On urban life Although Cleveland has made good progress in promoting residential construction downtown, there is a long way to go. At this point, the unspoken strategy of Cleveland's urban planners is to create an upscale/wealthy neighborhood in downtown. While it is a reasonable goal to attract a certain percentage of wealthy people to the city, it is unrealistic to think that such an economically homogeneous neighborhood can function and be self-sustaining in an urban setting. The effort to create a pseudo-suburb in the center of Cleveland misses the point--urban neighborhoods are qualitatively different from suburban ones. In urban neighborhoods, there are a number of economic drawbacks, including: (1) High land values drive up prices and lower the average square footage of homes (2) High land values prevent ordinary homeowners from having yards, gardens, garages (3) High land values make owning a car more expensive (4) Population density denies privacy to many city dwellers (5) Population density leads to more noise pollution (6) Population diversity threatens the homogeneity of one's social/peer group. In exchange for giving up space, urbanites are compensated with the unique aspects of an urban environment, including: (1) Proximity to one's workplace (2) A pedestrian-friendly environment (3) Diversity of population (4) Diversity of retail (5) 24-hour accessibility of services (6) Certain costs are lowered, such as transportation; additionally, city-dwellers don't pay taxes to two different municipalities (7) Population density and smaller housing spaces leads to a much-expanded "public" life; the possibility of seeing-and-being-seen alters the qualitative experience of the neighborhood. Though they speak of creating urban neighborhoods, Cleveland's urban planners have for the most part not organized their efforts around a holistic understanding of what would constitute such a neighborhood. By focusing mostly on upscale housing, they have ignored many of the other elements that constitute sustainable urban neighborhoods. If planners truly want to see an urban neighborhood downtown, Cleveland needs to direct attention towards the following goals: (1) More middle-income housing (2) Better schools (3) Improving public transportation (4) Improving security (5) Improving the parking situation.from Cool Cleveland reader Stephen Gross mrstephengross@hotmail.com (:divend:)