Conventional wisdom holds that the larger the population of a city, the more successful the place must be. If the population’s growing, that city must be doing something right. If it’s withering, it must be in decline.
No place is what it used to be. Yet many places do have a lasting identity. But Cleveland Heights has more than a single identity, it has diversity.
Fixing up a cheap house in a Rust Belt town is tough -- and a well-meaning buyer can end up doing more harm than good. What qualities do the right buyers have, and what's the value of land banks?
It took me a while to realize that community organizing is different in the Midwest than in Chicago. You don't shake oranges from a tree. The tree is barren.
An excerpt from Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City
Cleveland can’t be an international city when its politics only have two races.
Rust Belt cities must think bigger, not make themselves smaller.
I first heard the term “Rust Belt Chic” in Youngstown, Ohio, from a young software developer named John Slanina. Slanina was driving me around the Yo, as he called it, in a Ford Taurus with a bacon-scented air freshener ...
City analyses often fall prey to black-and-white narratives. The Rust Belt is either “dead” or “reviving.” Residents are either suburbanites or city dwellers, gentrifiers or natives, boosters or negative nabobs.
Frank Bures responds to Richard Florida Originally published in Thirty Two Magazine, July 2012 The morning after my story, The [...]
Richard Florida’s doctrine — that gays, artists, and bohemians bring jobs — has been embraced by a whole generation of [...]