We have to solve the property problem

If ever a city needed to get creative fast, it’s Cleveland. We need some top legal, financial and business minds to lock themselves in a conference room with proven idea people and not come out until they have a workable strategy for untangling Cleveland from the poisonous spider’s web of mass home abandonment and foreclosure described in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine story .

I’m thinking a streamlined legal process. Nimble public-private partnerships.  Mandatory jail time for nonresident property owners – be they bankers, mortgage brokers, developers or landlords – who neglect their properties and cheat  their buyers and renters. Heavy damages, too, so there’d be money for the city to repair or demolish those houses. And incentives for responsible people to buy, fix up, and live for a long time in, the salvageable homes.

This real-estate disaster is Cleveland’s Bay of Pigs, its Black Plague, its Apocalypse. And it hasn’t descended on us from out of the blue – it started a long time ago and is simply getting much worse quickly. For decades, our leaders haven’t done enough. And now, there isn’t going to be much of a city left if we don’t hurry.

So I’m not kidding: If Cleveland’s and Cuyhoga County’s political, business, law and creative leadership will do this much - select and invite the best minds from these national sectors - I’ll book the room and pay for all the pizza. Cleveland’s strangling in its own sticky mess. Let’s set it free.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Aren’t you forgetting something? I address this question not to myself - beset by gnatlike swarms of to-do items though I am – but to the greater metropolitan area in which I live.

This area, one G—-r C—d by name, these days finds itself in even more dire economic trouble than usual and so its elected and business leaders keep devising special new flies to tie to the community’s fishing lines, hoping to hook upstart fingerlings that could grow into 900-lb. tuna.  

Only a week or two ago, the latest one was announced: the North Coast Opportunities Technology Fund Pilot Program, a project partnered by NorTech (www.nortech.org) and Cuyahoga County, offering modest-to-medium, low-interest loans to small technology-based companies.     

But just like pretty much all of the various venture-capital firms, grant-giving incubators and other money resources available to start-ups here, this fund supports only companies that make technology, not companies that use technology. And, typically, only those technology-making companies that look like they’re going to turn a Google-sized profit within five years.

Does it matter to anyone in charge here that most people in most communities are employed by smaller firms? That technology-using companies also employ highly-educated and creative knowledge workers in well-paying jobs? That other companies besides biomedical enterprises have growth potential? That it would be just as dangerous to put all of G—-r C—-d’s eggs in the biotech-making basket now as it was to put them in steel a couple of generations ago? 

Where are the resources for the rest of us?  Can this region afford to ignore anybody with a bright idea and the determination to carry it out? Have we learned anything at all from the bad decisions that got us into this wretched, Third-World state of destitution in the first place? 

Will this city’s torrential brain drain continue to include people with non-technology-making ideas and creative abilities?

Some of us want answers.