It's Great To Be Home

You may remember about a year ago I wrote a letter from Boston that you guys published in which I expressed my yearning to come back to Cleveland. Well, I'm back! I just took a job as vice president of marketing and communications for Tri-C. --Michael Devlin

It’s great to be back in Cleveland. I spent almost two years living and working in Boston, often daydreaming of returning to my adopted hometown. The right opportunity came along, and here I am. It’s great to be back.

It’s great to be house hunting, walking through gorgeous $200,000 homes that would be three times that price on the East Coast. It’s great to play 18 holes of golf at the outstanding Berkshire Hills golf course in Chesterland on a glorious fall afternoon, get change from a twenty in the pro shop, and see about a dozen other golfers during the four hour round. It’s great to go to a Browns game with my buddy Ming, leaving South Euclid at noon, getting to the corner of East Ninth and St. Clair at 12:15, parking for $5 on the first level of a parking garage, walking to the stadium, and being in our seats by 12:35.

It’s great to meet friends for lunch downtown, find a parking spot right in front of a terrific restaurant like Opa on West 25th or Juniper Grill on Carnegie, get a great meal for less than ten bucks a head, and be back at your desk in less than 90 minutes. It’s great to walk University Circle, marveling for the hundredth time about how Cleveland managed to build so many important, world-class institutions, and then fuse them together into that mind-boggling cluster of cultural stimulation. It’s great to think ahead to the summer, remembering how awesome it is to hop in the car and be at Blossom in 45 minutes, buy a ticket at the gate, have a couple of glasses of the wine you brought, and drift off to sleep under the stars to the strains of Mahler or Mozart.

These are a few of the hundreds of things that make Cleveland one of the best places in America to live. They are each, without a doubt, great. But are they good? Are they like a steady diet of chocolate – a delightful indulgence today, but a dangerous, artery-clogging habit in the long term? These defining elements of the Cleveland lifestyle are why we live here, miss here, return here. But are they the things that assure Cleveland’s future, or harbingers of the end of the city’s economic vitality?

I think about something Bud Stanner, IMG’s great marketing impresario, said more than a decade ago. One of IMG’s event planners expressed concern that having the National City Triathlon and the opening of the North Coast Harbor on the same weekend might cause a traffic jam in Cleveland on a Sunday morning. Bud leaned across his huge desk, smiled and said, “Now wouldn’t that be great! It’s about time this city had enough going on to cause a downtown traffic jam on a Sunday morning.” He was onto something.

Maybe a fabulous home in a great neighborhood SHOULD cost half a million dollars. Maybe you SHOULD have to buy your Blossom tickets six months ahead of time. Maybe it SHOULD cost $30 to park in an open lot half a mile from the ballpark. Maybe meeting someone downtown SHOULD be an expensive, time-consuming hassle. All those things are true in successful, booming cities, right? That is certainly the case in the cities that Clevelanders are lured away to – Chicago, Boston, New York, D.C., etc. Expense and hassle are the necessary costs of living in a booming American city. That’s certainly the prevailing wisdom.

Well, Cleveland just has to present a different value proposition. We don’t have Boston’s absurd supply of academic powerhouses, or Chicago’s breathtaking physical presence, or New York’s pivotal role in world commerce. Nor do we have the weather of the rapidly growing McCities in the South. What we do have is our livability. Our competitive advantage IS our quality of life. And what’s more important than the quality of your life? If we are going to attract more business to Cleveland, we have to do a better job of selling this enduring competitive advantage. ‘Cause that’s what we’ve got.

Trouble is, it’s our little secret. Those of us who live here know how great Cleveland is, but no one else does. Few other city names can make people laugh. The word “Cleveland” can make people laugh. That’s not good. People in Boston used to snicker when I said I was from Cleveland. For that, they had to endure a litany of examples of things that are better in Cleveland than they are in Boston. What’s interesting is that those things are the things that really matter in people’s lives: being able to afford a home even if you don’t earn six figures; having time to play with your kids before they go to bed because you didn’t sit in traffic for two hours. Sure Faneuil Hall is cool. But so what? It has zero impact on the day-to-day lives of most Bostonians. Fenway Park? Try getting your hands on a couple of tickets!

We live in an amazing city. If you want to be reminded of that, go live somewhere else for a while. We should be grateful for the fabulous quality of life we enjoy. But in order to sustain it, we need to do a better job of telling our story. Cleveland can no longer be our secret. This is everyone’s responsibility. Team NEO. The CVB. And, most importantly, every one of us. An old boss used to say that if you don’t toot your own horn, someone else will use it as a spittoon. Are you tooting Cleveland’s horn? Do you take every opportunity to point out how great it is to live here? Did you laugh when Economist magazine ranked us America’s most livable city, or did you e-mail that news story to everyone you know? Do you really believe that Cleveland rocks?

If we are successful in attracting more talented people and growing businesses to Cleveland, we may have to share a little of that quality of life. But I’m willing to park on the fourth floor of the parking garage on game day. Are you?

from Cool Cleveland reader Michael Devlin (:divend:)