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What? You didn’t know that Cleveland sat in a valley with mountains to the south?
On this day, standing in front of the Cleveland Botanical Garden, you could at a glance mistake the curved steel roof of Case Western Reserve University's Peter B. Lewis Building for some distant mountains. |
Today
was a day to celebrate Cleveland. We had some typical Cleveland weather — a
sudden late-morning rainstorm that momentarily transformed the upper Larchmere
area into a feeder stream for the nearby Baldwin Reservoir, followed by a
perfectly lovely sun-drenched canopy for Wade OvalWednesday in Cleveland’s unsurpassed University Circle.
Wade
Oval Wednesdays always suggest the kind of generative spirit that outsiders see
as emblematic of Cleveland’s potential. It’s a summertime party for the
community, a casual recapitulation of a healthy cross-section of our diverse
region, and seemingly a far remove from the tortured spirits of the Anthony Sowells, Ariel Castros, rogue cops, and predatory lenders that prey on the
abandoned neighborhoods and people of that larger community.
I came
to Wade Oval today fresh from a smart assessment of the opportunities and
challenges of our regional economy, presented by the Center for Community
Solutions. I think of the Center as having a somewhat distant and sterile
diagnostic approach to assessing what ails us, but that sense may stem from my
once having been a board member there when it was known as the Federation of
Community Planning. Then, as now, it was the pedigreed agency anointed with the
task of analyzing Cleveland’s emerging socio-cultural issues and charting
strategic approaches to mitigate those challenges. As the establishment agency
of choice, it has both the credibility to sound the alarm but too often not the
temperament to match the temperature. The data may be alarming but the analysis
remains dispassionate.
But
today the Center was on point doing one of the things it does best: convening a
host of dedicated social and civic workers for a quality
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Sandra Pianalto, president of the Cleveland
district of the Federal Reserve Bank |
presentation on issues
of the day. Keynote remarks were delivered by Sandra Pianalto, president of the
Cleveland region of the Federal Reserve Bank.
As PNC
Bank Cleveland president Paul Clark noted, our city is fortunate to be a
capital city of an FRB region. It stamps us as a major league player in the
same way as the Cleveland Orchestra or the Cleveland Browns.
I’m not
a financial reporter so I will make no attempt to parse Pianalto’s remarks,
which primarily addressed the labor market recovery and the significance of
recent economic developments for the region and the nation.
I did
think her appearance at this event — the Center for Community Solutions annual
Human Services Institute — was noteworthy, since I don’t think her royal
economic lineage affords her many opportunities to get out among the hoi
polloi.
Pianalto offered a sober but not hopeless
picture of the US’s continuing slow recovery from the Great Recession that
started December 2007. She pointed out that while the unemployment rate has
declined to 7.4% from 8%, there are actually 2 million fewer people working
than in in December 2007, even though the labor force has grown. She said that
an unprecedented 3.1 million people had been out of work for more than a year,
observing that such a prolonged period of unemployment typically contributed to
declining skills.
Speaking of the Cleveland region, Pianalto said that we
have 85,000 fewer workers than in 2000, that a large part of that decline was
due to manufacturing job losses. She observed that manufacturing jobs were a
larger share of the economy here than elsewhere and that the region’s other
economic sectors had not been robust enough to offset those losses.
Pianalto’s prescription for regional growth was straightforward.
Growing a talented workforce, raising the area’s education level, and focusing
on innovation were essential steps she emphasized. She said that Cleveland’s
recovery would require patience, commitment, and endurance. Further, she
pointed out how other communities, most notably Pittsburgh, had rebounded by
emphasizing regional cooperation as opposed to competition.
Finally, she said that economic inclusion was important to
the success of the region. To insure such inclusion, she said, “leadership at
the top has to set the tone.”
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| Johnathan Holifield, NorTech |
Responding
to Pianalto’s comments, and extending them, were a strong
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Ziona Austrian
Cleveland State University |
panel, comprised of
Ziona Austrian, director of
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| Lisa Bottoms, Cleveland Foundation |
the Center for Economic Development at Cleveland
State University’s College of Urban Affairs; Lisa Bottoms, the Cleveland
Foundation’s program director for human services and child and youth
development; Paul Clark, PNC regional president; and Johnathan Holifield, the
vice president of Inclusive competitiveness at NorTech.
Each of
the panelists spoke with energy and passion, perhaps none more than bank
president Clark. Once he referenced his Cleveland roots as a 1971 graduate of
St. Edward’s. And he closed with comments that were both
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| Paul Clark, PNC Bank |
personal and almost
poetic, saying that he thought of Cleveland’s economy as a large and growing
array of brush fires [small businesses, minority entrepreneurs, innovators all
around] that collectively possessed the essential ingredients to lay the basis
for a robust 21st century economy.
The
program was held at the Benjamin Rose Institute, a stunning facility that on
this day afforded an impressive view of Cleveland’s skyline about eight miles
to the west. BRI sits on the site of the former Kaiser Foundation hospital,
just uphill from the Baldwin Reservoir, and at the western tip of one of
Cleveland proper’s neater neighborhoods.
