Communities: revival and regression.
In the past three weeks, due no doubt to my increased attentiveness to such things, I’ve encountered three different ‘outside media’ mentions of my region, northeastern Ohio. Each touched upon the area’s current economic plight. The first, from the Brookings Institute’s Reflections on Regionalism, discusses Cleveland as a prime case of a large city denied any possibility of expansion by the fact that all its bordering suburbs are incorporated, and as such, cannot be annexed (to read the intro, click here). The second, from the New York Times, includes a photo of an ethanol fuel plant under construction in Ohio. The third, in Germany’s Der Spiegel, was the most surprising of all; incorporated into the title story on the U.S. mortgage crisis was a two-page profile of Cleveland as one of the hardest-hit American cities, with something like a 10% foreclosure rate.
I don’t want to catalogue the connections I myself see between these three pieces. Rather, I wonder whether anyone can cite other recent examples of national/international media coverage of development issues facing dear old Ohio.
