Life in "Progress" City - Cleveland edition

A decade or so ago, I dated a fabulously liberal woman who resided in New York City. During one of our many political debates, I asked her what was so wonderful about city living.

I got that whole Cultural experience and Broadway lecture..... typical from your average urbanite. Nevermind that she'd been to the Guggenheim once (with me) and that she'd never seen a Broadway show or been to the Bronx Zoo. To her these amenities actually meant something even though she'd never found a reason to use them.

All those conversations flooded my memory bank as I started reading this piece from Reason.......

You want a quick indicator of urban decline in any city you visit? Ask a local what’s great about the place. If the top three answers include “a world-class symphony orchestra,” you’re smack dab in the middle of a current or future ghost town.

This orchestra axiom is something I divined while working on Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey, an hour-long documentary you can see at reason.tv/cleveland. Time and again, I’d ask Clevelanders—a proud breed beaten down by decades of lake-effect snow, economic degradation, population decline, and gridiron disasters worthy of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (“I had not thought death had undone so many”)—to tell me what was still top-notch about their hometown. It didn’t matter if I was talking to a CEO or a homeless man, a bar owner or a barfly. The inevitable reply: “We’ve got a world-class symphony orchestra,” typically embellished with some transparently phony claim about how it compares to those in other cities (“It’s in the top 15 or 20 in the world!”), as if orchestras are regularly ranked like NCAA basketball teams.

Such are the thin straws at which residents in drowning cities grasp. Such is the psychic depravity that failed polities inflict on their residents, the mental tics and habits of mind that both compensate for and reinforce the steadily diminishing material conditions that drive down the quality of life. The job losses, the economic stagnation, the grim depopulation of downtowns and residential neighborhoods have a psychological dimension that is every bit as punishing and effective in keeping terminally ill cities in their sick beds as high taxes, stifling regulations, and municipal corruption. Talk to the people left in cities on the skids, and you’ll quickly hear some variant on one or more of the following: If only heavy industry hadn’t gone south, if only Standard Oil or Boeing or Consolidated Fuzz or the Browns hadn’t moved, if only the weather were different, if only the blacks or the Puerto Ricans or the Italians or the bohunks or the unions or the Jews or the Bilderbergers or air conditioning hadn’t ruined it all.

From the year 2000 to 2006, Cleveland's population has dropped from 478,403 to 444,313. When the next census numbers come out, it will be even lower.

Sidney Independent and his followers have tried to convince me that population emigration has nothing to do with politics. I guess it's just some random phenomena where populations fleeing cities like Cleveland and Detroit are all run by democrats and liberal policies.

None the less, this is a great read and and video.

Thanks reader Tim for the link.

Driving out businesses and people with high taxes and horrible city services?

Now that's "Progressive"!