Cleveland: Promise Denied

When Moses Cleaveland carved out a settlement at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in 1796, it seemed a promised land. Since then, the Ohio city he laid out has dropped an a from its founder's name and most of his Utopian hopes. Last summer's flaming riots in the city's rat-infested ghetto of Hough proved that Cleveland's Negro neighborhoods are as volatile as Watts or Harlem. Scared citizens have taken to muttering about "Communist influence." Yet the Negro community's real problem is as close as the house next door—which in much of Cleveland is as apt to be a hovel as a highrise.

To date, Cleveland's urban renewal program has torn down 4,255 dwelling units—yet it has replaced only 2,000. Of the 4,487 families who lived in those apartments and duplexes, only 114 found their way into public housing, while nearly 1,700 families disappeared entirely from official records. Though 25,000 Cleveland families are eligible for public housing, only 7,478 units are available, and a scant 2,500 more are planned for the near future. Much of the fault lies with lackadaisical Democratic Mayor Ralph Locher, who took over Cleveland's fate when Anthony Celebrezze was called to Washington as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in 1962, and whose five-year-old administration has monumentally botched an ambitious slum-clearance program that held real hope of improving the lives of the inner-city poor.

Hopes into Headaches. When Washington offered to foot two-thirds of the bill for urban renewal a decade ago, Cleveland led the cities that applied for federal subsidies. Over the years, it staked out 6,060 acres for improvement—far outstripping its nearest rivals, Philadelphia (3,586) and Boston (1,787). Meanwhile, that hoped-for rehabilitation has become a headache: only one of Cleveland's seven reclamation projects has been completed; others remain wastelands of weed-grown vacant lots and high-rise trash heaps.

Erieview, the city's downtown core, is mottled with make-do parking lots; even the three-year-old federal building, a 30-story tower overlooking the polluted surf of Lake Erie, is already scabrous with peeling plastic. The city is having to pay $50,000 a month in interest costs on loans for its Erieview project alone. Last January, in exasperation, HUD Secretary Robert Weaver cut off $10 million in renewal funds.

Debris & Malaise. In particular, Mayor Locher has done little to implement the ambitious urban renewal project promised for Hough six years ago, and the section remains a garbage-strewn jungle. Exacerbating racial unrest over slum conditions, Locher (rhymes with poker), a Rumanian-born attorney and friend of former Mayor, now Senator, Frank Lausche, recently ordered a harsh crackdown on Negro demonstrators. "Fill every jail, if necessary," he said. The panic implied in that pronouncement was summed up last week by Chicago Sun-Times Reporter Morton Kondracke, who concluded from a five-week nationwide tour of the urban ghettos: "In Cleveland, the 'if' has almost gone out of riot speculation; the important questions for most residents and city officials are 'when?' and 'how big?' "