Slavic Village is battling back against the foreclosure crisis
by Marie Kittredge

Kittredge is executive director of Slavic Village Development, a nonprofit community development organization in Cleveland.

Cleveland Plain Dealer ~ Sunday May 10, 2009
To read this article online, go to: http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/05/slavic_village_is_battling_bac.html

Cleveland and other cities can't control the national and international forces that wreak havoc and create financial crises, any more than they can control hurricanes or tornadoes. But we can manage the effects. As we have done in the foreclosure crisis, we can join a swift crisis response with short-term solutions and visionary tactics that chart a sound course for the future.

Broadway/Slavic Village's response to the foreclosure crisis highlights Cleveland's toughness, its creativity, its resilience and its vision as we manage the effects of an international meltdown. Here, we are embracing the opportunity to redesign our community as a sustainable, 21st-century, urban community-of-choice, moving from the epicenter of foreclosure to the epicenter of recovery.

As has been widely reported, Cleveland officials began fighting predatory lending in 1999. At the state and national levels, there was no interest in addressing the problem, so it continued to escalate until 2007, when we began implementing responses like decorating boarded-up houses to let people know we were here and fighting back.

At the same time, we partnered with other community development corporations, Neighborhood Progress Inc. and state, local and national funders to craft a programmatic response: Opportunity Homes. This sophisticated program joins aggressive foreclosure-prevention strategies with targeted demolition of obsolete houses and full rehab of good-quality abandoned homes.
In our neighborhood, the rehabbed homes are frequently doubles, which we are converting to singles and packaging with adjacent vacant lots to create larger yards, thereby reducing density and meeting contemporary standards. The rehabbed homes are sold using attractive financing. For families with ruined credit, a lease option is provided while they repair their credit to qualify for a mortgage.

Opportunity Homes is a short-term strategy, jump-starting the real estate market in targeted areas by employing its broad array of tools. The longer-term strategy is one of redesigning our community by taking advantage of our new vacant land resource, as outlined in "Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland." The report, a broad, multi-agency collaboration, is a blueprint for sustainable reuse of vacant land to benefit people, neighborhoods and the city's ecosystem. Its recommendations were recently adopted by the City Planning Commission and are being used by Cleveland's nonprofit community development sector, in partnership with the city and local foundations, to right-size our city.

Even before the report, we have been "growing smaller, growing smarter" with real, measurable results in Broadway/Slavic Village. We consolidated commercial uses and expanded industrial uses with updated zoning. We built our bike trail on an abandoned rail line and demolished obsolete buildings on Broadway Avenue to create two new trailheads and our own Emerald Necklace. We have created new athletic fields to serve our two high schools, which previously had no outdoor athletic facilities. We are creating green-belt buffers, restoring native habitats and expanding community gardens. We are harnessing these strategies with targeted available resources and our active residents to transform neighborhoods, block by block.

Today, Broadway/Slavic Village is an affordable neighborhood for families, where workers can walk to work, students can take the bike trail to school or the nearby First Tee golf course; where quality education options are available; where residents, institutions and businesses and factories partner in the life and work of the community. We still struggle with the problems of poverty, crime and disinvestment, as do many urban neighborhoods, but we are in control and are defining our own future.

What distinguishes Cleveland's recovery effort is the way we are fighting back. As Councilman Tony Brancatelli often says, "We know what recovery looks like. We've done it before, and we'll do it again." The emphasis is on intelligent and collaborative solutions. Fully engaged residents, businesses and nonprofit community development corporations are working in a coordinated and aggressive fashion with city government to stabilize the city.

Our expertise, tenacity and commitment to our beloved city shows in the scope and breadth of our response to the foreclosure crisis.

Building Our Future

Beyond Foreclosure

What: The Levin College Forum series on Cleveland's future as it emerges from the foreclosure crisis continues with "Creating a New Story: From Crisis to Opportunity." Writer Alex Kotlowitz will talk about his recent New York Times Magazine story about Cleveland's Slavic Village neighborhood, and a panel of city and community leaders will discuss lessons learned and revitalization efforts.

Who: Open to the public.

Where: Levin College Atrium, 1717 Euclid Ave., Cleveland.

When: 4 to 6:30 p.m. Monday.

Cost: Free.

More information: Call 216-523-7330, or go online to: urban.csuohio.edu/forum. To read Kotlowitz's New York times story, go to: snipurl.com/hjx6j. To read the "Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland" report that Marie Kittredge mentions, go to: snipurl.com/hjxg6.

Cuyahoga County land bank could launch Cleveland renewal
by Steven Litt/Plain Dealer Architecture Critic

Cleveland Plain Dealer

To read this article online,  and see the special photographs, charts, and additional information, go to: http://www.cleveland.com/specialreports/index.ssf/2009/05/cuyahoga_county_land_bank_coul.html
Saturday May 16, 2009


Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis is a popular guy these days.

His desk is awash in proposals for thousands of vacant and abandoned properties that will soon be scooped up by the powerful new county land bank he persuaded the Ohio legislature to authorize in December.

Urban farmers want to sprinkle the city with zero-fossil-energy greenhouses. Neighborhood activists envision parks, trails and community gardens. Rokakis even has a brochure from a businessman who wants to build a winery in Hough on Cleveland's East Side.

"We've been bombarded," says Rokakis, whose office has suddenly become a clearinghouse for ideas on how to reconfigure neighborhoods hollowed out by subprime lending and tens of thousands of mortgage foreclosures.

Formally launched by the county in April, the new, nonprofit land bank is the first of its kind in Ohio.

It could soon turn Cleveland into the nation's biggest urban laboratory on how a declining industrial city with a comatose real estate market can downsize gracefully -- and prepare to rebound in the future. The impact on the city as a whole could be far greater than individual projects such as the proposed medical mart and revamped convention center downtown.

"The land bank is a key piece in realizing that this is the time for some of the most significant urban planning in 100 years, if not longer," said Frank Alexander, an Emory University law professor and a national expert on land banks.

Modern planning and zoning spread across the country in the 1920s to help cities manage growth. Those tools aren't well-suited to managing shrinkage in a city like Cleveland, which could soon see its population dip below 400,000, roughly the number it had a century ago.

But a new breed of county land banks, which have the power to capture troubled properties more quickly than traditional methods, can help.

In 2002, Alexander helped local officials create the first of the new, supercharged land banks in Genesee County, Mich., to improve the fortunes of long-declining Flint, Mich.

Genesee County Treasurer Dan Kildee, who heads the land bank, garnered national attention for stabilizing property values in Flint by demolishing vacant houses the way a surgeon cuts away gangrenous tissue.

His successes include boosting a $3 billion tax base by $112 million, attracting $30 million in fresh investment to the city's main street, and finding a developer to rehab a historic downtown hotel.

Kildee says the Cuyahoga County land bank has the potential to do far more, because it will be the first modeled on the Michigan example to address a major metropolitan area. With 1.28 million residents, Cuyahoga County has three times the population of Genesee County.

"I can't overstate the significance of the Cuyahoga County land bank," Kildee said. "It's the first attempt to take the concept we developed and apply it on a large scale."


Ideas proposed to the land bank

Among other things, the Cuyahoga County land bank could hasten the creation of urban farms and parks set amid consolidated neighborhoods, cultural attractions and high-tech development zones across Cleveland and surrounding suburbs.

Ideas that have landed on Rokakis' desk include:

• "Reimagining a More Sustainable Cleveland," a set of guidelines adopted by the Cleveland Planning Commission in December. The document envisions using vacant land for community gardens, agriculture and water-retention areas that could soak up runoff and ease the burden on the regional sewer system.

• Opportunity Corridor, a proposed $350 million thoroughfare intended to spark economic development and bring jobs to a high poverty zone on the city's East Side. The road will connect the stub end of I-490 at East 55th Street to rapidly developing University Circle.

• The New City Beautiful, a concept promoted by Edward Hill, interim dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, who argues that a new network of beautifully landscaped urban parks would add enormous value to neighborhoods.

• Go! Growers, a potential program of the Cleveland Clinic, which would turn vacant city land "into sources of healthy food, community assets and ecological oases."

• Chateau Hough, a winery proposed by Mansfield Frazier, a 63-year-old businessman, consultant, writer and blogger. Frazier wants to promote a positive image of the city's black neighborhoods by producing fine wines on vacant land near the ever-expanding Cleveland Clinic.

Drawing on these and other proposals, the land bank could shape a regional discussion about the urban future. But it can't act alone. Its success depends on how well it collaborates with Cleveland and other municipalities, which, under the Ohio Constitution, determine land use and zoning within their boundaries.
"Planning will be much more syndicated," said Cuyahoga County Planning Director Paul Alsenas. "You can't put yourself in a cocoon."

The potential for teamwork is built into the land bank's governing board, which includes seven members from Cleveland, the county and suburbs.

Members will include Rokakis; two county officials appointed by the county commissioners; South Euclid Mayor Georgine Welo; Berea Mayor Cyril Kleem; Chris Warren, Cleveland's director of regional development; and Ward 12 City Councilman Tony Brancatelli.

Cleveland already has a land bank, but critics say its effectiveness is limited. Established in the 1970s with little power and virtually no staff, it has acted mainly as a passive repository for 9,500 vacant parcels acquired through judicial processes that can take years to resolve.

"There's no real coherence to how the [Cleveland] land bank is operating," Alexander said.


The powers of the land bank
The county land bank -- or Land Reutilization Corporation -- will be turbocharged. As an independent government corporation with a dedicated staff and substantial resources, it can cut the process of acquiring tax-foreclosed properties from as long as two years to 45 days. It can also buy discounted properties in bulk from banks or loan servicers.

The land bank can wipe titles clean of debt. It can buy, manage and sell buildings or vacant land. It can also float bonds against revenues including penalties and interest on overdue real estate taxes. Rokakis said the land bank could be ready to borrow $50 million to $70 million by late summer.

The immediate goal, Rokakis said, is to follow the Genesee County example by demolishing dilapidated houses to boost the values of remaining properties.

He also wants to halt speculation on thousands of foreclosed properties distressed by subprime lending. Investors are snapping up foreclosed properties for pennies on the dollar, and "flipping" them to unwitting buyers to make a quick buck.

"We have to be a firewall against these kinds of people and this kind of activity," Rokakis says.

The land bank board of directors is scheduled to hold its first meeting this week, although a day has not been set.. Rokakis said it's likely that Gus Frangos, the attorney, deputy treasurer and lead author of the land bank legislation, will be appointed the first director. Other staff members will soon be hired.

By the end of 2009, Rokakis estimates, the land bank will have assembled 1,000 properties, most of them in the city. Within a few years, it will control thousands more.

What's key, though, is whether the land bank establishes a strong vision or simply creates a vast patchwork that leaves the city looser and baggier, not better.

"If Cleveland ends up as a city in which half of every street is empty, it would be a disaster," said CSU's Hill.

Assembling large parcels is not an easy task

Using the land bank to assemble larger parcels, though, could be hard. Recent changes in state law make it difficult -- if not politically impossible -- to assemble land for economic development through eminent domain, the government power to compel unwilling sellers to sell property for a set price.

Nearby Youngstown is trying to use money from federal block grants to persuade isolated residents to relocate from largely abandoned blocks to denser parts of town. The city wants to save money by vacating streets and, possibly, by removing utilities.

But Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams said residents aren't buying the relocation offers yet.

Rokakis isn't discouraged by the Youngstown experience. He said that residents on sparsely populated streets could be enticed to move elsewhere in the county if it helps assemble large lots for redevelopment.

Cleveland, however, doesn't yet have a clear vision for consolidating neighborhoods.

The "Reimagining a More Sustainable Cleveland" guidelines adopted by the city in December show how future development should concentrate on downtown, University Circle, Opportunity Corridor and the proposed new Port of Cleveland along Lake Erie at East 55th Street.

But the document doesn't articulate a big idea for green space in the city, such as new agricultural districts, or a series of mini Emerald Necklaces.

In the absence of such a vision, neighborhood planners are taking small bites.

The nonprofit Neighborhood Progress Inc., which helped fund the "Reimagining" project, is working on pilot projects to demonstrate techniques that could be used to stabilize vacant land, such as re-planting native grasses in "low-mow," easy-to-maintain landscapes.

In Slavic Village, a Cleveland neighborhood hit hard by subprime lending, Councilman Brancatelli wants to thin out dense streets of wooden houses crammed on tiny lots that were built to provide cheap housing for immigrant workers a century ago.

He's working with the nonprofit Slavic Village Development Corp. to enable homeowners to acquire vacant lots as side yards or community gardens and to create new athletic fields, parks and trails.

Rokakis' long-range view is that Cleveland is likely to shrink a bit more before rebounding later in the 21st century.


Global warming and rising sea levels, he said, will eventually halt growth along the coasts and across the sun belt. Money and people will flow back to the Great Lakes region, with its abundant fresh water.

"There will be a lot of people living here in Cleveland as coasts flood -- and they will -- and as natural resources grow more scarce," Rokakis said.

Cleveland City Planning Director Robert Brown agrees with the Rokakis forecast. The question, he says, is the length of the interim between now and the growth that's likely to come.

Rokakis knows the land bank will be closely watched, especially because the FBI is investigating possible public corruption in a probe that has touched Cuyahoga Commissioner Jimmy Dimora and Auditor Frank Russo. The treasurer's office is not part of the investigation.

The state's enabling legislation for the land bank requires regular audits and lots of transparency. That visibility will intensify the discussion about how best to use a new resource across the county -- open land.

And so Rokakis is sifting a growing stack of proposals, including Mansfield Frazier's concept to produce a wine called "Chateau Hough" on land near the Cleveland Clinic.

"Mansfield happens to be a very intelligent guy who has researched this carefully," Rokakis said. "Winemaking occurs all over the country. Why can't it happen here?"

Cuyahoga County Land Bank

What it is: A government corporation that will acquire, manage and dispose of thousands of vacant properties across the county.

How it works: Fueled by penalties and interest on unpaid real estate taxes, the land bank can buy properties wholesale from banks or loan-servicing companies. It will also acquire tax-delinquent properties through streamlined procedures.

Why it's better than previous land banks: The county land bank has more powers, a bigger budget and a dedicated staff, making it more powerful than the city of Cleveland's existing land bank.

-- Steven Litt

The Cuyahoga County land bank: a timeline

December 2008: Ohio legislature approves Senate Bill 353 authorizing Cuyahoga County to create a new, supercharged land bank.

Feb. 20, 2009: Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland signs the land bank into law in a ceremony at Cleveland State University's Levin College of Urban Affairs.

April 16: The Cuyahoga County commissioners direct the incorporation of the land bank.

April 17: Articles of incorporation filed with the state.

Early May: Land bank leases offices at 323 Lakeside Ave., Cleveland.

This week: First board meeting of the land bank scheduled. Agenda will include hiring a president and adopting a code of regulations.

Late summer: Land bank plans to issue $50 million to $70 million in bonds to pay for programs.

All Boarded Up
By ALEX KOTLOWITZ
Published: March 4, 2009 in the New York Times Magazine

TONY BRANCATELLI, A CLEVELAND CITY COUNCILMAN, yearns for signs that something like normal life still exists in his ward. Early one morning last fall, he called me from his cellphone. He sounded unusually excited. He had just visited two forlorn-looking vacant houses that had been foreclosed more than a year ago. They sat on the same lot, one in front of the other. Both had been frequented by squatters, and Brancatelli had passed by to see if they had been finally boarded up. They hadn’t. But while there he noticed with alarm what looked like a prone body in the yard next door. As he moved closer, he realized he was looking at an elderly woman who had just one leg, lying on the ground. She was leaning on one arm and, with the other, was whacking at weeds with a hatchet and stuffing the clippings into a cardboard box for garbage pickup. “Talk about fortitude,” he told me. In a place like Cleveland, hope comes in small morsels.

To read the entire article, click HERE or go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08Foreclosure-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Photo of City Councilman Tony Brancatelli by Reuben Cox

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Cleveland Plain Dealer ~ MESSAGES OF FAITH
New pastor at Old Stone Church: God called me to Cleveland Messages of Faith

Saturday, March 07, 2009

To read this online, go to: http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/stories/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1236418398306130.xml&coll=2

The Rev. R. Mark Giuliano
When I tell folks that I moved to Cleveland six months ago, by choice, they usually look at me as if I was stark-raving loony.

"Cleveland? Why Cleveland?" they ask, as if there were a hundred and one better places to live. When I let them in on my shocking little secret, that I traded the Spanish moss and balmy ocean breezes of Savannah, Ga., for the frigid, and sometimes blinding, lake-effect snow of living and working in downtown Cleveland, even the heartiest of Northerners seem to be aghast.

I'm fond of quoting Mark Twain these days: "We go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company." Clevelanders seem to get that quote more than anyone else.

Sure, Cleveland has seen some rough economic times, worse than most American cities. And, admittedly, Cleveland is not always the prettiest of places, particularly when the snow melts and the scattered winter trash and dog poop begin popping up like spring crocuses. But there is a strong survival spirit about Clevelanders. The T-shirt I saw in Tower City's eclectic The Cleveland Store says it best: "You Have to be Tough - It's Cleveland."

And in most Clevelanders there is a glowing coal of pride that's ignited, at least to a small, flickering flame, when the embers of all the wonderful things Cleveland has to offer are fanned: from the world-class orchestra and outstanding theater to the ethnically rich and di verse cultures and their foods, the mar ket and neighboring delis, the affordable downtown living and outstanding restau rants, the historic churches and their powerful preachers (as the new pastor of the Old Stone Church, I'm a little biased here), the Browns, the Cavs, the Indians, even the Lake Erie Monsters, who have been known to draw crowds in the thousands to The Q on "Dollar Dog" family-friendly Fridays.

But there is work to be done here, and that's what really brought me to Cleveland. The answer to the question, "Why Cleveland?" is simple: Cleveland called to me. Better yet, God did.

In fact, there were a hundred and one other possible places for me to live, but as my 21-year-old son reminded me as I wrestled with indecision, "Dad, you'll be happiest if you go where you are needed." And that's the one thing Cleveland has in spades: Need.

I've come to Cleveland because I believe in a God who does his best stuff among those who are in need. If you want to see God in action, or if you want to know God on a daily basis, don't move to a city where everything is well in hand, go where there is godly work to be done.

I'm a sucker for the underdog. I love to see God upend the powers and principalities who try to keep good folks and their good cities down. Believing in Cleveland is a little like believing in the Browns; one day they are going to knock those Steelers on their behinds and the Dawgs will have their day.

As a kid, I grew up on a staple diet of those great stories of how Jesus raised up those of lowly estate and simple means, how he empowered those who were bent low to raise up their heads and live in hope, like the marginalized but courageous woman who was so desperate she believed if she just touched Jesus' cloak, she would be made well, or the blind panhandler whose eyes were opened when Jesus scooped up some dirt, spit in it and said, "Here's mud in your eyes!"

Well here's mud in your eyes, Cleveland. Years ago, through prophet Isaiah, God said, "I do a new thing among you." Maybe that new thing that God is doing today is calling out a collective faith among all Clevelanders, to lift up our heads and believe that God has not left the building, and to live with vision and hope for our city, its people, our neighbors once again.

Sure the beaches and balmy breezes of heaven's climate are great, but I think God prefers the company of Clevelanders.

Giuliano is the pastor of Old Stone Church in Cleveland.
 

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MESSAGES OF FAITH

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Find this article online at: http://www.cleveland.com/religion/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1235208759176220.xml&coll=2
 

The Very Rev. Tracey Lind calls on Clevelanders of all faiths to promote sustainable living
Saturday, February 21, 2009
The Very Rev. Tracey Lind
 

Last summer, I spent a lot of time riding my bike from my home in Euclid through Cleveland's neighborhoods. As I pedaled the streets and talked to the people I encountered, I became convinced of two things: People of faith are everywhere in Greater Cleveland, and we are all called to come together and address our community's pressing issues.

As much as we love our region, we know that if we don't find a way to restructure local government so that it meets citizens' needs and allows us to fund our public life and schools equitably, we won't be able to stem the tide of population loss.

If we don't find a way to ensure accessible and affordable health care and more healthful lifestyles, it won't matter that we have the best hospitals in the country. If we don't find a way to sustainably but aggressively harness the wind and water of our greatest natural asset - Lake Erie - we will miss out on an economic engine, cultural icon and renewable energy source that could transform our city and region.

If we don't stop playing "the blame game," rewinding the "should have, could have, why didn't we" tape, and longing for "the good old days," we'll continue to decline.

While Greater Cleveland's people of faith might not always agree about doctrine, politics and morality, we all want see our community thrive. In fact, our deep and abiding concern is mandated by the teachings of our religions.

Christians call it stewardship or creation care. Judaism teaches tikkun olam, or repairing the world. Muslims follow the teaching of the Koran that calls humans to care for creation. Bahais believe that creation is a mirror of the divine. Unitarians lift up respect for the interdependent web of all existence. The power of the natural world is central to the images of Hindu tradition. Buddhists embrace a precept against the taking of life.

Across all major religious traditions, we are coming to understand the importance of sustainable living.

According to the GreenCityBlueLake Institute, Cleveland is already ranked the 16th-most-sustainable city in America. So we only have to move up 1.5 points every year for the next decade to become the most sustainable place in the land by 2019. What a way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the burning river! How do we get there, and how can the faith community help?

I don't believe that we need to start another civic initiative. There are lots of terrific projects under way to foster sustainability, explore revenue sharing, plan for better community health, encourage local food and urban farming, and promote public transportation and bicycling.

Rather, I believe the faith community can support all of these initiatives by articulating common values to undergird a common vision of what our region can be. Working together, we can help our region's citizenry understand and believe in our common, sustainable future.

According to the Pew Research Center, 36 percent of Ohio's population attends a house of worship at least once a week, and another 35 percent worship several times a year, suggesting that more than 70 percent of our region's population is affiliated with a church, synagogue, mosque or temple.

Not only do we have pulpits for proclamation and a degree of moral authority, but we also have classrooms for teaching, coffee hours for conversation, newsletters and Web sites for communication, and volunteers for service. We also have a network: Many faith communities are already connected to one another through judicatories, denominations, clergy associations and ecumenical and interfaith initiatives.

So how do we begin? Let's set aside our differences, parochialism and fear in favor of our common understanding of the call to sustain creation. Let's dig deep into our common texts and beliefs to lift up the abundance and stewardship of creation, love our neighbors as self, repair the breach and restore the streets, seek the welfare of the city, and demonstrate compassion for the least among us.

Working together, let's create a new vision of sustainability for the place we call home.

Lind is the dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland.

Messages of Faith is a biweekly column written by leaders of Greater Cleveland's faith communities. The Plain Dealer invites leaders of established congregations to submit proposals for columns of 500 to 750 words to Religion Editor Barb Galbincea at bgalbincea@plaind.com.


©2009 Plain Dealer
© 2009 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.


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THE PEOPLE UNDER THE BRIDGE
by Suzanne Benner

"For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what he does not have" (2 Corinthians 8:12).

"I think there are people living up there, behind the pillars."

"Those people are staying under the bridge because they don't have a house."

"I want to be friends with those people under the bridge."

"We should help them."

All fall, every day they drove under the highway overpass, the young boy watched for the people under the bridge and made comments to his mother. Unwilling to simply ignore his remarks, she asked him, "What do you think we should do?"

"I would give them a pillow," was his response.

Not a complicated strategy to end homelessness, not an intellectual discussion on why poverty exists, just the offer of a pillow.

Well, not just a pillow.

When his mother agreed to buy some pillows, the boy thought blankets would be good too. When his mother suggested second hand blankets from the thrift store, he responded, "Mom it's Christmas, we should give them new blankets. I have $75 in the bank, so I'll buy the blankets."

Not just new blankets, either.

"I think I should give a Bible to my friends under the bridge, because I have three and nobody needs three Bibles."

And so that is how pillows, blankets, a jar of peanut butter, some bread and a Bible were put into a garbage bag tied up with a Christmas ribbon and delivered one night to the people under the bridge. Inside was a note that read: "God loves you through a nine year old boy."

~O God, give us hearts like that nine year old boy, to truly care for those in need.

Question: How could you help someone that is in dire straights today with what you have? Ask yourself this question, "Do I really care about those in need?" How can we become more sensitive to the needs of others?

About the Author: http://talk.thelife.com/experience/devotionalforwomen/authors/suzanne-benner/

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Bill Moyer's Journal: American Cities on PBS at
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03282008/profile3.html

[I felt that this story and interviews was so important to our current understanding of how our cities got to be the way they are, that I am copying the entire transcript here.  I highly recommend you also go to the link above to see all the resources available.  ~Pastor Allen]

March 28, 2008
THE KERNER COMMISSION — 40 YEARS LATER
THE JOURNAL looks at an update of the Kerner Commission Report, which blamed the violence on the devastating poverty and hopelessness endemic in the inner cities of the 1960s and includes an interview with former Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, one of the last living members of the Kerner Commission.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03282008/transcript1.html

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.
You have to go searching deep into their websites, to find out what the presidential candidates think about urban issues. Their speeches on the subject have been few and far between, and during all those debates of the past year, cities were rarely mentioned. Perhaps it's because to talk about cities, we have to think about the very touchy subject of race. Or perhaps the culprit is amnesia; we've simply forgotten the past that produced the urban challenges of today. Here's what I mean:
The official name for it was the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. But it passed through the press into popular lore as the Kerner Commission report, and that's how it's remembered today — at least to those of us old enough to remember. If you think all the talk about race in this presidential campaign is savage, you should have been around 40 years ago, in 1968, when this report was published. Talk about controversy! The Kerner Report was an unflinching portrait of America — and it was born from the flames of exploding cities.

BILL MOYERS: July 1967, Newark, New Jersey goes up in flames. Reacting to a rumor that police had beaten and allegedly killed a local man, residents protested peacefully at first. But then the scene turned violent.
For six days, state troops and police clashed in the streets with rioters. Twenty-six people were killed, including a ten year old boy.

Six days later, it happened again in Detroit, Michigan

NEWS REPORTER: Detroit. It looked like the wartime blitz on London, but this was no war, it was arson, looting, a race riot blowing up into something beyond control.

BILL MOYERS: Triggered by another police action, and another angry protest gone haywire, the destruction of downtown Detroit was worse than Newark's… the nation watched on TV as Detroit was torn apart.

As reports poured in of snipers shooting at police, President Lyndon Johnson called in the army to put an end to the violence. Thousands of blacks were rounded up, and a curfew was thrown over the city.

Five days on, forty-three people were dead, hundreds wounded, and block after block of inner-city Detroit was destroyed. Locals picked through the ruins, stunned and confused. Detroit's mayor said his city looked "like Berlin in 1945"
It wasn't just Newark and Detroit that erupted that year. Scores of other cities seemed under siege.

NEWS REPORTER: In 1967, 126 cities were hit by racial violence, with 75 incidents classified as major riots.

BILL MOYERS: The country was stunned and terrified…what was driving these events? President Johnson felt compelled to act.

LYNDON JOHNSON: We need to know the answer, I think, to three basic questions about these riots: What happened, why did it happen, what can be done to prevent it from happening again and again.

BILL MOYERS: To answer those questions, LBJ appointed what became known as the Kerner Commission… named for its Chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. New York City's Mayor John Lindsay was Vice-Chair.
The youngest member of the panel was a populist senator from Oklahoma named Fred Harris. Just in his 30s at the time, and coming from a mostly white state, Harris nonetheless went to the floor of the Senate and called on the president to fully and publicly reckon with these awful events.

SENATOR FRED HARRIS: It's gonna take a national commitment, a massive kind of national commitment and anything less than that will not cure the ills that we have, and poverty generally, and the problems of race and the problems of our cities.

BILL MOYERS: The President listened. He was furious about these riots. Believing that militant groups such as the black panthers must've somehow been behind the violence.

But when the Kerner Commission's work was done, its findings would shake Lyndon Johnson, and the country. The Kerner Report became a moment of clarity for America. A time when the nation was forced to focus on the harsh realities of racism, poverty and injustice in our cities.

BILL MOYERS: On the 40th anniversary of this historic Kerner Commission Report, I asked that formerly-young Populist Senator Fred Harris to talk about his experience. He's one of the last of the surviving members of the original Commission.

BILL MOYERS: What was the urgency? I mean here you were just recently elected to the senate from Oklahoma, a basically white state, little town of Walters. What were you thinking? Is this the end of the country? Is this-- what is it?

FRED HARRIS: We just didn't know how-- how far this was gonna go. Johnson-- the President, later I went down to talk to him while we were working on the commission. And he said to me, "Have you seen the FBI reports about these riots?" Johnson was like a lot of people who thought maybe there's some conspiracy behind them. And I said conditions are such and the hostilities are such in these central cities that almost any random spark could've set them off

BILL MOYERS: You and all the commission actually went to the streets where the riots were--

FRED HARRIS: That's right. We--

BILL MOYERS: What did you see? What all these years later, what are the particulars you remember most formidably?

FRED HARRIS: We divided up into teams. And my team was John Lindsay and me. John was then the Mayor of New York. You couldn't have had two more different people me from a little ole town in Oklahoma and John Lindsay.

BILL MOYERS: For one thing, he was tall, and you were short.

FRED HARRIS: That's right. And I remember one-- we went for example, we went to-- Milwaukee. And I spent a good portion of that day in a black barbershop. We found Milwaukee as segregated really, maybe more so, then southern cities. I kept saying to people-- "Do you run into much discrimination here in Milwaukee?" And people didn't know quite how to answer it. It turned out the reason was, that they didn't see any white people. That's how segregated Milwaukee was.
And we found there people, of course, and this was true all over. Black people had come up there looking for jobs.

BILL MOYERS: From the South.

FRED HARRIS: And the trouble was they found very little opportunity.

FRED HARRIS: Jobs is what we heard everywhere. John Lindsey and I were walking down the streets in Cleveland, I believe it was, for example. And we'd see idle young black men on the streets, you know. And these guys get up, and they said, "What we need is jobs baby. Jobs. Get us a job, baby." I remember that so-- and that's what we heard all over.

BILL MOYERS: It was the promise of those jobs that had lured so many African-Americans up from the south in the first place. From World War II on, millions of blacks migrated north. Packing into the booming industrial cities of Chicago and Newark, Milwaukee and Detroit. There they earned wages that were the first steps out of poverty for an entire generation.
But twenty years on, even as this great migration kept bringing more and more people into the cities, many of those jobs began dwindling. Huge plants closed down. Moved out to the suburbs and beyond. Many white residents followed suit, leaving the central cities in droves.

By the mid-1960s, many of the biggest inner-cities in America had become chronically segregated. And were drying up economically.

FRED HARRIS: There was low family income, high unemployment. Almost criminally inferior schools. No jobs. The jobs had moved out to the suburbs. There was poor transportation. People couldn't get, you had to take two or three buses to get to some of those jobs. And there were jobs, the new jobs that were created, were either requiring a very high level of skills or education, or were just service jobs that were very low pay kind of flipping hamburgers kind of jobs. The people that black people saw as sort of representing society were police officers. And they were nearly all white. And most of them lived outside the central city. And came in during the day to enforce the law. So there was a great deal of hostility.

BILL MOYERS: I had a remarkable woman on this broadcast a few months ago, Grace Lee Boggs. She's 91 years old, still lives in, Detroit. She said, "Bill, this was not a riot. This was a rebellion. This rebellion against what you just described as the phalanx of white faces that surrounded the ghetto and kept it segregated." She said it was a rebellion against the loss of jobs. Do you think there's something to that?

FRED HARRIS: Well there is, in a way. Although you've gotta be careful to say, you know, it wasn't some organized thing. That is it wasn't a rebellion in the sense that somebody decided to organize it, with a definite ends in mind, goals. It was more spontaneous than that. But what we finally decided on the commission was we couldn't say what caused the violence. Or why the violence would occur, for example, in Watts in '65, but not in '67. What we could do was to describe with particularity, the terrible conditions that existed in these places, where riots had occurred.
We found as I said, no conspiracy. There were one or two on our commission said, "Well, should we actually say that?" Well, isn't that the truth?

BILL MOYERS: There was no conspiracy?

FRED HARRIS: There was no conspiracy. No organization to this. And they were, "Well, yeah. Well, let's just tell the truth."

OTTO KERNER: (Illinois Governor, Chairman of Kerner Commission) There is no indication, no fact, to indicate that any of them we're planned. The elements were there. And some fuse, an unpredictable fuse, set them off, but at this point there is still no evidence for any planning for the civil disorders within the cities.

BILL MOYERS: In March of 1968, the Report was published. It was brutal in its honesty:

While saying that a growing black militancy may have added fuel to the riots, the commission rejected the idea that there'd been any organization behind the outbreaks.

Instead, the Commission blamed the violence on the devastating poverty and hopelessness endemic in the inner cities of the 1960s.

Among their many findings:
One in five African-Americans lived in "squalor and deprivation in ghetto neighborhoods."
The unemployment rate was double for African-Americans, as compared to whites.
The report described communities that were neglected by their government, wracked with crime, and traumatized by police brutality.

Disproportionate rates of infant mortality were astonishing - African-American children dying at triple the rate of white children.

The statistics weren't new. But the Kerner Commission pushed further, and laid the blame for many of these conditions on white racism: quote "what white Americans have never fully understood -- but what the Negro can never forget -- is that the white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it. White institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

The report's conclusion — and it's most memorable message — was this: "our nation is moving towards two societies - one white, one black - separate and unequal."

FRED HARRIS: We used the word racism. And on the commission, we had two or three people say, "Should we use that word, racism?"

BILL MOYERS: Not a word that was thrown around largely by-- government panels in the 1960s.

FRED HARRIS: We felt that was very important. I did and I think it was to say it. Because what we know is that oppressed people often come to believe about themselves the same bad stereotypes that the dominant society has. Our saying racism-- I think was very important to a lot of black people who said, "Well, maybe it's not just me. Maybe I'm not-- by myself at fault here. Maybe there's something else going on."

BILL MOYERS: I remember that the headlines based on the premature leak of a summary of the report would read-"A Commission Blames Riots on Whites."

FRED HARRIS: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: White racism. And that inflamed-- whites who didn't want to be blamed.

FRED HARRIS: No, that's right. But we felt-- now I think if we had time to background it so that people would have understood it a little better. What we telling about-- with racism was not-- one white person hating one black-- or all black people. We're talking about kind of an institutional racism which existed. And where people live in all white neighborhoods. Send their kids to all white schools. Drive quickly through black section maybe, or on the train, to a job where all their associates are white. And don't see anything odd about it. That was what-
BILL MOYERS: The natural order of things.

FRED HARRIS: That's right. That's what we were talking about.

BILL MOYERS: For civil rights leaders like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. the Kerner Report confirmed reality

MARTIN LUTHER KING: And now we see the surfacing of old prejudices and hostilities that have always been there and they're out in the open — that's very good they're out in the open because you can deal with them much better when they are there to see and when people admit them. My analysis was no more pessimistic or gloomy than the Kerner Commission's report the other day. I do feel that we've got to say in no uncertain terms that racism is alive and on the throne in American society and that we are moving towards two societies... separate and unequal and if something isn't done to stop this in a very determined manner, things can really get worse.

BILL MOYERS: The Kerner Commissioners suggested a series of solutions to tackle the problems they'd diagnosed. Everything from better early childhood education to a crackdown on police brutality. They pushed for massive job creation, more affirmative action, and an expansion of the social safety net.
But critics saw the Commission as wrongheaded. They blasted Kerner for blaming everyone in society except for the rioters themselves.

Commission members had hoped to spend six more months explaining their report to the public and lobbying for their recommendations, but in the face of all the criticism, LBJ shelved that idea.

BILL MOYERS: Looking back all this time, what did the Kerner Commission get right?

FRED HARRIS: I think well virtually everything was right. And I could add onto that this. I think one of the awfulest thing's that came out of the Reagan presidency and later was the feeling that government can't do anything right. And that-- everything it does is wrong. The truth is that virtually everything we tried worked. We just quit trying it. Or we didn't try it hard enough. And that's what we need to get back

to. We made progress on virtually every aspect of race and poverty-- for about a decade after the Kerner Commission Report. And then, particularly with the advent of the Reagan Administration, and so forth, that progress stopped. And we began to go backwards. There are consequences from our acts, and when we-- cut out a lot of these-- social programs, or the money for them, or cut it down-- we don't emphasize jobs and training, and education, and so forth as we had been doing, there are bad consequences from that.

BILL MOYERS: The Reagan conservatives were quite critical of the Kerner Commission as being unbalanced and simplistic. They say, for example, that you failed to take into consideration that the close correlation between being born out of wedlock, and growing up without a father, and being poor, that your work over the years actually exempts the poor from being responsible for their own condition.

FRED HARRIS: Well, you know, the breakdown in families is just like sort of crime and narcotics and so forth. These are the consequences. They're the handmaidens in the sense of-poverty

FRED HARRIS: I said at the time, there are a lot of people who want to-- punish people for being poor. You know, say, "It's your own fault." We want to punish people for being poor. I said, "I I used to poor myself. And being poor is punishment enough." I think what you need to do is to help people-- up, give 'em a hand up. And recognize the kind of terrible conditions that they're grown up in.

BILL MOYERS: For the last thirty years, Fred Harris has been teaching politics at the University of New Mexico.

FRED HARRIS: Power was diffused and one way it was diffused was to break all these committees down into subcommittees…

BILL MOYERS: But he never lost his commitment to the cause of the Kerner Commission. When he's not in the classroom, he's part of major, ongoing investigation into the issues of race and poverty today.

Harris sits on the board of the Eisenhower Foundation based in Washington D.C. the Foundation was created to continue the Kerner Commission. Its work is to research and support successful programs in the inner cities.

Every few years, Eisenhower publishes an updated set of findings: a report card of how the country is dealing with the key issues raised by Kerner.

Alan Curtis is President of the Eisenhower Foundation.

ALAN CURTIS: The Kerner Commission said, "Look. These problems can be solved. Let's not give up hope. And so, we try to be keepers of the flame of that message. That there is hope. There are solutions. And we remind America every so often, that we still have a long ways to go in fulfilling the prophesies of those commissions and their recommendations.

BILL MOYERS: Alan Curtis and Fred Harris have been holding hearings in Washington, Detroit and Newark to prepare a report on the 40th anniversary of Kerner.

ALAN CURTIS: We want to listen. We're taking testimony. We would encourage you to discuss today not only the solutions, but how to change political will in America so that we can embrace the priorities of the Kerner Commission and we can begin to fulfill America's promise.

BILL MOYERS: In those cities, they heard a striking set of voices

KOMOZI WOODARD: We've gone from an urban crisis in the '60s to an urban catastrophe in the 21st Century. That's what you're looking at when you look at Katrina. That's what you're looking at when you look at gentrification. We are in an urban catastrophe community, we need to be blunt about it because if we use the wrong words, it doesn't wake people up, It puts them to sleep. This is not an ordinary situation and it is a national situation. It is not a Newark situation.

JUNIUS WILLIAMS: Big northeastern cities are home to some of the most concentrated poverty in the country, and that's your new split. That's your new division.

RONALD ANGLIN: We're seeing lives of quiet desperation that we have cordoned off communities in which we allow crime to exist. We allow lots of bad things to exist, and as long as they don't spill over, that's okay.

RICHARD CAMMARERI: I would take issue with one of the premises of the most famous quote in this that we're moving towards two societies. I would respectfully suggest that we never were one society in this country. This country has simply never confronted the issue of race. . Race is, I guess to use a religious term, the original sin of this country.

HEASTER WHEELER: I believe 40 years later, today the conditions here in Southeast Michigan are just as ripe for protest, and demonstration, and possibly all those other negative things as they were 40 years later. You need not look too far to see Jena, Louisiana and all of the other challenges.

MAUREEN TAYLOR: On my way here, there are people on corners, standing up with signs, say, "Will work for food." But we're in here, talking about what's the problem?

JOSEPHINE HUYGHE: You want to know what's going on? It's somebody say, "It's the same old, same old." With the continuation of white flight that started in the '50s has been compounded by the exodus of the middle and upper class blacks as Detroit experienced a 'brain drain'.

DR. HERBERT SMITHERMAN: In 1970, the infant mortality rate, that is our babies dying before age of one, was about 65 percent higher in the black community than in the white community. Currently, it's 205 percent higher in the black community than in the white community.

GEORGE GALSTER: The City of Detroit constitutes 85 percent black residents, only nine percent white residents. The poverty rate -- white, it's only 5.9 percent, blacks: 24 percent. The median family income -- for whites, over $65,000, for blacks, only $37,000. We could go on and on, but, it's very clear that there are these measurable distinctions between blacks and whites in metro Detroit.

REV. KEVIN TURMAN: The young people of my congregation and my community are as industrious as you will find anywhere. They are as innovative and as intelligent as any that you will find anywhere. But unfortunately, they have a number of challenges that have been un-addressed, because the recommendations of the Kerner Commission were ignored or dismissed.

ROY LEVY WILLIAMS: The one industry which has flourished is the prison industry. And, yes, it has become an industry. During the last 15 years, this state has been averaging one brand new prison a year

GLENDA MCGADNEY: We have got to get serious about what's going on and what our government is allowing to happen to us, and how we're losing our rights every single day. And all this money that's being spent for the war, we need to pray about that. Because it should not be going to Iraq. It should be right here in our cities, in our neighborhood.

DR. HERBERT SMITHERMAN: When we had 9/11, we were arguing about Social Security reform. Where are we gonna find the money for it? And within 48 hours after 9/11, we found $40 billion for New York City, a billion dollars an hour. When we want to do something as a country, we do it. This is not about can we do. This is about a will. This is about do we want to do. When you start saying I'm gonna have cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, cuts to housing in urban development, no subsidies to mass transit, eliminate funding for job training, cut school lunch programs for inner city children, eliminate school loan programs for minority students, repeal after-school programs. What I'm saying is this is about public policy. This is about resource implementation.

KARL GREGORY: The 1968 Kerner Commission conclusion that racism is deeply embedded in the American society is still true. Racism is still as American as apple pie in this area. The existing huge disparities by race could not exist without racism.

BILL MOYERS: The Eisenhower Foundation has now issued their preliminary report and it echoed the testimony they heard across the country:
While noting that certain things have improved - such as the dramatic growth of the black middle class - the foundation nonetheless concludes that "America has, for the most part, failed to meet the Kerner Commission's goals of less poverty, inequality, racial injustice and crime."

Among the troubling facts:
Thirty seven million Americans live in poverty today. But African-Americans are three times as likely to be at the very bottom of the scale, living in what's known as 'deep poverty'
Median non-white families have just one-fifth the wealth of white families
And…over the last 20 years, three times as many African-American men go to prison as go to college

ALAN CURTIS: Many people today-- Americans have short memories, of course-- don't realize, for example, that the sentence for a minority person is longer than a sentence for a white person going to prison. Minorities are more likely to get the death sentence than white. The sentences for crack cocaine, used disproportionately by minorities, are longer than the sentences for powdered cocaine, used disproportionately by whites. And so, there is still this endemic, institutional racism in America that people forget about. And I think they need to be reminded about that.

BILL MOYERS: The Eisenhower Foundation's full report will be released later this year.

BILL MOYERS: Fred, you've been teaching democracy down there at the University of New Mexico for 30 years. Your textbook on democracy is used in universities all over the country. Why can't democracy deal with these persistent, chronic realities that the Kerner Commission described and you here 40 years later are restating?

FRED HARRIS: Well I think first of all-- people don't really realize that conditions are so bad for so many people in poverty and-- and for African-Americans, and for Hispanics. I think a lot of people say, well, didn't we do all that? And I think if people knew these conditions and that's what we ought to do on the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Report is to get people to see that these problems of race and poverty are still with us. Also, I think we need to approach this on a basis of that we're all in this together. Somebody said we may not have all come over on the same boat but we're all in the same boat now.

And here's the interesting thing. Every poll that's taken shows that two-thirds of Americans think America's on the wrong footing. They're headed in the wrong direction. And there's overwhelming support for example this: do you think we ought to spend more on-- in prevention-- by putting money in education and training and jobs, instead of police and prisons.

Overwhelmingly people say, yes. Do you think that we ought to have a social net-- so-- just to catch people falling out and to give them another chance? Oh, yes, they strongly believe in that. What about healthcare? We got 46 million people without health insurance. And yet overwhelmingly Americans say, yes, I think we ought to have-- healthcare even if-- everybody-- universal healthcare even if it costs us more money. So the public is way ahead of the politicians I think.
And I just think that, as I said, it's in our own interests, and everybody's interests to try to do something about it. We can do it.
 

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National Cityscapes Conference traverses urban environments through humanities' lens
http://blog.case.edu/case-news/2008/03/26/cityscapes

[Web Note: Pastor Allen attended part of this conference.]

The three-day National Cityscape Conference, sponsored by Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art, will examine our urban environment, past and present, through the lens of the humanities, asking what contributions the arts, culture, and society have made to the formation of cities.

The free, public conference, March 27-29, launches with an exhibition by conceptual artist Carl Pope, who has turned a public conversation about Clevelanders' dreams and anxieties for their city into a poster installation called The Mind of Cleveland that will extend out into the city through billboards and kiosk posters. Viewing begins on Thursday, March 27, at the Cleveland Institute of Art, 11141 East Blvd., with a preview at 4 p.m., followed by a keynote talk at 5 p.m. by New York University visual culture professor Nicholas Mirzoeff on "Days of Race: Democracy and Black Reconstruction in the Work of Carl Pope." The preview and talk are followed by the official opening and reception at 6 p.m. in CIA's Reinberger Galleries.

The Cityscape conference continues on Friday, March 28, at CIA with sessions from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., devoted to "Creating and Performing Community," "Contested Space and Social Divisions" and "Organizing the City."

The Saturday sessions on March 29, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., move to Case Western Reserve University's Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations Building, 11402 Bellflower Rd. Sessions will address "Knowing, Remembering and Imagining the City," "Representation and Urban Spaces" and "Marketing the City."

A reception and talk by public artist Lee Quinones closes the conference at 4:30 p.m. with an overview of "The Lincoln-West High School Mural Project," about the experience of working with local high school students on the art project.

The Cityscape conference dovetails with Case Western Reserve's 2008 Humanities Week celebration, March 24-29, dedicated to the theme of Cityscape. Highlights of the week include a film series at Cinematheque and lectures by visiting scholar Alison Isenberg from Rutgers University. The featured keynote speaker for Humanities Week is Norman Krumholtz, winner of the 2007 Cleveland Arts Prize for his lifetime work in urban planning. His talk, also free and open to the public, takes place at 4:30 p.m. in Amasa Stone Chapel, 10940 Euclid Ave.

Funding to the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities for Humanities Week comes from a major grant from the Presidential Initiative Fund for the Humanities through the generosity of the Cleveland Foundation and a grant from the Ohio Humanities Council. Additional support for these various activities is from Clear Channel, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Cleveland Councilman Joe Cimpeman (Ward 13) and Progressive Arts Alliance.

Although the event is free and open to the public, registration is required by visiting http://bakernord.org, where a full list of events and speakers is also available for the conference and Humanities Week 2008.
For more information contact Susan Griffith, 216.368.1004.

The Mind Of Cleveland Art Exhibition
The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) jointly commissioned conceptual artist Carl Pope to create a public art work project “The Mind of Cleveland.” This exhibit will premier in conjunction with the National Cityscapes Conference from March 27-30, 2008. The conference explores the intersections between the urban environment, humanities and the community.

“The Mind of Cleveland” is a public conversation in billboard/poster form, a conceptual town meeting where everyone has the opportunity to be heard publicly. The project employs modes of communication common in urban spaces, such as billboards, letterpress posters and the Internet. With the use of public signage, the thoughts, feelings and wishes of Cleveland residents are displayed.
Responses to the question, “What do you think about Cleveland?” will be collected by this website and displayed on billboards and letterpress posters. Ideas circulating in the public sphere can represent the unspoken thoughts of thousands of people. And those collective thoughts have the potential to inspire dialogue and communal action.
In addition to the billboard campaign, there will be a gallery exhibition featuring letterpress posters containing quotes from the Cleveland community. Copies of the posters will be given away to the general public upon request. To learn more about the billboard campaign and gallery exhibition, click here.http://www.themindofcleveland.com/billboards_exhibition.html

Pope believes we are living in a time in which individuals and small groups can exert tremendous influence on the world. His artistic practice is rooted in a belief that outer change is born within the imagination, inspiring the individual to become a catalyst to effect transformation in the world. The goal of “The Mind of Cleveland” is to inspire civic pride and cooperation during this critical point in the city’s history. Now seems to be the perfect time to pose these questions.