I know how you feel Laura. Now that you wrote that and got it off your chest, let's think about it. The fact is that we do have an inbred system of funding things here in NEO (probably not too different from everywhere else), and we do have a large compliment of racist and bigoted thinkers (even though they would never admit it, their decisions display it). But they are here, too and I doubt that they will go away because someone wrote that they should leave on a blog comment. I think the issue is education. Not K-12 in this instance, but in helping them to understand the environmental justice bottom line.

Yes, we will have to lead by example as Norm is doing in East Cleveland. It will take many urban pioneers to pull this off. And there will have top be a bottom up revolt because we have seen that the top down approach continues to concentrate wealth in the outlying communities, but there are glimmers of hope.

For example, there are people like Kathleen Barber and Steve Blossom who chose to live at Judson Manor -- yes it is nice, but it is also in the city of Cleveland. There are the very well-to-do who live at Moreland Courts and pay taxes both to the city of Cleveland and the Shaker Schools. More places for the empty nesters and retirees are cropping up in Cleveland and some well meaning young people are moving to the city (albeit before they have kids and are not faced with schooling issues). So in this way, we can eventually begin to see neighborhoods coming back. It is wrong, I agree, that long time city residents continue to pay taxes while a new family moves in next door to a tax abated new home that raises the property value of the long time resident while the new neighbors are being treated to tax exemption.

But when better-off folks who can influence the decision makers begin to understand that clean water, cleaner air and remediated soils will improve life in the city, we will begin to get somewhere. It’s the infrastucrure, the infrastructure! Give us good basic services that are reliable, clean and not corrupt!

I have had first hand knowledge of outliers coming into the city. It is so easy to imagine how to fix the problem when you don't visit what Jeff so aptly calls the “donut of poverty surrounding downtown) (that would be the neighborhoods). Habitat for Humanity has a mission to provide affordable housing, and they do it with the assistance of volunteers. The value of the volunteers however is not so much in the siding they put up or the walls or wiring or plumbing, but in the fact that the program brings suburbanites to the city neighborhoods to see for themselves what is going on. It takes knowing what the problems are before one can begin to understand what to do to get us out of this mess. It takes working a weekend in the snow to wire a home and then coming back the next day to see that thieves have dismantled and stolen all your work to understand what the city residents are up against. It takes being on a job site for weeks with no electricity to understand that First Energy has an 18 week lag for connecting new job sites with power. So much for the security system… It takes being there for the inspection to understand what might improve in the realm of city codes and services.

Since this sort of activity is not widespread, there is just a small wedge of this sort of education in place. We need to drive the wedge farther until it splits open the problems of the city for more to see and understand. These things are not simple; the buck has been in a round robin for some time, passing from one city office to another and from agency to agency. At some point even a City of Cleveland model of regionalism needs to lead by example – money or none. Even without the money, one can practice cleaning up the business model, changing the way we do business with what we have, using it more efficiently and wisely.

But Cleveland has more than that to deal with because we have highway builders from Columbus threatening to rearrange our thoroughfares, utility companies hijacking utility rates and services and egocentric, narcissistic leaders who are looking for plaques and political legacies and the fed is totally ass-backwards. Then there are the developers whose plans include using public money for their private gain. It can’t be easy for the elected. Campaigns must be rearranged so that those who are elected do not carry with them a box of instructions as to who is owed what now that they are in office. There has to be an end to public financing of private fortunes.

We will have to both pull the drowning out of the river as well as educated those who are pushing them in about the efficacy of doing the pushing. These two groups will need to see both ends of that series of events. The foundation community has indicated fully that they are no longer satisfied with the basic concept of the Elizabethan poor laws from whence their business was birthed – they want to make policy. OK wealth accumulators – head up river and keep you eyes out fort the racists and bigots while you’re en route, because we got ‘em and they are here to stay. How do we get from “fuck it up and then fix it” to “stop fucking it up”? Now there’s a place for grantmakers to begin their plan for obsolescence.

While so many only come to the city for sports events or the theater, we will not change, it is the nonprofits sector that engages those from outlying suburbs -- now another generation away from the parents who moved out and raised their kids in exurbia - that will begin the change. But it will also take city residents following your example and Gloria and Tim’s and many others’ who are saying, “I’m sick and tired and I just won’t take it anymore” AND “I have educated my once racist bigoted neighbor and now that he understands, he won’t take it anymore either!”

And while were talking about equity and justice...

How many felony counts for defacing Breuer?

http://blog.cleveland.com/architecture/2007/11/large_towerlobby.jpeg

"Gone forever: This two-story window, designed with an irregular grid like that of a Mondrian painting, has been torn out of Marcel Breuer's Ameritrust Tower by contractors removing asbestos." PD

How many felony counts for defacing the Breuer Tower? What would the penalty have been for the perpetrators of the bombing of the CMA's cast of Rodin's "The Thinker"? How many hours of community service should our BOCC get for this act of defacing art, defacing a building? Should the planning commission be up on charges, too for condoning it?

Aren't we going a bit overboard with these felony convictions of young outsider aerosol artists while our county commissioners blithely destroy an art object and while an uneducated populace stands idly by or worse buys into the “ugly” propaganda? What separates these onlookers from the same folks who stand in the radiant heat of a book burning held by some hicks that feel threatened by a challenging passage or contrary thought expressed and published. Are we at the precipice of a censorship discussion?

No I do not want someone to add their "tag" to my home, but so much of this aerosol art –writing, is quite beautiful, some of it has as much meaning to me as abstract art worth millions in museums, but it is a felony to make this art in public. Why, when we do not hold accountable our own elected officials for defacing a work of art and architecture and with our tax dollars at that? It seems a conundrum...