"The DCA insists that 535,042 residents in "greater Cleveland" could afford downtown living. That's 30 percent of our five-county region. Meanwhile, median household income in Lorain, Medina, Lake, Geauga and Cuyahoga counties dances around $57,000. Based on conversations with a number of people plugged into the market, one would need to pull in $70,000 to, preferably, $80,000 yearly to live comfortably downtown. (For $35,000 or so, you can get by in the neighborhoods.)"
What is infuriating about this article is the figures of income – now it’s already perfectly clear to me both through my current job in Social Work and my previous jobs in Education that there’s an ever-widening wage gap, largely based on race and privilege at work in Cleveland.
The surge of new housing downtown – by the very numbers that these associations use – is directed at the influential and rich. I ride public transit everyday past these apartments. And what I see, time and time again is that they are so far outside the realm of reasonability for the average person to be offensive to the senses. This isn’t even an issue of gentrification – there’s no existing housing stock in downtown. However, the housing stock that exists in Cleveland is so degraded and devalued (partially because of decades of poor management, but also the financial crisis, and subsequent subprime meltdown).
On one hand, I ought to be happy that there’s all this new growth downtown- that there’s a flourishing of businesses and apartments – but the price range – while it might seem undervalued to those outside the region- is so vastly overpriced. From the article:
"Meanwhile, in that same period, the rental market jumped from 4,636 total units to 5,785. In tandem, square-foot pricing bumped up from $1.14 to $1.33. The average monthly rent is $1,107, according to the DCA. Occupancy now hovers above 97 percent. Waiting lists in some buildings range from "40 to 100" prospective tenants per unit type (one-bedroom, two-bedroom, etc.), according to one broker."
For some perspective - I live 15 minutes outside of downtown in a first generation suburb and pay $565 a month for just over 1000sq. I understand arguments based on density - but there's no reason in a region with our kind of population that prices should jump that much. Unless, unless, there's some form of economic gate-keeping going on, designed to keep poorer and browner people out of the tony lofts and condos.
The thing of it is that looking at the median income for the county – or even averages doesn’t do much to represent the gap that exists. A big reason for this is that averages take the wages of people like plastic surgeons for the Cleveland Clinic and weigh them against those with no reported income – or only social security disability – this leads to an average income in the mid-50s. That’s wholly unrepresentative of the actual income of most people.
Even the members of the county council (who just voted to give themselves a raise) don’t make that kind of bank currently.
So, who I ask, who is living in these places and pulling down that sort of money? I really have no clue. I’d like to know because clearly working in the public service means that I should get paid a 1/3 of what they make in a year? It’s absolutely baffling. I wouldn’t think most of them would work for the Clinic because those people live either close by to the hospital in their gentrified enclave OR in far exurbs (in the case of most of the Docs). I can’t think of a single opening I’ve seen that lists that kind of salary and I have no idea how you have a job that pays that much in a labor market like Cleveland – outside of attorneys perhaps, but the market within Cleveland can’t support that many (as evidenced by declining numbers of enrollments at the three area law schools, Cleveland State, - where I went before dropping out –CWRU, which has been embroiled in a sexual harassment lawsuit related to its staff, and Akron, nearly an hour and half south of the city center of Cleveland.
Cleveland is and has been for quite some time a minority majority city – with, at the last census something like 60% African-American population. (As an aside – how was a city that had more African-Americans depicted as so lilywhite for 5+ years on the Drew Carey Show) For decades communities like Hough and Slavic Village have gone unserviced – and now that wealthy, ‘millennial’, white folks are moving downtown, suddenly there’s a flourishing of businesses. It’s pretty explicitly racist – AND, belays larger problems. What happens when these young people have kids? Are they going to send them to the notoriously bad Cleveland Public Schools – or push more money out of the city and into expensive charters? How involved in policy – especially related to policing after the Cleveland police decree from the DoJ enumerating years of police abuse on largely racial grounds?
For me personally, I can’t project into my crystal ball – I’m legitimately happy that the place where I’m from seems to be turning it around, and I sincerely hope that a rising tide will lift the boats of the inner-city dwellers. Right now though, that growth seems largely boutiques and risks enforcing or even exacerbating the long history of racial bias and struggle in Cleveland.
I also want to know how I can get one of those 90k a year jobs in Cleveland. Badly.
