Aired April 13, 2007

The City of Cleveland has been attracting new residents to its downtown, showing a steady growth in housing for the past 15 years. The jump in downtown living comes despite a loss of 26,000 residents since the year 2000. Yesterday evening the editor of Governing Magazine spoke at a forum at Cleveland State University. He says we may be needlessly hung up about some roadblocks to revitalizing downtowns. ideastream's Mark Urycki reports.

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With a speech titled The Myths And Realities Of The Downtown Comeback, one might expect a harsh dose of reality. But Alan Ehrenhalt, who has been watching and writing about the health of cities across America for years, was surprisingly optimistic. He said some cities are up and some are down, depending on the year, but a change is going on.

Alan Ehrenhalt: The single most important development in American cities in the last five years is downtown living.

Ehrenhalt says inner cities are no longer dirty places, choking on smog smog and millions of young people are looking to try urban living. Cleveland's overall population may have declined since 2000 but he says don't worry about it.

Alan Ehrenhalt: It's nice to gain people but you need to ask who they are, where they're going, how the role of different neighborhoods are changing. Boston lost 30,000 from 2000-2005, Chicago lost 54,000 but if you said those were declining cities you'd be challenging reality.

The editor uses his hometown Chicago as an example of the new American City.

Alan Ehrenhalt: In that city, we're not talking about a few thousand empty nesters. It's an inversion of rich and poor. It's an amazing event. It's making Chicago more like a 19th century European city. In 19th century Vienna or Paris, the wealthy people all lived on this inside and the poorer people lived further out.

Ehrenhalt says you can complain about gentrification but the fact is people with money are making the cities healthier. Cleveland's Economic Development Director Brian Reilly is blunt about the net loss of residents.

Brian Reilly: I'm more interested in wealth than I am in the population numbers. We have housing and we have retail because people have money to spend on housing and retail.

The Dean of CSU's College of Urban Affairs, Mark Rosentraub, agrees that cities like Cleveland need the lifeblood of income taxes.

Mark Rosentraub: Where Brian and I are on the exact same page is that driving people in that drive up the earnings tax, that drive up the property increases the wealth a city like Cleveland needs to address the problems in the neighborhoods.

Another challenge to conventional wisdom put forth at the forum is that the city has to improve the schools before people will move back. Ehrenhalt says it's foolish to try to solve the hardest problem first. He says schools are not a priority for the people moving downtown.

Alan Ehrenhalt: This is one of the last pieces to fall in place before this comeback. First you need the streets to be safe. Then you commerce: stores, restaurants, coffee houses, theaters. Then you need public transit to get them to work. Then some adventurous families will move in if all goes well enough of them to improve the schools. That's how it'll work, not the other way around.

Cleveland has somewhere between 9 and 10,000 people living downtown. Ehrenhalt and others were relatively confident the city could reach its goal of 25,000. What's more, he said that number living downtown tends to have a much greater impact on the city than its numbers might suggest.