New York Times on Cleveland

Summary: Cleveland's a crumbling disaster. They had to get a guy from Pittsburgh to try to dismantle houses in some "green" way that seems to be a flop. Clevelanders are desperate for work. The expansion industry in Cleveland involves razing the city.

Times link

From the article:

The house at 6538 Lederer was built in 1900 on a quiet back street in the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland. By the ’50s, Slavic Village, named for the immigrants who came to work in its steel mills, had grown to 70,000 residents; Cleveland was billed as “the greatest location in the nation.” Then, gradually, machines replaced men at the mills, and the laborers left.

Recently, Slavic Village has been a perpetual media symbol for the subprime mortgage fiasco, akin to what the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans became after Katrina. According to its city councilman, Tony Brancatelli, 1 of every 11 homes in the neighborhood is now empty. Many are bought and sold on eBay for as little as $5,000. Arson has been a problem, and in the two years since 6538 was boarded up, looters tore out its copper wiring and peeled off its aluminum siding as high as they could reach. A dead cat awaited Guy in an upstairs bedroom.

There are now 8,000 vacants in Cleveland. The city, ramping up condemnations, will spend $9 million demolishing 1,100 of them by the end of the year. It plans to continue at this clip indefinitely. The Cleveland Foundation, a well-endowed nonprofit, approached Guy to run a pilot study assessing the feasibility of deconstructing, or even partly deconstructing, some of those structures instead. What would end up being preserved, and what might be created in the process?

...

And yet in Cleveland the drawback of deconstruction that Guy was always trying to compensate for — that it takes two weeks and a dozen wage earners to do what a piece of hydraulic machinery accomplishes before lunch — was actually a selling point. The Cleveland Foundation was attracted to deconstruction as a way to provide jobs and job training in a county where unemployment is high and 5,000 ex-offenders surge out of prison every year. As a concept, at least, it fit nicely into the city’s effort to become a cradle for sustainable industries and green-collar jobs.

The city contributed $19,000 to Guy’s pilot project, the cost of demolishing the two condemned houses he would now deconstruct. The Cleveland Foundation agreed to cover the ultimate difference in cost. As the project got under way, the city, the foundation and its nonprofit partners were all committed to taking a close look at the results and exploring what subsidies or incentives might be put in place to stimulate a new, local industry. No one seemed to have any concrete ideas of how exactly they might go forward. But they floored Guy with their enthusiasm. He had never experienced such openness outside of famously green cities like Portland or San Francisco.

...

Among them was Robert Middlebrooks, a widower living in a foreclosed home next door. (A judge, he said, ordered him to stay when the mortgage company didn’t show up in court.) Last fall, Middlebrooks’s son, a truck driver, was shot and killed across the street. A few months later, Middlebrooks had two toes amputated after a fall. He had taken to standing at the curb in front of 6538 most mornings, holding a pair of black work gloves just in case Guy was hiring.