Hospitals Are Robbing Us Blind [Slate]
What kind of lousy ingrate doesn’t love hospitals? Go to any big American city, including cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh that have been devastated by deindustrialization and joblessness, and you’ll find a mammoth hospital complex in the center of town, buzzing with activity. Forget about big cities—there is a hospital in every congressional district in America, and local hospitals are often among the largest employers in the district.
Will tensions in Cleveland over police violence rise as does the temperature? [The Guardian, by Belt Senior Writer Dan McGraw]
“Other parts of the country have shown outrage at this type of behavior by police,” said Mara Brown of Cleveland, an emergency medical technician, “but Cleveland has a history of using many types of devices – from the business leaders ignoring things to control of the media to political leaders favoring the status quo – to keep things quiet.”
At the grocery store in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood where Jones was killed hardly anyone was around on Monday afternoon. Outside the store, with its bricked-up windows and a sign advertising sausage sandwiches – “Polish Boyz, 2 for $4” – foil balloons were tied to a telephone pole, with prayer candles at the base.
A sign on the pole read: “The Whole System is Broken.”
Who Roots for the White Sox? [The Point]
I grew up in a leafy residential neighborhood less than a mile from Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs. All my friends—virtually everyone I knew—were Cubs fans. If there are tics, habits and emotional dependencies common to fans of every sport and franchise, there is also something specific to the community of the faithful surrounding each individual team. Cubs fans are known for being happy, prosperous and good looking. They enjoy drinking, sunbathing, and having fun at the ballpark with their incredibly sexy girlfriends. Disturbingly, at least for those of us who hate them, they appear relatively unfazed by the stunning ineptitude of their team, which has set a standard for ingenuity in managing to avoid winning a World Series since 1908.
Chicago’s other baseball team, the White Sox, played on the South Side, where nobody I knew lived. They played in a ballpark nobody liked, in a neighborhood you had to lock your doors just to drive through.
Wabash 2.0 [The Wall Street Journal]
In what could be a road map for other ailing towns, Wabash emerged from the recession in 2009 with a strategy that focused on transforming the historic downtown into a place that would attract educated workers, firms that employ high-skilled individuals and even tourists.
The idea was to bring a small-scale version of the urban amenities—a walkable arts and entertainment district, boutique shopping and restaurants—to a downtown that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places but that was largely abandoned just a decade ago.
Illinois Leads the Nation in Depopulation [WBEZ]
In the past, people of low income populated in the city center, like Chicago. Now, that population is moving out to the suburbs and collar counties.
“Those reasons are typically tied to employment—proximity to employment. Could also be tied to crime, crime rate in the city versus the suburbs. And it’s also a direct correlation to quality of education.”
The SimCity way of seeing the world [Play the Past]
I don’t think there is any sort of straight line between SimCity and how we think about cities. The games are a bit notorious for their limitations as models for thinking about cities, but I have to imagine that people like Tom and I who grew up “playing too much SimCity” likely think about cities in different ways and on different terms than people previous generations.
