‘Check Cleveland,’ says writer’s advice for downsizing Detroit

Call it Rust Belt creativity. Cleveland’s experiments with reviving foreclosure-devastated neighborhoods could inspire Detroiters, a Motor City writer says.

Detroit faces every problem Cleveland does, multiplied. Its abandonment and suffering from the subprime mortgage collapse are hard to fathom. But John Gallagher of the Detroit Free Press is trying. Like Steven Litt at the Plain Dealer, Gallagher evaluates the city's landscape and civic life as an arts critic would, looking for ways it could be better.

Gallagher’s “10 tips for downsizing Detroit” lists “Check Cleveland” as number 7. He credits us with more than 50 pilot programs to revive the city’s most troubled neighborhoods:

Ideas range from creating pocket parks to building an alternative energy plant, and from planting a bamboo grove as part of a zen garden to creating vineyards and orchards.

I think that “vineyards and orchards” line might be a reference to Cleveland Magazine contributor Mansfield Frazier’s plans, including the Vineyards of Château Hough.

Gallagher’s picked up on the creative spirit sprouting among Cleveland's ruins, as WVIZ's Applause did this April. Billy Delfs and I aimed to do the same with our March photo essay, "Tear It Down!"

In turn, Gallagher’s other nine ideas could be as valuable to Cleveland's leaders as they are for Detroit's. Here’s how he tries to solve the political debate over whether “shrinking cities” means letting some neighborhoods go: “Prohibit any redevelopment in neighborhoods marked for mothballing,” he says, but “Never try to forcibly relocate residents.”

'What's taking so long to expose crooks?'

That headline isn't mine. It's from a column the Detroit Free Press published earlier this month. Clevelanders, impatient for our public corruption investigation to show results, might be interested to know Detroit's getting antsy too.

You've heard about Kwame Kilpatrick, right? The lying, sexting, cop-firing, justice-obstructing former Detroit mayor? Scandal and a tough local prosecutor knocked Kilpatrick (pictured, in mug shot) out of office a year and a half ago. Now, a massive FBI probe of Detroit City Hall -- which has already brought down the former city council president -- seems to be aiming to add bribery charges to Kilpatrick's tawdry legacy.

The feds seem late to the party, so columnist Rochelle Riley called up the U.S. Attorney in Detroit and asked, what's the hold-up?

"There are important investigative reasons that it can take so long," Barbara McQuade told Riley. "Sometimes, you have to work your way up a chain," she said. "Sometimes, you talk to someone who pleads guilty and that leads you to new people. And we're analyzing records that lead to other records."

That's how federal investigators in Cleveland are pursuing Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo: Still not charging them with a crime, still racking up guilty pleas from potential witnesses 21 months after raiding county offices.

They're getting results. Consider Bruce Zaccagnini, one of the lawyers who's pleaded guilty to bribing Russo with $1.2 million in cash kickbacks. From the Plain Dealer story on his February sentencing:

As soon as federal investigators approached Zaccagnini, he agreed to help make their case against his co-conspirators. The financial records he handed over revealed the corruption was more extensive than investigators had realized, Assistant U.S. Attorney Antoinette Bacon said at the sentencing. "He saved months upon months of agents' time," Bacon said.

Could "more extensive" mean $1.2 million?

The water-torture drip of charges have triggered wild mood swings in the town and the targets themselves. Dimora's gone from reclusive to obnoxiously defiant to subdued to cocky again. He swung back to his innocent-persecuted self-defense last month, because he thinks some of the latest charges against buddies of his are weak -- they did work on his house but didn't do county work.

The favors Dimora allegedly did for the latest contractors may seem small -- recommendation letters and such. But the prosecutors are trying to establish a pattern they can take to trial. The explosive charges involving Steve Pumper look more damning if other contractor buddies testify that they, too, helped remake Dimora's back yard into a patio paradise and didn't get paid until the FBI started nosing around.

Clevelanders want charges, trials, verdicts, closure. But as impatient as they feel now, many of them would be furious if Dimora walked -- if jurors in a future trial were to decide that the investigation had left some fuzzy gray areas between Dimora's Vegas trip and barbecue shelter and his alleged nudges and phone calls at the county building.

In the meantime, the town could use some reassurance from the normally tight-lipped local U.S. attorneys, something like the words McQuade, a Detroit native, offered Riley:

"We recognize the need to act with thoroughness, but also a little bit of urgency," she said. "The city really needs some closure, and it's not healthy for anyone in this city to have a cloud of suspicion hanging over them indefinitely. In public corruption cases, we want to move as quickly as we can."

Med Mart: Dan Gilbert's weak argument

The Plain Dealer gave Cavs owner Dan Gilbert's argument for putting the Medical Mart at Tower City page-one play again Sunday. This time the lead was Gilbert's comparison of downtown Cleveland to downtown Detroit.

Gilbert argues that Detroit made a terrible mistake when it put three casinos in different places, two of them too far from the city's center. They lost a chance to give downtown Detroit a connected core.

True, but there's no lesson for Cleveland there. "NOTE: Maps are not at the same scale," says the fine print on page A16 under the PD's Detroit and Cleveland maps.

Detroit's downtown is much bigger and sprawled-out than Cleveland's. The Motor City Casino is 1.4 miles from Detroit's convention center, Cobo Hall. But the convention center site on our Mall is a half-mile from the Q, with East Fourth Street halfway between.

Yes, the Tower City site's big advantage is that it's connected to the Rapid, a shopping center, two hotels and the arena. But the mall site is hardly isolated -- it's next to two hotels, a block from Public Square, and the new center would have a big glass window overlooking the Rock Hall and the lakefront.

Developer Jeffrey P. Jacobs took out a full-page ad in yesterday's paper supporting the Mall site. His letter makes an interesting point about connecting downtown. "Successful urban planning... involves the creation of multiple traffic generators," Jacobs writes. "Moving visitor traffic throughout downtown will help sustain a community of businesses."

In other words, grouping things fairly close together is good -- but you do want conventioneers to get outside, into taxicabs, onto the streets.

{Correction, 4/21: In an earlier version of this post, I wrote that Jeff Jacobs' father, Dick Jacobs, owns the Marriott at Key Center, across from the Mall site. Actually, cleveland.com reports tonight that the Jacobs Group relinquished its 50% stake in Key Center this fall. See my new post.}

Cleveland vs. Detroit: What we take for granted

I got back from a weekend in Detroit to see this story, which almost wasn't news: Frank Jackson and Tim Hagan had a nice talk about Cuyahoga County acquiring the convention center site from the city of Cleveland.

Hagan had suggested that the city just deed it over for free. Jackson replied it was a valuable asset, so county should pay for it. But they'll work it out. They had a pleasant chat, and they're confident they'll have a deal by the end of the month.

Meanwhile, Detroit may give up ownership of its convention center too -- but only after an ugly, dirty, ridiculous, YouTube-worthy, crazy fight.

Cobo Center is getting old and out of date. Not as far gone as Cleveland's convention center, yet. But it costs $15 million a year for the city to keep up. It will probably lose its biggest event, the North American International Auto Show, if it doesn't undergo a major renovation. But the city can't pay for the work. It's flat broke.

So the state legislature, metro Detroit's three counties, and Detroit's mayor came up with a plan to transfer Cobo Center to a regional authority. But Detroit City Council voted against it. They don't want the center to give up preferential hiring and contracting for Detroiters.

Two councilwomen are playing the race card to attack the plan. Barbara-Rose Collins (whom voters threw out of Congress 13 years ago amid scandal, and who occasionally wears a tiara to council meetings) started ranting about "European rulers" at last week's city council meeting, then sang "Onward, Christian Soldiers"!

They're suing Detroit Mayor Ken Cockrel, Jr., a good guy who calls for regional and racial cooperation. People outside Detroit who want to help the city are recoiling, appalled.

Compared to Detroit's convention center battle, Cleveland's looks remarkably civilized. That reminds me of a few things about Cleveland politics that we take for granted.

Detroit and Cleveland are very similar -- 1920s boom towns, manufacturing capitals, formerly among the nation's biggest cities, scarred by racial tension, now shrinking from industry's decline. But today, Cleveland rarely sinks into the battles between city and suburb, black and white, that wound Detroit over and over.

It's not that Cleveland is a racial utopia. It's definitely not. (Just look at how often local news stories attract ugly comments from readers with racial grudges.)

But in Cleveland politics, racial divisiveness is ultimately a losing strategy. Leaders who appeal to our better instincts deserve some of the credit. Geography deserves some too -- the simple fact that the Cuyahoga River has been our racial dividing line, not the city limits.

Detroit's racial geography lines up roughly with political boundaries. The famous 8 Mile Road is not just the boundary between Detroit and the suburbs, but between one county and two others. So politicians in Detroit and the suburbs who think along racial lines can play the race card and win re-election. Kwame Kilpatrick, the recently disgraced former Detroit mayor, was infamous for this.

But Cleveland's mayors -- Frank Jackson in 2005, Jane Campbell in 2001, Mike White in 1989 -- win office by attracting votes from black and white and from both sides of town. City council presidents need east-west coalitions to survive. County-wide candidates, too, know a multi-racial coalition is the easiest way to victory.

Just after Frank Jackson was elected, I asked him how he might improve race relations as mayor. Here's what he said:

I don’t think it’s really about improving race relations as much as it is carrying out what you said. If I look at what I do in the city of Cleveland not as black, white or Hispanic, or East Side or West Side, but look at it as doing it for Cleveland, that’s a message from me. If you do not play up the issue of differences or what divides us, then it will tend not to be as prominent.

We're fortunate most of our leaders think like that. I wish more Detroiters did.