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I didn't say it was tasteless, the other poster did. Since we're on the subject, why do you feel it's nonsense? I'm kind of glad that Cleveland didn't get Amazon.
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Originally Posted by QCongress83216
I do agree that it's tasteless for expats to talk about Cleveland but they say they wouldn't ever move back.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with people talking about a city, even if they don't live there, and even if they don't have any immediate plans to move back. Gatekeeping is tasteless.
Let me share a persona data point. I’m not from the Midwest; indeed, most of my formative years were spent in “elite cities”. But I relocated to Ohio for employment reasons. The “elite cities” were great for computer-related technology, advertising, finance, publishing, maybe bio- and chem- stuff, insurance, healthcare, pushing paper. But they didn’t engage much in heavy, traditional engineering. That sort of engineering was done in second-tier and third-tier cities in the Heartland… places like Huntsville, Alabama; Ft. Worth, Texas; and Dayton, Ohio. This was more than a generation ago. So, I moved. The job was great, and that’s the majority of what mattered. But now, nearing retirement, I have other interests and other desires. Outside of working-life, relocation to the Midwest has not been a success. But returning back to an “elite city” would be problematic, because I lost the real-estate race as compared to my peer group, which bought houses in the 1990s and held on, to enjoy handsome and remunerative gains.
We tend to forget, that in 1990, a modest ranch-style house in an unglamorous suburb of Los Angeles wasn’t much more expensive than its counterpart-house in a counterpart-suburb of a Midwestern city. The price difference was maybe 50%. Today it’s 500%. Just as fresh college graduates are priced-out of the market in the elite cities, so too are Boomers and Gen-X’ers, who didn’t ride the real-estate train in due time. I deeply resent that, and that resentment colors my perspective on living anywhere outside of the “elite cities”.
Indeed, while having considerable respect for the cultural resources and overall tenor of Cleveland (which I much prefer to SW Ohio, where I’m based), the lack of real-estate price appreciation is so jarring, so irritating, that I can’t abide anything else.
To conclude the personal vignette, no, I won’t move back to NYC. But I’d love to move to a locale that’s growing, and to buy property that over the ensuing decades will appreciate faster than inflation.
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Originally Posted by HueysBack
I'd agree. And things are cyclical. You once couldn't pay someone to move to NYC or Boston. They were horribly depressing and dangerous places.
But will this be true, going forward? 100 years ago, Cleveland and Cincinnati were powerhouses. So was Dayton. It’s been described at the “Silicon Valley of its time”. Well then, in 100 years, would we find the California Bay Area forlorn and neglected, and some other place burgeoning and “cool”? I remember NYC circa 1980. It was gritty and crime-ridden. The subways stank of urine, and were plastered in multiple layers of graffiti. New Yorkers took New Jersey’s motto of “garden state” seriously; a drive to NJ was an escape from the city’s urban blight. Sure, Manhattan was always expensive. But parts of say Brooklyn was synonymous with low-cost (and commensurately undesirable) housing.
Sure, Cleveland (or Dayton etc.) will never be NYC, or even say Ann Arbor or Austin. But can it recover its stature of 100 years ago? Part of me hopes so. But the greater part highly doubts it.
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Originally Posted by HueysBack
Honestly, the idea that our (national) economy has infinite growth potential is ludicrous.
...if the rest of the world calls their debts and turns their nose up at the US, ... the world begins to look very different, very quickly.
The adjective “infinite” is indeed ludicrous, by design. But why must growth necessarily be bounded? Should humans run out of ideas, of new vistas, new appetites? Is the globe headed for stagnation? Or are we only lamenting the potential decline of America’s primacy? I don’t see why the 21st century shouldn’t remain the American Century; and for that matter, the 22nd. There are ample and compelling reasons for prefer a rotation of global leadership. I’m far from being a jingoistic, chest-thumping nationalistic cheerleader. I just don’t see an alternative in the foreseeable (or even distant) future. I don’t see anything replacing the US dollar, or the US stock market, or US leadership in registering patents, publishing books, making movies, underwriting public offerings, researching drugs, or even writing software. It’s not because America is so great, let alone intrinsically so – but because there’s no alternative.
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Originally Posted by j_ws
These new jobs are essentially all high-paying tech jobs. Nothing mid to low range aside from what is required to support the facilities such as custodial staff, and even then Amazon will probably use a contractor that doesn't guarantee local access to those jobs.
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Originally Posted by HueysBack
...I guess my question is, does CLE need to attract the 1%? Should CLE seek to foster a booming real estate market? Should CLE strive to become an elite city?...
I just don't think CLE solves its problem by figuring out ways to attract swaths of outsiders. Much less a bunch of 1%'s. ...
I’d argue that that’s the principal problem with the Heartland job market – in Cleveland, or elsewhere. We don’t have enough superstar jobs, the C-suite jobs. We don’t have enough $2000/hour lawyers or hedge-fund traders or giants of tech with their $300M mega-yachts. It isn’t about the 1%. It’s about the very apex of the 1%... the several thousand or perhaps several tens of thousands of people who move the world.
Let me rephrase that. Conjure up a number; call it 10,000. 10,000 people worldwide, make the globe spin on its axis. They’re the Nobel-Prize winners, the inventors of blockbuster drugs, the Pulitzer-prize winning authors, the composers whose work gets played in concert halls, the nationally syndicated columnists, and yes, the billionaires (though far from all of them) and the financiers. How many of them live in Ohio?
My nominal town, Dayton, was built by Patterson, Deeds, Kettering, the Wrights and maybe 3-4 other people. Sure, hundreds of thousands did their part. But if it weren’t for the Wright Brothers, there would be no Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and without Wright-Patterson, Dayton would have been… to put it charitably, quite a bit worse. It is a very, very few superstars who make all of the difference! Nameless billions don’t matter; a few monumentally great individuals do. Fail to attract those individuals, as we fail – full stop.
I left Northeast Ohio after being born there and living there for 19 years. It wasn't that great when I lived there.
Aspects of cities like Cleveland and Akron have improved for the one percent that can afford it. It is not for everyone. If you can afford $2,000 a month to live downtown and have money left over Northeast Ohio is great. If you can afford 20% for a down payment they have homes that are cheaper than anywhere else. In particular Youngstown. So there's that.
But if you're minimum wage I would highly suggest against it. Crime is terrible there. You won't be able to afford a nice neighborhood. Your kids will be in some of the worst schools.
People ask why we say we will never move back there. Technically I could and I would get by. But I struggled there and the economy is a lot better in the South (Southwest and Southeast) for people, on average, than it is up there for the average person. I don't feel any type of way, but if you're not college educated, hipster, yuppie, etc it really isn't for you anymore. That era has passed. That hard working, 12 hour day in a factory and the company is financing your GM, Ford or Chrysler and you get the employee discount or some company bonus those days are over. They're never coming back. Living middle class on a high school education; forget about it.
Get a job in the medical field. Get a job in IT. Get a job as a programmer. Get a job in biotechnology.
This is the future of Ohio. Not everyone can keep up and not everyone is going to make it. If you're retired it's great but if you have 20, 30 years of employment ahead of you and you do not have the background people are looking for you have some hard decisions to make.
But if you're minimum wage I would highly suggest against it. Crime is terrible there. You won't be able to afford a nice neighborhood. Your kids will be in some of the worst schools.
This is the same in Boston, NYC, DC, Philly, Chicago, and all the other major cities out there that are apparently much better than Cleveland... only it's probably worse in those places, in that the hope of ever getting above minimum wage is less given the sheer amount of competition, which is compounded by huge cost of living.
I don't agree with this as Cleveland's amenities are far superior to other cities with a similar cost of living in the U.S. Salaries for national talent aren't much different. Cleveland corporations do perhaps have to pay a weather premium for those with adverse perceptions of Cleveland winters, or those who want to live closer to magnificent outdoor attractions.
BTW, I've had several friends move to Colorado to be closer to the skiing, hiking, etc. The numbers of friends moving to CO actually compare to those whom I have known who moved to Florida. The only complaint of those moving to CO is the dry, brown (not green) climate. I know one westerner who returned to the East in the early summer and who said, and not jokingly, that all of the greenness hurt her eyes.
Also, owning or purchasing property in coastal cities in coming years may be akin to playing a high-stakes game of musical chairs called "When to Get Out."
Now here's my "Cassandra prediction."
I watched the New York City episode of the PBS series "Sinking Cities." It had some great information, but the episode was actually very inadequate as there was no discussion of even the accelerating rate of sea level rise let alone that the problem isn't "Sinking" as much as inundation. I was surprised to learn that NYC already is in the process of building a 15-foot sea wall around Manhattan!
Then I thought of the work of Harold Wanless, chairman of the geological sciences department at the Univ. of Miami and an expert on sea level rise. He says the RATE of global sea level rise is doubling every 7-8 years. He expects at a minimum 15 feet of sea level rise in southern Florida by 2100, but notes that it could be much, much more if the doubling continues unchecked. Wanless is focused on accelerating ice melt, especially in Greenland. Here's the thing to me: a respected scientist says that based on the empirical data set the sea level rise rate is doubling every 7-8 years. This should be easily verifiable, and, if Wanless is correct, we should be in crisis mode. We are not, but don't think that the "smart" money, which IMO doesn't include Trump, isn't already on top of this issue.
Now consider the recent U.N. climate change panel report which noted its already apocalyptic projections didn't include any negative feedback loops!!! IMO, one of the scariest negative feedback loops is the triggering of a massively vicious methane feedback loop, resulting from the thawing an release of the earth's massive stores of frozen methane. See post 26 in this thread.
There are indications that this vicious methane feedback loop already is underway. The NYC 15-foot sea wall may be entirely inadequate. NYC perhaps should be building coastal dikes with ocean locks, much as exist in the Netherlands. The PBS episode well explained, examining Hurricane Sandy and other historic NYC hurricanes, that protection already is needed against hurricane storm surges not even considering future sea level rise.
Having been professionally involved in real estate, I've seen massive increases in real estate prices in reaction to changes in base inputs, such as in Denver which suffered an energy bust and boom cycle in the late 20th century. My expectation is that Cleveland at some point in the next 20 years will experience a real estate price boom that is unimaginable due to mounting cognizance of the consequences of fossil fuel consumption on the world's environment. It's not just the worries over actual inundation, and the ongoing loss of beaches, coral reefs, etc., it's the sheer cost of dealing with these consequences amid likely plummeting tax bases and revenues.
What will be the reaction when PBS airs the Miami episode of its "Sinking Cities" series on Nov. 21? Compared to the problems facing Miami, with porous, soluble, limestone base rock, NYC might as well be located, say in Ohio.
Anyway, my thoughts. I likely won't be around to see if I'm right, but I wouldn't be surprised to see increased interest in Cleveland and other Great Lakes cities among sophisticated investors in the coming decade. Also, consider that Cleveland winters are expected to become less severe with each passing year, even as the environment in southern locations become hotter and even more humid. Note that Wanless discusses the slowing of the Gulf Stream, which removes great amounts of heat from the tropics around Florida....
Had to have the Climate folks get involved Fla is sinking more than the ocean is rising
This is the same in Boston, NYC, DC, Philly, Chicago, and all the other major cities out there that are apparently much better than Cleveland... only it's probably worse in those places.
True. But I don't deal with those cities for that reason. Those cities were always worse, particularly in the seventies through nineties.
I'm just questioning what someone living hand to mouth in New York or California think they're going to accomplish in Ohio when both situations have the exact same jobs. What do they think that people in Ohio actually do for a living? They don't have factory jobs anymore and Ohio doesn't have them anymore. They just got rid of their jobs decades earlier than Ohio did.
Is it that bad there that people would rather put themselves in situations that to them, are sort of rural, sort of suburban, to live in Ohio where you can count the number of streets in your downtown as opposed to what Manhattan offers just to complain about what Ohio is like? No subways none of those conveniences maybe bus rapid transit?
Some people make the move and they love it. That's great for Ohio. And it's great that people have the option and they can transfer their skills. I just hate people saying, "it's so easy" when it is for some people and not so much for others. Maybe it's just a personal hangup of mine because I was always a fish out of water and I'm ambivalent every time I think about Ohio.
I left Northeast Ohio after being born there and living there for 19 years. It wasn't that great when I lived there.
Aspects of cities like Cleveland and Akron have improved for the one percent that can afford it. It is not for everyone. If you can afford $2,000 a month to live downtown and have money left over Northeast Ohio is great. If you can afford 20% for a down payment they have homes that are cheaper than anywhere else. In particular Youngstown. So there's that.
But if you're minimum wage I would highly suggest against it. Crime is terrible there. You won't be able to afford a nice neighborhood. Your kids will be in some of the worst schools.
People ask why we say we will never move back there. Technically I could and I would get by. But I struggled there and the economy is a lot better in the South (Southwest and Southeast) for people, on average, than it is up there for the average person. I don't feel any type of way, but if you're not college educated, hipster, yuppie, etc it really isn't for you anymore. That era has passed. That hard working, 12 hour day in a factory and the company is financing your GM, Ford or Chrysler and you get the employee discount or some company bonus those days are over. They're never coming back. Living middle class on a high school education; forget about it.
Get a job in the medical field. Get a job in IT. Get a job as a programmer. Get a job in biotechnology.
This is the future of Ohio. Not everyone can keep up and not everyone is going to make it. If you're retired it's great but if you have 20, 30 years of employment ahead of you and you do not have the background people are looking for you have some hard decisions to make.
This is a false statement.
Compared to many parts of the nation, Greater Cleveland offers free parks (even Cuyahoga Valley National Park) and even free admission to the Cleveland Museum of Art, one of the best in the nation. The Cleveland Orchestra offers free concerts and even free admission to children for the Blossom Music Festival and student discounts. PlayhouseSquare offers cheap "smart seats." Cleveland Metroparks Zoo has free admission Mondays for Cuyahoga County residents.
Ohio still has excellent, free library systems compared to many U.S. states. An Ohioan can get a library card for any library in the state, even if not a resident of the library district.
Ohioans and Greater Clevelanders are totally unaware of the park fees charged in many states and localities, let alone at most national parks.
Cleveland offers safe suburbs with very inexpensive housing compared to the rest of the nation, and often with good schools. Yes, certain Cleveland neighborhoods have high crime rates, but this is true in many major cities.
Heck, Ohio even has had Medicaid expansion for years, which only will begin in Virginia, where you now live, in 2019.
I really have no idea what you are talking about when you imply Greater Cleveland is an expensive place to live. Why is someone who has admittedly lost touch with Greater Cleveland posting such inaccurate statements about it???
Let me share a persona data point. I’m not from the Midwest; indeed, most of my formative years were spent in “elite cities”. But I relocated to Ohio for employment reasons. The “elite cities” were great for computer-related technology, advertising, finance, publishing, maybe bio- and chem- stuff, insurance, healthcare, pushing paper. But they didn’t engage much in heavy, traditional engineering. That sort of engineering was done in second-tier and third-tier cities in the Heartland… places like Huntsville, Alabama; Ft. Worth, Texas; and Dayton, Ohio. This was more than a generation ago. So, I moved. The job was great, and that’s the majority of what mattered. But now, nearing retirement, I have other interests and other desires. Outside of working-life, relocation to the Midwest has not been a success. But returning back to an “elite city” would be problematic, because I lost the real-estate race as compared to my peer group, which bought houses in the 1990s and held on, to enjoy handsome and remunerative gains.
We tend to forget, that in 1990, a modest ranch-style house in an unglamorous suburb of Los Angeles wasn’t much more expensive than its counterpart-house in a counterpart-suburb of a Midwestern city. The price difference was maybe 50%. Today it’s 500%. Just as fresh college graduates are priced-out of the market in the elite cities, so too are Boomers and Gen-X’ers, who didn’t ride the real-estate train in due time. I deeply resent that, and that resentment colors my perspective on living anywhere outside of the “elite cities”.
Indeed, while having considerable respect for the cultural resources and overall tenor of Cleveland (which I much prefer to SW Ohio, where I’m based), the lack of real-estate price appreciation is so jarring, so irritating, that I can’t abide anything else.
To conclude the personal vignette, no, I won’t move back to NYC. But I’d love to move to a locale that’s growing, and to buy property that over the ensuing decades will appreciate faster than inflation.
But will this be true, going forward? 100 years ago, Cleveland and Cincinnati were powerhouses. So was Dayton. It’s been described at the “Silicon Valley of its time”. Well then, in 100 years, would we find the California Bay Area forlorn and neglected, and some other place burgeoning and “cool”? I remember NYC circa 1980. It was gritty and crime-ridden. The subways stank of urine, and were plastered in multiple layers of graffiti. New Yorkers took New Jersey’s motto of “garden state” seriously; a drive to NJ was an escape from the city’s urban blight. Sure, Manhattan was always expensive. But parts of say Brooklyn was synonymous with low-cost (and commensurately undesirable) housing.
Sure, Cleveland (or Dayton etc.) will never be NYC, or even say Ann Arbor or Austin. But can it recover its stature of 100 years ago? Part of me hopes so. But the greater part highly doubts it.
The adjective “infinite” is indeed ludicrous, by design. But why must growth necessarily be bounded? Should humans run out of ideas, of new vistas, new appetites? Is the globe headed for stagnation? Or are we only lamenting the potential decline of America’s primacy? I don’t see why the 21st century shouldn’t remain the American Century; and for that matter, the 22nd. There are ample and compelling reasons for prefer a rotation of global leadership. I’m far from being a jingoistic, chest-thumping nationalistic cheerleader. I just don’t see an alternative in the foreseeable (or even distant) future. I don’t see anything replacing the US dollar, or the US stock market, or US leadership in registering patents, publishing books, making movies, underwriting public offerings, researching drugs, or even writing software. It’s not because America is so great, let alone intrinsically so – but because there’s no alternative.
I’d argue that that’s the principal problem with the Heartland job market – in Cleveland, or elsewhere. We don’t have enough superstar jobs, the C-suite jobs. We don’t have enough $2000/hour lawyers or hedge-fund traders or giants of tech with their $300M mega-yachts. It isn’t about the 1%. It’s about the very apex of the 1%... the several thousand or perhaps several tens of thousands of people who move the world.
Let me rephrase that. Conjure up a number; call it 10,000. 10,000 people worldwide, make the globe spin on its axis. They’re the Nobel-Prize winners, the inventors of blockbuster drugs, the Pulitzer-prize winning authors, the composers whose work gets played in concert halls, the nationally syndicated columnists, and yes, the billionaires (though far from all of them) and the financiers. How many of them live in Ohio?
My nominal town, Dayton, was built by Patterson, Deeds, Kettering, the Wrights and maybe 3-4 other people. Sure, hundreds of thousands did their part. But if it weren’t for the Wright Brothers, there would be no Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and without Wright-Patterson, Dayton would have been… to put it charitably, quite a bit worse. It is a very, very few superstars who make all of the difference! Nameless billions don’t matter; a few monumentally great individuals do. Fail to attract those individuals, as we fail – full stop.
This post is so objectionable in so many ways that I don't immediately have time to respond.
Let me point out one obvious fact. Neither Austin nor Ann Arbor, nor more than a couple handfuls of even much larger U.S. cities, can compete with Cleveland's cultural, parks, medical and pro sports offerings.
And obviously, you know little about the economy in northeast Ohio.
If you can afford $2,000 a month to live downtown and have money left over Northeast Ohio is great. If you can afford 20% for a down payment they have homes that are cheaper than anywhere else.
But here's the problem. Let's suppose that you can easily afford a $900K house. In the Cleveland suburbs, that buys you a McMansion in the toniest community, on acreage - or perhaps a country estate. 20 years later, your $900 slice-of-paradise is still only worth $900K - or possibly even less. Meanwhile, in say the New Jersey suburbs of NYC, that $900K buys you a 1200-square-foot ranch, with a dated kitchen and a short driveway and a neighboring house 15' away from yours, on either side. But what if 20 years later, that crappy little ranch becomes worth $2M? Which of these alternatives is preferable?
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Originally Posted by goofy328
...if you're not college educated, hipster, yuppie, etc it really isn't for you anymore. That era has passed. That hard working, 12 hour day in a factory and the company is financing your GM, Ford or Chrysler and you get the employee discount or some company bonus those days are over. They're never coming back. Living middle class on a high school education; forget about it.
That era has passed throughout the Western world, from Germany to America to Australia, and in every city in between. But that's not the market that Amazon's second-HQ is trying to reach! Presumably, Amazon wants to lure the freshly-minted PhD physicist, who would have accepted a tenure-track position at a leading state university somewhere, but instead would optimize operations-research (or whatever) for Amazon, given the right offer. Would this physicist rather settle in Cleveland/St. Louis/Minneapolis/San Antonio/Birmingham/Charlotte, or NYC/London/Paris/Tokyo? That's the dilemma.
America's Clevelands didn't face this problem in the year 1900. They actually could compete with NYC and London and Paris, perhaps not on cultural grounds, but in a certain kind of optimism and opportunity. Can they do so, today?
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Fla is sinking more than the ocean is rising
