Cleveland Heights lost about 8 percent of its population in the last decade. It was 50 percent white in the 2010 census, a decline from 52 percent in 2000, and 42 percent black, a number almost unchanged from the previous decade. There is a demographic divide of huge proportions. On the one hand, there are the apartment buildings on the north side of town, bordering on East Cleveland, filled with black Section 8 tenants. On the other hand, the bulk of foreclosures that hit Cleveland Heights beginning in 2008 occurred among African American home owners, who had been persuaded to sign contracts on the modest working-class bungalows. Many have left. So there are forces working in both directions on the racial makeup of the area.
The real race problem in Cleveland Heights is not in housing, however, but in education. Although the overall city population is almost exactly half white, the public schools, including Cleveland Heights High School, are approximately 80 percent black. In the system as a whole, 52 percent of the students are classified as disadvantaged. It is not an easy task to persuade middle-class families of any race to settle in the community and send their children to the public schools, even at the lower levels. Of those families in Cleveland Heights that do have school-age children, about a quarter use parochial or other private education. They can afford to escape the racial tensions that pervade the public school system.
FOR MOST of the long history of American suburbia, the concept of the inner suburb was utterly unknown. There was the city itself, and then there was all of the territory beyond it. Only in the late 1980s did a collection of scholars and activists begin to argue that communities like Cleveland Heights had more in common with the central city than with the auto-dependent places that had sprung up in the previous twenty years along interstate highways. “The cycle of decline has recently caught up with the suburbs,” the urban historian Kenneth Jackson warned in 1987. “Half a century after Levittown,” the critic Herbert Muschamp wrote a decade later, “the dream is coming apart at the seams.… The first ring is in a state of emergency similar to that suffered by the cities the suburbanites fled.”
White flight was a good deal of the emergency, as in some of the suburbs directly adjoining Cleveland and bordering on Cleveland Heights. Economic resources were a large part of it: Most inner suburbs, with little industry or large-scale commercial activity, were heavily dependent on residential property taxes. A decline in residential property values, as occurred in many of these places, was likely to be devastating. Moreover, in comparison with the inner city and the burgeoning exurbs, the inner suburbs received little help from any outside source: county, state, or federal. In a rational system of metropolitan triage, inner suburbs would have claimed a much larger share of outside assistance, as they stood on a precipice between renewal and decay, unlike the exurbs, which needed no immediate help; and the inner cities, many of which seemed beyond repair. But the exurbs got federal highway money to spread even farther into the countryside, and the inner cities were the beneficiary of a whole array of federal programs. “It’s absurd,” claimed Tom Bier, the urban scholar at Cleveland State. “Unless you are a slum, their attitude is, ‘We won’t help you.’ You actually have to fall apart to the point where it’s evident you are a disaster case.” In reality, though, inner suburbs differ among themselves almost as much as they do from inner cities and outer suburbs. Even before urban demographers paid much specific attention to inner suburbs or their distinctive set of problems, they were interested in the way urban populations flowed through metropolitan areas over time. Elaborate theories were developed to explain this. Bernadette Hanlon provides a rich account of them in her excellent 2010 book, Once the American Dream.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there was what was called persistence theory. It held that the socioeconomic character of suburbs scarcely changed at all. As the upper middle class traded their postwar suburban homes for larger places farther from the city, they were replaced by newcomers who looked very much like them, transfers from corporate jobs elsewhere in the country, or families making their first move beyond the city borders. Similarly, factory workers moved out from their first-tier postwar bungalows only to be replaced by other blue-collar workers graduating from city apartment life.
Competing directly with this idea was the concept of “life cycle” change. The economic status of a given suburb gradually declined as its most affluent residents moved farther out and their housing “filtered” down to a less affluent but still economically stable class of newcomers. Some of these neighborhoods were attractive to a mixture of artists, gays, and others who found the edginess appealing and began what amounted to a revival in the attractiveness of the entire area. But a larger number, for one reason or another—often the modest quality and visual appeal of the housing stock—were not so fortunate. Rather than begin the economic and demographic life cycle all over again, these neighborhoods endured a period of pervasive price decline.
Finally, as an alternative to both of these ideas, there were arguments based on social stratification: Suburban status remained essentially frozen in place as the richer suburbs enacted zoning laws and other restrictions designed to keep the less affluent from moving in or multifamily apartment housing from being built. The poorer suburbanites remained “landlocked” in their poorer communities, just as many of them had been in the inner city a generation earlier.
One could, and still can, find support for each of these notions, even within a territory as circumscribed as the Cleveland area, but none is subtle enough to pick up on the complex qualities of inner suburbia. At the upper end of the spectrum, there are suburbs built for a corporate and professional class before World War II, usually filled with large Georgian or Tudor homes, generally situated on the edge of a big city, designed around public transportation and the existence of a village square. Even in a recessionary economy, these suburbs command intimidatingly high housing prices, are doing quite well economically, and need relatively little help from other levels of government. Most of them are overwhelmingly white. Brookline, Massachusetts, is an example of this type of fortunate inner suburb; so is Winnetka, Illinois, on the shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago. So are some of the inner suburbs of Westchester County, on the northern outskirts of New York City.
At the most unfortunate end of the spectrum are the very poorest of the inner suburbs, usually on the edge of the city closest to what was the African American ghetto half a century ago. They tend to house a transient population, nearly all of it composed of minorities, and possess a housing stock dominated by apartment buildings, many of whose tenants left now-demolished high-rise public housing within the inner city. These are the real trouble spots of inner suburbia, circa 2010: havens for crime, underperforming schools, and general physical deterioration. In the Cleveland area, East Cleveland is an example of this sort of suburb.
In between are two kinds of surviving but vulnerable inner suburb. One is the enclave of tract homes, à la Levittown, built for the salesmen, engineers, and lower-level corporate executives who made up so much of the suburban postwar middle class. Their populations have turned over numerous times in the past half century, sometimes maintaining a consistent middle-class status, but sometimes sliding down a few notches on the socioeconomic ladder as new buyers replace the old ones. Middle-class African Americans wishing to flee the more troubled communities in the first category often settle here.
The other troubled variant of postwar inner suburbia is the industrial working-class suburb, mass-produced after World War II for upwardly mobile blue-collar workers employed in factories nearby. The most serious problems faced by these suburbs are easy to describe, although they are profoundly difficult to solve. They include a disappearing manufacturing base, a supply of bungalow housing whose units are too small for the tastes of most modern buyers, and an aging population incapable of paying for the services that the suburban government is expected to perform. In many cases, they are centers of foreclosure for homes financed with subprime mortgages in the past decade.
There is no bright line separating any of these categories. But one must understand their diversity to make sense of what is happening in inner suburbs right now. Generalizations about them are risky, but one can confidently be made: Increasingly, inner suburbs are doing really well or really badly—they tend to look either like wealthy Brookline or Winnetka, on the one hand, or like East Cleveland and most of the close-in industrial suburbs of Los Angeles on the other. The middle range is shrinking. In 1960, the average income gap between America’s richest and poorest inner suburbs was about 2.1 to 1. Now it is about 3.4 to 1.
CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, more than almost any other community in America, manages to do a convincing imitation of all the different types of inner suburbs at the same time. It has the stately Colonial homes. It has the run-down apartment buildings housing tenants who have fled the larger city. And it has the blue-collar bungalows that are in need of repair, no longer convenient to factory work, and difficult to sell. It even has them in an almost equal division of thirds.
One can walk down the tree-lined, curving sidewalks of Fairmount Boulevard and envision the most pristine outposts of American suburbia, the Brooklines and the Winnetkas. One can travel just a few miles north and look at dangerous apartment buildings where few who had a choice would want their children to grow up. Or one can drive through the bungalow neighborhoods and sympathize with the elderly home owners who are hanging on but who wonder what happened to the stable town they settled in during the heady years after the war.
The inner suburb of Cleveland Heights, sandwiched between a troubled big city and its sprawling outer suburbs, retains neighborhoods of prewar elegance that house a twenty-first-century professional elite. (photo credit 5.1)
The bungalows themselves are a large part of why Cleveland Heights sits perched uneasily on a precipice of demographic inversion. Some built in the 1920s, some in the 1950s, they are for the most part two-story, two-family houses, with the space for each family closer to the eight hundred square feet of Levittown in 1950 than to the twenty-two hundred square feet of the average home sold in the last decade. Careful studies by William H. Lucy and David Phillips of the University of Virginia have shown that it is the suburbs with the highest proportion of these houses—all past the fifty-year mark in their history, most of them needing an expensive and likely unaffordable new roof for the second time—that have shown the greatest income decline since 1980. Cleveland Heights simply has too many of these houses.
The problem is not without remedy. Small postwar houses can be retrofitted, strengthened in their construction, and made larger to meet twenty-first-century sensibilities. Several cities and inner suburbs across the country have had some success providing home owners with modest subsidies to perform this sort of modernization.
But these successes are occurring in suburbs whose metropolitan areas are thriving—or are at least stable in hard economic times. New jobs are being added to replace the manufacturing jobs that have been lost; young people come to the metropolitan area to fill those jobs and, as often as not, look for places to live that are close to their central places of work. As they do this, the center of the city becomes too expensive for the newest arrivals, and they settle in the neighborhoods just beyond and in the inner suburbs slightly farther away that are on convenient lines of transportation. These recently fading parts of town acquire a cachet, as Sheffield did in Chicago in the 1980s, and the poorer people who formerly lived in these communities move farther out to obtain cheaper housing. Demographic inversion has taken place.
It’s not impossible to imagine this happening in Cleveland and Cleveland Heights. But it requires jobs—new ones in the postindustrial economy in numbers sufficient to replace the old ones in manufacturing. Cleveland has not been able to produce these jobs. In fact, the whole area has been losing them at an alarming pace. As the economist George Zeller reported from census data in mid-2010, in the years since 2000, Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County had lost more than 130,000 jobs. There was little sign that well-paying jobs were emerging to replace them, as had happened in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s.
It remains possible, of course, that in the aftermath of the recession, Cleveland will be able to gain back many of the jobs it has lost. That would go a long way toward ensuring the stability of Cleveland Heights and many of the suburbs that surround it. But at this point, it is difficult to make that prediction.
One perverse symbol of greater Cleveland’s economic trouble is its absence of traffic congestion. To the drivers who still commute into town every day, that is a pleasant thing. But it is not good for the central city and most of the inner suburbs. In Cleveland, a commuter can nearly always make it in from the most distant exurb in half an hour or less. There is little incentive to move closer to the center to escape the traffic. That is not Cleveland Heights’ fault, but it is part of Cleveland Heights’ problem.
Given the difficulties of its housing stock and the stagnation of its metropolitan area, Cleveland Heights has done the best it can to sustain itself and establish an identity that can make it attractive to the kinds of newcomers it wants. It changed its city motto from “A City for a Lifetime” to “Home to the Arts.” It plays up the fact that more than a third of the musicians in the Cleveland Orchestra live within the suburb’s borders. It treats its fragile racial balance as a virtue rather than a challenge. “This is the model community to see how diversity works,” boasts Jennifer Kuzma, the suburb’s director of development.
Cleveland Heights has done everything it can to make a selling point of its history of funkiness. It has made a pitch to lure young academics to the offbeat sidewalks of Coventry and the environmental consciousness it actively promotes. It has been willing to try every stratagem imaginable to sell itself to outsiders, including an active campaign to promote the town to Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn who may be tempted to flee the grimy streets of Williamsburg or Crown Heights. This last effort has actually been fairly successful. Not only does Cleveland Heights now have a conspicuous contingent of Hasidim, but of Hasidim who have been relatively comfortable living in the mostly black areas on the north side of town.
While nurturing its free-spirited, tolerant attitudes, Cleveland Heights has been preoccupied with crime. It has more than one hundred police officers on duty, more than twice as many as some nearby suburbs with only slightly smaller populations. It has five patrolmen who spend much of their time on foot keeping an eye on the apartment buildings that border blighted East Cleveland. When budget cuts led to the elimination of these foot patrols, they were quickly restored. This too seems to be having its effect. The violent crime rate has often been lower than in some of the neighboring suburban jurisdictions. Cleveland Heights has a reputation for being tougher on speeders and other minor law violators than any town on the east side of Cleveland. Whether the heavy-duty law enforcement will be possible to maintain amid sharply reduced help from the state of Ohio remains to be seen.
But the violence that threatens Cleveland Heights the most is violence within its school system. When a riot takes place at a basketball game at Cleveland Heights High School, as it did in 2008, everyone in metropolitan Cleveland seems to hear about it. Something of the same phenomenon occurs when a decline in test scores places the school on a Department of Education “watch list,” as has happened periodically over the past decade. It remains true, of course, that each year students from local schools, including the public high school, are admitted to the most prestigious colleges in the country. But that is not the image that most Cleveland-area families with small children carry around in their heads.
Still, racial tension may be only the second-greatest burden. The property tax rates are the third highest in the entire state of Ohio. Moving into Cleveland Heights is not an economically easy decision for anyone, married or single. Voters in Cleveland Heights rejected an increased local income tax in 2008.
When it comes to fiscal problems, there is something that all the inner suburbs in the are
a, not just Cleveland Heights, can actually do: They can work together. In Cuyahoga County, the inner suburbs as commonly defined make up 39 percent of the county population. The city of Cleveland itself comprises only 33 percent. And in fact, Cleveland Heights and other towns have made heroic efforts to join forces for mutual economic benefit. Starting in 1996, when city councilman Ken Montlack and others organized the First Suburbs Consortium, they have labored to control their budgets by sharing costs and lobbying the county and the state legislature to pay attention to the needs of inner suburbs in general.
In many little ways, this has worked well. In 2006, a study by the Brookings Institution declared the First Suburbs Consortium to be a role model for inner suburbs nationwide. There are now sixteen suburbs in the FSC, on both the east and west sides of Cleveland. When the organization started, it represented communities with about four hundred thousand people. Now the number is close to six hundred thousand, and the FSC suburbs have received modest grants from both the state and the county to conduct joint operations. Each suburb pays only $3,000 of its own money to be an FSC member. The consortium engages in joint marketing for economic development, with common advertising and a common website, touting the locational advantages of suburban Cleveland to both businesses and potential residents.
The FSC does a lot of other things that make economic sense. It operates multicommunity procurement programs, recreation centers, and joint law-enforcement technology sharing. Three suburbs, including Cleveland Heights, run a common police dispatching operation.
But this is small potatoes. What might really bail out Cleveland’s inner suburbs would be something closer to an actual merger, so that what is still currently a staggering level of duplication would be reduced, expenses trimmed, and taxes cut accordingly. No one thinks this is likely to happen in the foreseeable future. The individual suburbs simply have too much invested emotionally in their own cultures, their own identities and sense of place. It will be hard for them to cooperate much more than they have already done, no matter what the advantages might be. As Ken Montlack says, “Everybody talks about regionalism as an altruistic notion of collaboration.” But moving beyond talk can be almost impossible.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 13
