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Finally, some real estate appraisers and bankers use a set of methods incorporating an assumed “rot rate” that can define entire neighborhoods as bad investments if they are over fifty or even thirty years old. Such formulas exist because they make it easy for lenders to make decisions—just like those property ratings from the 1930s made it easy. But easy isn’t the same as fair or smart. Lenders and appraisers need to account for the fact that houses originally built for middle- and upper-middle-class owners between about 1890 and 1940 have some of the highest-quality construction and materials even though some formulas might suggest they are past their economic lifespan. Nothing built since then can compete with the level of handcraftsmanship that went into a regular middle-class house. And those houses are tough—the structural wood in the pre-dimension lumber days was notably stronger than post–World War II product (just try to saw through an old joist). The scale of the neighborhoods built in that era was defined by the streetcar and the early days of the automobile: notably more spacious than earlier in the nineteenth century and designed to allow for cars, but still compact enough to comfortably get around on foot or by bicycle. These are the authentic neighborhoods upon which “New Urbanism” is modeled, and these factors of craftsmanship and neighborhood form should enhance investment value—not only for those houses built 80 to 120 years ago, but for any new construction that embodies high craft, quality materials, and efficient site design.
SEGREGATION: REIMAGINE IDENTITY
Round one in the growth of Cleveland’s population was usually a story of ethnically homogenous groups coming here and setting up ethnically homogenous enclaves (by choice or not). Yes, the city contained diverse cultures, but at closer magnification one could see that these groups did not mix a whole lot at the neighborhood level.
But that seems to be changing now—as downtown, Ohio City, and University Circle attract new investment and new population, property values are climbing in those areas and in nearby neighborhoods.4 The demographic makeup of those growing core areas tends to be fairly diverse, and one can expect that as population growth spreads outward from those centers, the people occupying the formerly segregated adjacent land will be increasingly mixed in race and culture as well. Places like these can provide a model for how empowering it is for a community to see itself not just through a monocle of common heritage, but through a multidimensional sense of community and shared values. If the coming years show significant population growth in the city, it will be the first time in Cleveland’s history that city neighborhoods have grown without an official framework of racial segregation, and we ought to make the most of that opportunity.
It’s worth noting as well that for every Shaker Heights that successfully integrated in the 1960s and ’70s, there are also places that “flipped” from white to black well after the civil rights era, not because of any racist legal framework, but because of the prejudices and fears of individual home- and business owners. As long as we continue to see each other and ourselves mainly through the lens of race, then we will continue to sort neighborhoods by race. The only way to get beyond that is to cultivate other senses of shared identity that we decide are more important.
SCHOOLS: LOCAL CONTROL WITH STATE SUPPLEMENT
For more than a century, schools have been strongly identified with the communities they serve—not only in the rah-rah sense of cheering for the hometown sports team, but also in the civic significance and permanence that is signaled by stately architecture and the usually prominent location of the high school in a spacious setting at some kind of focal point of the town. This is all great, but it poses a problem in the context of statewide standards: this local tradition can sometimes confound the state’s avowed interest in providing something that approaches fair opportunity in education for all students.
Shifting the way tests are used could not only help improve educational outcomes but at the same time allow each local district to retain some local flavor. First, let each district fund itself as it chooses, and let each substantially control its methods to best match its local community. Second, the state should use its test data to improve education where the need is greatest, on a student-by-student basis. That could be as simple as having state-employed specialists trained in remediating particular kinds of learning deficits—in reading, writing, math, science, history, arts, and so on—come in to supplement the local school’s own teaching corps. Certainly that’s a more effective response than saying, “We’re going to publish school district report cards that reflect where the rich and poor kids live and you can try to move to a wealthier place—and good luck with that.”
SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?
Fear of retail competition, fear of a home investment losing value, fear of taxes rising, fear of other races, fear that your kids might fall behind other kids—our preoccupation with mobility seems driven as much by fear as by romance. These days it’s not so much fear of oppression or persecution but fear of being left behind in a policy environment that favors flight and abandonment, that privileges those with the wealth and inclination to move. It can even start to seem as if this policy environment might not be an accident—that it is an intentional effort to make sure the advantaged can always leave behind the disadvantaged. But that would only happen if these policies were crafted by people who already had most of the wealth and power and felt entitled to even more. And that would never happen, would it?
So let’s be nice and assume the policies weren’t created with our current result in mind, but that the set of assumptions that underpinned those policies haven’t held true in the Rust Belt and we’ve had unintended consequences. The primary faulty assumption has
