cleveland a clever disguise Not a word? Aw, well Cleveland is the wonderful, terrible land that I love. Made famous when on 30_Rock Alec_Baldwin said, "Sure, we'd all love to flee to the Cleve." Really, that was our big moment. Oh, and the Rock Hall is pretty sweet. 120124 ... unhinged oh_honey first the steel mills lumber out of town and then lebron kicks you in the teeth on national tv irrational pride straight work ethic (maybe she was the one that gave me my unwavering faith in the underdog) pierogies paprikash nostalgia_stomach my moms family has lived in the same house for sixty years (!) roots run deep we drove up denison to the funeral and my heart crumpled a little bit more at how ramshackle the neighborhood has become oh_honey being the middle notch on the rust_belt has not been kind 120125 ... unhinged and my favorite cleveland reference was on the drew carey show; the bosses wife was bitching about being stuck in cleveland instead of nyc or la and drew turns to a coworker and says something like: 'we should send her to youngstown . then cleveland wouldn't seem so bad' ;-) (and i was probably one of few to understand the hilarious truth of that one liner. besides maybe you of course) 120125 ... unhinged 'i always thought of cleveland as a shithole' says my brothers roommate and then 'ive only met like four good people in my whole life and your brother is one of them' how do you think he got that way? where we grew up has something to do with it. come_on_dude don't dis our home 120310 ... unhinged i_miss_you the tombstones are piling up in the cemetery the snow piles up on the tree lawns the cars pile up in the drive ways i_don't_need_brighter_days i just need some faith 130502 ... amy and the purplely apostrophe amasa stone 170417 ... unhinged 'in cleveland, more than one out of three working people earned less than $15,000 in 2014. the median earnings for *all* cleveland workers, poor and non-poor, was just under $23,000 per year. in cities like cleveland, the well-paying factory jobs of fifty years ago, which offered people with little formal education a step up into the middle class, have long since disappeared.' - alan mallach 180815 ... unhinged 'while the total number of *jobs* in cleveland went up, although very slightly over these years (2002-2014), the number of *city residents* holding those jobs went down by 22,000 or 26%. in other words, there were 22,000 fewer city residents working in cleveland in 2014 than 2002. the number of city residents working in the suburbs dropped by a similar number; all in all, over only twelve years, the number of people living in cleveland who had jobs - wherever they might work - went down by 45,000. meanwhile, the number of people commuting into cleveland to work went up by 25,000.' - alan mallach in other words, the people in the city are worse off than the people in the suburbs. which seems the logical conclusion of the idea/process of moving out to the suburbs as you become more successful, wealthy. my own family did that in spades. we moved to a close suburb of cleveland because my father had a housing radius for his job, so he moved to the neighborhood with the best schools and property values for his income level. then the village he worked for that abutted right up against cleveland eliminated the housing radius for his fire station (the logic being that if they needed to recall off duty fire fighters because the scheduled fire fighters were out on runs they would be closer, get back to the station faster) because someone related to the mayor wanted to move outside of the radius. 'those people' moved into the neighborhood i grew up in so my father, afraid that our property values and schools would plummet (the typical narrative white people were fed in the 70s and 80s), my dad moved to an even farther suburb a 45 min drive from his fire station. 'not only are the ranks of commuters growing, as they take over more and more of the jobs that were once held by city residents, but they have the best jobs. they earn far more than city residents who still work in the city, and their incomes have been growing faster. the median commuter working in cleveland earned $50,000 in 2014 compared to just over $31,000 for city residents working in the city and $26,000 for city residents working in the suburbs. on top of this, commuters' earnings rose by an average of 40% from 2002 to 2015, while city residents working in the city saw their earnings go up by 22%, and those commuting to the suburbs by only 15%. since the rate of inflation over this period was 32.5%, they were falling behind in real dollar earnings.' - alan mallach 180816 what's it to you? who go blather from