DEVELOPMENT-ORIENTED TRANSIT.

Clare Malone compares and contrasts two Ohio suburbs on opposite sides of the Cuyahoga River, and on opposite sides of the schism in the Party of Government.

My maternal grandparents bought the house where I grew up in 1949. They were the rare Catholics in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and they lived at the edge of the city, a few blocks away from a Jesuit college and parish. They were entering their 40s, and that they could buy in tony Shaker carried a certain cachet. The city probably wasn’t quite as excited to have them. My paternal grandfather, who was a real estate agent and lived a town over, was sometimes told by sellers in Shaker that they didn’t want their homes shown to any Catholics (like him) or Jews. The city had few black residents then. After one black couple did move to Shaker in the mid-1950s, their newly built home was firebombed in the middle of the night. That determined so much, too.

Parma, a city on the other side of the Cuyahoga River — which bisects Cleveland both geographically and transcendentally — was on the precipice of a wild population sprout in ’49. The city’s neat rows of modest houses still speak to the enthusiasm of its post-war suburban sprawl. In the course of two decades, Parma’s population grew from 30,000 to more than 100,000. It was the butt of Cleveland jokes, though. In a blue-collar part of the country, Parma was almost too blue collar — its flamingos-on-the-lawn, pierogies-in-the-kitchen reputation was so infamously parodied by a local 1960s TV personality that the mayor of Parma called the comedy “a dangerous slur to the community.”

For Cleveland suburbs, Shaker and Parma have little in common other than that, until recently, Democratic presidential candidates could count on their votes. But in 2016, Parma voted for Donald Trump, and Shaker didn’t. To Clevelanders, this split followed a certain logic. Shaker and Parma have long been of different tribes, though the same political party.

There's evidence that once upon a time, Shaker Heights was a sundown suburb.  The story is germane to Cold Spring Shops for a number of reasons.

First, the developers of Shaker Heights even built their own interurban railroad into downtown Cleveland.  That line is now a light rail line, part of Cleveland's rapid transit system, and it makes local stops, same as any other common carrier.  For all I know, it might have run express from downtown into the development (the idea of a rolling gated community predates the Congressionals, Metroliners, and Acelas, and Virgin Brightline?) or perhaps it made some stops in the east side for the domestic workers to get to their jobs, something that was the practice on the North Shore Line's Shore Line until the end.  Some of the people involved in running the Shaker Heights line thought they could transfer the concept to Milwaukee, with Waukesha and Hales Corners serving as the bedroom communities.  That didn't turn out so well, but then, neither has the ensuing congestion on the so-called freeways.

Second, where Ms Malone says "too blue collar," she's really saying "too ethnically Slavic."  Any exile from Milwaukee's South Side would understand.

Third, Parma, specifically the union hall hard by the Chevrolet plant, is the new home of the November O Scale swap meet, which sometimes pays off a hard road trip.  I can now make a weekend out of that, or take advantage of the time zone to grab chow at Tony Packo's in Toledo and still be home at a decent hour.  So I know the place, and, yes, years ago, I went joyriding on the Shaker Heights line.  Gotta get that interurban fix, no?

Here's some of last fall's haul.

Ms Malone discovers that growing up in contemporary Shaker Heights involves a wholly different milieu than growing up in contemporary Parma.  (That probably generalizes: Shorewood as opposed to New Berlin; Naperville as opposed to Tinley Park; Scarsdale as opposed to anywhere.)

Our concept of class is far too vaguely defined, and our political discussions of it too two-dimensional. Class means more than how much money you make or whether you went to college. It encompasses your understanding of racial identity — your own and that of others — and your perceptions of history, whether you look favorably or unfavorably on the country’s evolution. When we say “working-class white,” what we actually mean is a set of people whose understandings of politics is rooted in a specific set of values: those of racially homogenous communities who came up in America through middle-class jobs, often unionized ones.

These days, the upscale suburbs are still segregated by income, but (it's a Thomas Friedman sort of moment) there's a kind of cosmopolitan diversity that's both encouraging (integrated golf courses, soccer players of all creeds) and discouraging (what was that old remark about Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood being where black and white stood shoulder to shoulder against the poor?)

Shaker has spent 60 years trying to fight [its sundown suburb past.] And in the process, the city cultivated what might be called, in the parlance of 2019, a woke white demographic. The identity of the city, which once rested on being wealthy and WASP-y, turned unmistakably liberal.

But echoes of that past remain.

Most Shaker residents probably don’t like the “build the wall” chant that Trump has popularized, but they built one of their own here, years ago, a reminder that the city’s integration was done on its own particular set of terms; it wasn’t necessarily meant for everyone.

Parma's insularity might be more explicit.

“There are places I won’t go here because I know I wouldn’t be welcome,” Karyn Dukes, who is black and lives in Parma, told me recently. “There’s a bar at the end of my corner” — I’d seen the Irish bar with cinder-block half-windows when I’d driven up her street — “I’ve never been there.”

Dukes told me that she thinks twice about going into stores with Polish flags or ethnic emblems on them. “You’re scared to because of the rejection of how people will act or treat you when you’re in there,” she said. “I feel like I have to put on this air. I feel like I can’t act like myself — ‘Hi, how are you!’” She put on an exaggerated perky voice.

A couple of days earlier, I’d gone into one of those businesses to buy Polish jelly doughnuts. The place smelled like pure sugar, advertised polka dancing lessons and had a picture of Joe Biden on the wall. The woman behind the counter was lovely and insisted on giving me free doughnuts when she found out I was visiting from New York. It felt like a Cleveland hug of kindness, the kind of out-of-nowhere warmth I miss on the East Coast. Would Dukes have felt comfortable walking in, I wondered.

We'll know that assimilation is working when everybody gets to be Polish for Pączki Day.

Joe Biden plays well in Parma.  Hillary Clinton finished her Ohio campaign swing with a rap music concert in downtown Cleveland.  The Democrat establishment are currently mau-mauing Joe Biden.

The kicker, though, is toward the end of the story.

[Parma mayor Tim] DeGeeter told me that the city’s Polish Village, pączki - laden Fat Tuesday celebrations and Ukrainian parades and festivals were real selling points for Parma. Young people, he told me, were eager to move to a community with cheap housing and a cohesive sense of identity.

“People work hard, play hard, want their kids to do better than they did, want their kids to go to college at the Kent States, the Bowling Greens, and be able to afford to go on vacation to Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head,” he said. And they want their politicians to confine themselves to kitchen table issues.

Proper beer and good sausage, that might be easy to do.  Getting Bowling Green and Kent State and the rest of the Mid-American Conference to do right by their students, not so much.  Here's Richard Vedder (Economics emeritus from Ohio University, also in the Mid-American) unloading on Bowling Green.

Let us take at random a very typical American public school, Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Does that school warn students that nearly half (46%) those entering full time do not graduate in six years? Do they tell them that a large majority of students take out loans, averaging $26,000, but that nearly half of the borrowers have not paid a penny back on that debt within three years of graduation? Do they tell them that the median annual earnings 10 years after leaving Bowling Green of those getting federal assistance is barely $40,000, only slightly more than the median earnings of male workers over 25 years old with high school diplomas? (All data are from the College Scorecard of the U.S. Department of Education or the Census Bureau) Colleges need to be brutally honest, serving society rather than their narrow parochial interests. Perhaps penalties for collegiate moral transgressions need to rise.

Professor Vedder has long been a critic of universities that don't appear to do much for students' human capital.  It's an argument that's been around for a long time.  I once worked in a factory with a man who, after a hitch in the Army, started at Wisconsin - Whitewater and found it wanting, in part because people were finishing and screening as assistant managers for Kroger.

My view has always been, it's not about the entry-level job, it's about the capability to take on additional responsibilities.  When the regional comprehensives and mid-majors lose sight of the possibility that less affluent or less connected students might discover their talents in an environment that's not a woke hothouse with a U.S. News problem, it's those strivers from Parma and Springfield and Decatur and Wausau who will be hard done by.  Universities that go all-in on access-assessment-remediation-retention or on viewing first-generation, non-traditional as somehow deficiencies, or selling the party atmosphere of weeknight football perpetuate the social stratification.