Even by the standards of struggling cities Cleveland has a particular penchant for silver bullet grifty solutions for our urban ills. This balloon launch was one of them, but not nearly the most costly or damaging. A few years ago the balloon launch inspired me to create a new metric to analyze the public-private partnerships that are the most common current way to fix everything. I started doing the math on each new project as compared to building a cash volcano in the middle of Public Square. I compare every new project to the economic development potential of spraying out the public budget of the project at a random interval averaging out to about 1000 an hour and whether that is likely to generate more outside tourism. The new stadium renovation deal could fund a cash volcano for more than 15 years and draws almost no tourism from outside the metro and only helps nearby businesses a few days a year. A giant cash volcano is the better investment. I’ve taken to structuring most of my economic development arguments based on the balloon launch.
It makes sense. Cleveland used to be part of Connecticut until surprisingly late and would be the largest city in the state if we still were.
Yes and no. We have a great food scene, tremendous cultural assets, the highest poverty rate in the country, and one of the higher homicide rates. If you have money and aren’t bothered by the weather, Cleveland is great, if not…
We have a great food scene, tremendous cultural assets, the highest poverty rate in the country, and one of the higher homicide rates. If you have money and aren’t bothered by the weather, Cleveland is great, if not…
I lived in Cleveland from 2015-2019 and I mostly agree with what you are saying. For people not in the know, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland International Film Festival are both fucking amazing and either one alone would completely justify a trip to Cleveland.
I wasn’t as impressed with the food scene as I had hoped I would be, maybe it’s because there are soooo many sandwich places in Cleveland. Seriously, I have moved around a bit as an adult, the amount of sandwich places in Cle is weird. (Melt is overrated AF, fight me)
Melt now is actively bad, not even just overrated. The first year or so it was actually great. By the time they opened the second location it had gone way downhill and each location afterwards seems to have taken it even further down that hill.
When it was new, friends visiting Lakewood always wanted to go there. I never had a decent sandwich, although everyone else raved. (Servers and bartenders think I’m invisible, and forget to bring out my orders. It’s a reverse superpower.)
I still think I make better personalized cheese sandwiches at home, tons cheaper, and with no snarly wait staff.
I see stuff like this and think about the social acceptance of terrible things we did in the past (in this case gross acts of plastic pollution) and wonder about what things we do now will be looked at with disdain decades in the future.
If I had to guess, internal combustion cars would be the top of my list. Killing the planet in the long run and killing tons of people annually (not just traffic accidents, but just standard air pollution) is probably going to be frowned on.
Not to detract too much from the buffoonery of this environmental disaster, but was anyone else particularly unsettled by the fact a male reporter felt it was appropriate to sign off his interview with a random woman by kissing her on the cheek?
That’s not a reporter, that’s Big Chuck, one half of Big Chuck and Little John, Cleveland’s longtime Saturday night movie hosts and the motivating pair behind this disaster. (@oldtaku - Little John is the small person, also definitely not a reporter.)
Mary Ellen, the woman he kissed, is one of the people that have appeared in their skits - usually wearing a babushka as “Certain Ethnic Woman” which should tell you all about how unpolitically correct the show was.
