Brazil. Before I met her I was ignorant to the presence of the Brazilian community in Cleveland. Now, I no longer am, and the experience provides me with on-the-ground lessons as to the importance of migration in evolving the Rust Belt “way”.

For instance, individually speaking, my panorama is being broadened, with the dominant cultural connotations of Cleveland defined primarily by whiteness or blackness taking a needed hit. For instance, I was at a Brazilian-hosted house party not long back, and it was like nothing I ever experienced. The dining room was cleared, bodies moved, sweat poured, people screamed and shook ass. A band was set up to play bossa nova along a window seat. And it was happening all in the neighborhood of my childhood, but way beyond my childhood. Rather a feeling of something forward.  Not just past. Not identity politics, but a freshness needed so that crusty legacy and power can be dampened if only to bust identity politics up.

No doubt, these identity politics hurt the region’s ability to welcome and catalyze emerging groups. For instance, I am reminded of a recent Facebook comment on a local politician’s page that discussed a community forum about how Cuyahoga County government reform would affect race relations. The commenter notes:

The whole panel was black or white people. The Asians and Latinos were in the back of the room wondering “what about us?”

“What about us?”

It’s a good question, and one local leaders shouldn’t underestimate given the region’s need for fresh blood. And we aren’t just talking bodies, but talent, as migrants are “economic ass-kickers”, particularly due the fact that migration is in itself an act of entrepreneurialism.

For instance, my partner Andiara studies the Brazilian trade market for a local investment company. Her informational network into the country, both professionally and informally, is deep. For me, she is a link between two Rust Belt worlds, shattering my sense of restrictive locality for a borderless view that gets me thinking about how to position Cleveland not just regionally, but globally.

For Cleveland, she is a reserve for local industry that should be both cultivated and tapped, especially since—as the US Ambassador to Brazil recently said at Cleveland’s Union Club—“Brazil is an economic and democratic power the United States needs as a partner”.

And there is Luca Mondaca and Moises Borges, both acclaimed Brazilian musicians who are plugging (into) and broadening (out) Cleveland’s musical legacy. Yet there is frustration, particularly for Luca, as she feels isolated, untapped, and sometimes lost in the culture of a city that—while desperate for freshness—has difficulty getting beyond the inertia that comes with being comfortably stale. And while I am hopeful that the city is in fact becoming more welcoming—and that the opportunity afforded by the region’s affordability and legacy assets can further open the inmigrant sluicegates—passive optimism is not an option.

Neither is parochial playmaking.

In fact, Andiara Lima, Luca Mondaca, and Moises Borges are Cleveland’s “own”. But without that recognition, they may not be for very much longer.