Production and distribution of City Club forums and ideastream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence to help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, June 7th.

And I'm Ricky Smith, the founder of the nonprofit Random Acts of Kindness Everywhere.

It's my privilege to introduce today's forum and our invited guests.

Joining us on stage, Daniel R. Kerr, assistant professor of history at American University and the author of his latest book, Derelict Paradise Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio.

This book expertly outlines the history of homelessness in Cleveland and its deep roots and shifting ground to urban labor markets.

Downtown development.

The criminal justice system.

A notion of the undeserving poor.

To name a few, Kerr carefully explains that the unhoused crisis is prodigal.

All the structures and political dynamics shaping the city rather than the illness, inadequacies, an unhoused themselves.

Since his earliest work with the Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project, Curtis sought out ways to bring oral histories.

He has collected back to communities they originated from.

The project shaped the core themes we've seen woven throughout Derelict Paradise.

Right now, Kerr is working on Mobilization Against Homelessness Project, which seeks to document, amplify the voices, perspectives and analysts of those experienced homelessness in Washington, D.C.. Today, we'll learn more about the history and current efforts to address homelessness right here in Cleveland, Ohio.

Moderating the conversation is Sam Allard, a reporter with Axios prior to Axios.

Sam spent decades at Cleveland City magazine, where we cover politics, power and various local topics.

We were coworkers for a little bit.

I'll leave that part behind what I was doing, but if you have questions for our speaker, you can text it at 3305415794.

Once again, that's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Now, members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Dan and Sam.

Well, we haven't been struck by lightning yet, Dan.

So off to a racing start in November of 2021, when Vince Gregory and I at Cleveland Scene magazine, where I worked for many decades when we were assembling the 42 best books that every Clevelander should read.

I know if you're familiar with this, I made a somewhat audacious proclamation, which was that this book, Derelict Paradise by Dan Kerr, was the single most important ti There are so many epiphanic moments throughout.

I'm quoting myself here that utterly reshape or reinforce one's conception of Cleveland and its leaders.

This masterwork will remain a vital source of reality for those who don't wish to live in the Matrix.

So I'm a bit of a superfan if you haven't gathered.

And it's a real honor to be sharing the stage with you this afternoon.

It's also, I should say, an honor to see so many family, friends, neighbors and comrades in the struggle for justice here this afternoon.

So thank you all for joining us.

The title of the program, of course, is the title of the book, which gives us a great place to start.

When I first read it, I've read it multiple times.

When I first read it, I thought I was encountering this book about homelessness.

And as Ricky alluded to, it's much, much more than that.

It's this expansive history of 20th century Cleveland.

And I'm curious maybe to start, you can kind of set the stage for us how this book went from an oral history project into this enormous undertaking that really exposes the root causes of homelessness.

Sure.

I think really I mean, honestly, the very first time I probably started thinking about the questions that informed this book were probably as a child driving down from Cleveland Heights downtown through what looked like a war zone and trying to make sense of of what really what really happened.

And so I you know, there's I could go on and on, but I'll just put that there.

But I'd say, first of all, I was in a graduate program and I was in, you know, I was required to write a dissertation in history.

And so certainly I was interested from the start and producing something of, you know, historical research and, and, but and I knew for and I'm not going to get into all that.

Why?

But I knew I wanted to write about the issue of homelessness.

And I understood that there's no way I can write that history unless I understood what homelessness was.

And I had spent quite a bit of time really since 1992 to 96.

I had been involved in various forms of activism related to homelessness.

So it wasn't like I didn't know anything, but I felt like I'd moved to Back to Cleveland.

Originally from Cleveland Heights in.

In well, when I was four I moved there, but I moved back to Cleveland in 1995 and I started a project called Cleveland Food Not Bombs.

In January of 1996.

And so we were bringing out food on a weekly basis to Cleveland Public Square.

And I was very interested in creating a city club of sorts on Cleveland Public Square, where we were sitting and we were talking to one another around food.

For us, really, the discussions around the food were were in many ways just as important as the food itself.

And we were I was hearing a lot of interesting stories.

We talked a lot about everyday things that Clevelanders talk about, about the sports and all of that.

But we also were I was starting to hear about people's personal experiences, their assessment of what's going on.

And I was also learning about the field of oral history.

And I was interested in understanding if oral history could be relevant here, in trying to understand these experiences.

And so I brought out a recorder and my misunderstanding of what oral history was at the time, or I should say have reinterpreted the field, was that it was a life history.

But what I quickly learned was that sitting down with people who were unhoused and asking them about the life history mimics the intake interview of a social service agency.

And I didn't have any resource as to offer.

I was a grad student who was basically making $1,850 a semester, approximately.

So I didn't have much to offer.

So and one at one point this guy said to me, Well, what's in it for me?

I might even tell you this.

So I decided that I was going to bring down a video camera and a TV, and then rather than me just being the one that was getting the interviews that I was going to start asking folks instead of about their life history, about what they thought the causes of homelessness were in Cleveland.

And then I set up another TV on the other side of this little section of public square with a VCR.

I found an electric outlet.

I didn't ask permission, but I just found it.

And I played those videos and so that they would know they weren't just talking to me.

They were talking to one another.

And through that process, as we started doing many of those short form interviews, we started I started taking these interviews to the drop in centers, to shelters, and we developed the themes that were critical, and that was the transformation of the downtown business district and the loss of all of the affordable housing, the room housing, the rooming houses, Skid Row hotels that had been downtown to make way for these new beautiful stadiums and whatnot to make it a playground for the wealthy.

We talked about the transformation of the neighborhoods that they had grown up in.

Many had grown up in the Hough neighborhood, Fairfax, etc., and had seen the decimation of the arson epidemic of the 1970s on the demolition that had taken place and the loss of all the housing units and the gentrification on the Near West Side that had taken place.

So we talked about that.

We talked about the rise of the criminal justice system and the expansion of the prisons and the rise of the war on drugs impact that this had on people's lives, both going in and out of prisons, but also having these criminal records that stood with them and impacted their ability and capacity to get jobs, get housing to be a kind of stigmatized labor force.

We talked about the rise of the day labor industry and how people were working and not getting paid.

They were essentially working in all kinds of the most common job of all the people I interviewed, men and women who were living in shelters and encampments was punch press operator, and they were working for Minutemen in the Maritimes and they were making less.

We calculated all the hours they were spending from the moment they arrived at the day Labor agency to the moment they came back to the amount that was in their check.

After all the fees were taken out for their transportation, it was $2 an hour.

And so folks were talking about how went from being able to get jobs that you could afford housing to these jobs that are extraordinarily exploitative.

And then we talked about the rise of oh, I should also say we talked about the criminalization of poverty itself and how part of the problem is if you want to have all these new stadiums and the convention center and being bring the business traveler to Cleveland and the shoppers downtown to shop, eat, work and play that they don't want to see extreme poverty on the streets.

And so how are we going to push that off to the side and manage that?

Right.

And so that also was about the history of policing that poverty, but also of creating the shelters.

And so the shelter was very the logic behind where 2100 Lakeside was set up is the same logic that has been used over the course of the 20th century.

And I think we're going to get to this, but was to put folks in a light warehouse district that was non resident civil, that essentially warehouse human workers that would go off to the day labor agencies during the day.

The two biggest things that people talked about and the two biggest themes they wanted to work on were on the day labor issue, which was their working lives and the degrading treatment in the shelters that they were experiencing on daily basis, which many of them wanted to stay out of the shelters.

Everybody I've talked to and this continues in Washington DC refers to the shelter as akin to the penitentiary and the prison as as an extension of the prison system.

Right.

That is a form of institutionalization for extreme poverty.

So we frequently talk about homelessness has been a product of deinstitutionalization of the asylums.

But in fact, what we've seen with the rise of homelessness is the re institutionalization of extreme poverty through these two institutions, the prisons and the shelters, which are working alongside one another to contain and control those who are experiencing various forms of poverty.

And so the shelter was located there because it was not in a residential area and it was easy to get downtown, but it was also pushing people off the streets downtown.

So how did this so the question is, where did this come from?

How did we get here?

Yeah, how so?

In other words, the direct experience of the folks who were interviewing really guided your research.

Oh, yeah.

Those were the themes that shaped the entire book, and that all came from the oral history.

Well, let.

Me ask you this.

So, everyone, you were certainly this was in the 1990s, people of all ages you were talking to, but no one was 100, 120 years old.

Why why did you choose to start back in the 1870s, 1880s?

Why start there?

Well, the earliest person I and the oldest person I interviewed had arrived in 1940s to Cleveland from Appalachia.

And he talked about the loss of the Skid Row hotels that he had spent many times.

Ralph Pack I.

Was with Ralph Packard near West Theater, believe it or not.

And so he was a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.

But what are the things I you know, obviously, if we're thinking about where do we begin?

You know, the many would say, hey, let's start with Ronald Reagan's administration, because that's really kind of where you see the reemergence of the public spectacle of homelessness in the public consciousness.

Or we could go back to Richard Nixon and talk about the rise of the war on drugs and his role in that and the policing strategies that impacted communities.

Also the Community Development BLOCK Grant Program we can talk about.

Oh, jeez, yeah, I'm sure we want to do that.

Or we can talk about urban renewal, Negro removal of the 1950s, slum clearance of the 1930s.

We could talk about the massive tent encampments and chanty towns that existed in the 1930s and the Great Depression that many of us are aware of the Hoovervilles.

But one night when I was looking at the 1930s, this is where I encountered the fact that there was this shelter called the Wayfarers Lodge that is now the city of Cleveland's Department of Taxation Building.

And that shelter sits right across like just more or less catty corner to 2100 Lakeside and says like where the hell did this thing come from?

And I kept looking back, back, back, back.

And it went, oh, it took me all the way back to 1877.

And so that's where the story begins.

Okay, great.

Well, and so the Wayfarers Lodge was to me, it helped explain kind of patterns in the future in the respect that private agencies basically took it over from from the Public Relief Department, correct?

Yeah.

So what happened in 1877?

There's this massive railroad strike all across the country.

And in Pittsburgh, there were literally burning stuff down.

They were burning.

And the industrialists in Cleveland were freaking out.

They were they were concerned that and they understood that this rebellion was being led by tramps and those people who were nobody knew anything about.

And they were like, we have no idea who these people are.

They could come down and burn down the city here.

We need to we need to get involved.

And so the very first thing they did was create a Gatling gun battery, which was to protect the streets.

And the very second thing they did was form the signed or form the scientific charity society or scientific, which led the which was the creation of the scientific charity movement.

And that to this very day, the logic of the scientific charity movement informs basically all of our homeless social service policies.

You know, if you wanted to look at continuum of care and the role that that plays at the county level, the structure of that, the logic behind that all comes from the scientific charity movement of the 1880s.

And so the idea was they this prior to that, they used the city used to give out relief directly to people in need.

And there were a series of what they called disorganized charities that were operating that usually had some sort of religious basis, but they wanted to systematize and organize.

And by they, I mean that what became it was then the Board of Trade, which became the Chamber of Commerce, the business leaders.

They wanted to organize that in order to, one, privatize relief.

They didn't want folks to feel like they were entitled to anything, that they had to prove their worthiness of receiving relief if through what became work tests, which at that time were performing at a woodlot, working at a woodlot, and that they were going to have to go to a centralized place in order to access anything which was the shelter, the wayfarers lodge and the wayfarers lodge was primary role was to essentially create records on every single individual that came in to request for service and that this is where the HMS System comes from.

But the idea was that we were going to essentially surveil this population.

We wanted to know who they were, right?

That we weren't going to be in a situation of not knowing the tramps anymore and that this would then essentially the between the work test, the privatization, the institutionalized they call this indoor charity, right?

So in order to access any kinds of relief, you would have to go into the institution of the Wayfarers Lodge.

The problem is at first they couldn't really get charities to cooperate because they didn't really have any incentive.

And you know by I think it's around the board itself of trade wasn't that organized and it was by around 1893, I think, where they formed the Chamber of Commerce.

And shortly thereafter they do what's called the community chess campaign, which later becomes the United Way.

And the idea is that they needed to control the purse strings in order to control the charities.

And so it wasn't really until about 1922 that they had fully privatized the system of relief under the Associated Charities, that the Wayfarers Lodge was kind of their central institution for determining who was worthy and who was not and where they were going to gather all this data that they were going to maximize efficiency.

They were constantly trying to police anybody who is anybody who is giving relief without outside of their system.

They hated panhandling because the idea that someone was giving someone else something or that anyone went down to share food on Public Square, that was a big problem.

So they did that.

But the problem was in the Great Depression, this whole system, they were literally saying in the Great Depression that they were going to keep this going, that Cleveland was the most efficient, the most efficient at providing relief and service that we could.

We were giving less to everybody than anyone else in this country.

And isn't this great?

And so the people rose up, you know, all across like that.

And they they knew who was they.

They referred to the Associated Charities as a spying organization.

And so and they went on protest and city hall and public square.

Am I talking too much?

Well, no, this is good.

I think maybe I'll I'll zoom out just a bit.

Okay.

I think we're aligned pretty much here in the in recognizing the delusions of local elites and the inefficacy of their plans to solve homelessness, solve poverty.

And I think one of the I mean, one of my key takeaways from the book is sort of an organizing principle that actually helped me a lot with my reporting in the 20 tens and 2020s, this idea that the prerogatives of urban development, the elite prerogatives of urban development, whether as you describe urban renewal, luxury housing, pro sports stadiums, whatever it may be, that happens in conflict with provocative for social and economic justice.

And I think that's a theme of the book that's that's really important.

But why so you're describing all this stuff back in the 1920s, almost.

I mean, as I'm hearing you talk, so much of that persists to this day.

What's what's going on?

Why aren't they getting the hint?

What's going on with these elites?

Well, why can't they understand that.

That's not the way?

Well, I mean, that's the question to ask the elites.

But I will say I will I will say that that it is remarkable.

Like we can go to 19.

There's a big recession in 1914.

And it's remarkable that one of their solutions is to promote convention activity.

Oh, yes.

And and the book itself, I kind of hinted that you were wondering why is it named like paradise?

So they as early as 1909 where they decided that they were.

Okay, let me just take one step back.

First of all, they say in 1903, they there's a thing called the group plan of 1903, and they demolish two major working class neighborhoods that are downtown.

One is called the Hamilton Avenue Segregated Vice District.

That was where there were a lot of brothels.

There was a lot of gambling dens.

That's exactly where city council is today.

And so that that was also the most integrated neighborhood probably in the city.

That's where Chinatown was.

They demolished that to make way for the city council, for the downtown mall and for what became the public auditorium.

It took them a minute till 1909 to decide, Hey, conventions out of the way.

But since 1909, I mean, I just read a couple of I think it was maybe even yesterday's paper, someone talking about how beautiful our convention center was, but that the unhoused were, you know, making it look bad.

And so but so they wanted to promote business travel, to promote Cleveland as a place to shop and buy.

Right.

And so they built the public auditorium, and then they soon decided that they needed a stadium, which they.

Just one.

Well, at the time they wanted a really big one.

They wanted the biggest one in the world, huh?

No kidding.

Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

And so the Great Depression hit and the very first public works project was to build the municipal stadium because we could build this and it would be on the cheap.

Let me stop you before you go too much further.

Can I just say one last thing?

Because this is like to me, the peak of like the peak of like how absurd and insane the business elite are.

And I think if you just think about this so this was their plan for getting out of the Great Depression there and this is from the convention bureau and come to Cleveland committee had written this in their 1930 132 annual report and they wrote that conventions stimulate local confidence and increase local buying and spending power.

They optimistically proclaimed that 1931 indicated the Depression can be minimized by this persistent convention activity, that they declare that it generates millions in profits, stimulates business, and advertise and sells Cleveland.

And so throughout the Great Depression, the business elite had determined that they were going to promote conventions, that they had a grand plan of setting up this Great Lakes Expo of 1936.

So that's all in the book you can read about.

But I see him his other question.

Well, just I mean, listen, we want to cover some few more bases.

He did mention city council.

And I'm curious about your I mean, through the nineties and early 2000, as you were doing this work, what was your relationship with the public leadership?

City leadership?

Yeah, that's a good question.

So my one of my things in doing my oral history project was to say to folks, hey, we need to talk to each other first before we go to the mayor.

Everybody wants to go to the mayor.

And first of all, the mayors is not making the decisions in this city.

In case you didn't know that.

But everyone wants to go to the mayor or the city council.

So my my point is and I'm not to tell someone what they should or shouldn't do, but my point was, let's talk to each other first.

Let's figure out what it is we're doing, what are our issues?

Let's let's get this all together.

And then we'll bring a large group of people to talk to city council.

So there are two, two times, as I said, the two things that people wanted to deal with.

So one of the things I'm doing is researching this and in part in researching this, I'm realizing actually these folks that I'm talking to right now aren't crazy for wanting to sleep outside of the shelter and for complaining about the shelter and and the employment agencies.

There's a long, deep history of tradition of this resistance to all that and that this is what they're speaking to and and really participate.

Not to say that they that this this history.

I don't think many folks are aware of.

But but that these these patterns of behavior persists to the present in terms of how one has to kind of resist in order to sustain one's own well-being.

Right.

So they wanted to fight against the degrading conditions in the shelter.

And they formed a residents association.

And at the time, the shelter was run and operated by the Salvation Army.

And so they did a petition drive to eliminate the Salvation Army from running the shelter.

And they wanted to run the shelter themselves, but they took it off.

They went to city council and there was hearing in general the city council, I guess they might have listened.

I don't know who listened, but eventually they replaced the running of the shelter, two Luther Metropolitan Ministries.

And that wasn't what the intent was of the folks that were organizing.

But I do think that there are significant improvements.

If we look at if we look at the conditions of this shelter, the other thing they wanted to do was organize around the day labor issues.

We were and I'm just going to take it quickly now.

So we were started going around and as we started hearing the stories of the abuse that people were facing at these at these labor agencies, we started going around and doing a public forum not far from here.

There was a conference, a convention for Jobs with Justice, and it was at a hotel.

And I brought a group of day laborers to present their stories there.

And then we went and sat in in a luncheon and all the people who were working those tables were working as day laborers and were were living in the shelters.

Right.

And the people who I brought knew them.

And so fortunately, that was a unionized hotel that was unionized by the hotel employee restaurant.

Hotel employee restaurant for a year right here at the time, it was local ten.

The president was Ken Elgin.

We brought him over and we're like, Hey, look, this is what's going on.

And he was he was rightfully so shocked.

And so he was very interested in the possibility that, hey, what if we what if we did something different where we created a community hiring hall, where the unions, SEIU, was interested because all of the workers who clean these stadiums that when you go those are mostly unhoused day laborers right there are sent from Minutemen.

They were interested in in figuring out how do we improve those workers conditions.

And so we had a hearing in Cleveland City Council.

Not many city council members showed up, but we did produce a report.

We also we did Dennis Kucinich was there to his credit.

He showed up and he spoke about his situation.

And that was on, I think, September 7th, 2001.

An auspicious.

And so what happened was then the hotels collapse after September 11th, the business did.

And so the hotel employee, Russian employee union was able to support.

But we did.

We worked hard with United Labor Agency to set up a community hiring hall.

We worked hard to try and get some sort of legislation to regulate the day laborer industry.

But what was then called the Greater Cleveland Growth Association.

GCP, now.

A view that as one of their one of the primary threats that they had to address, I knew that because a good friend of mine worked there.

And so we had a city council that didn't do much for a little bit.

For a short moment, Cleveland was using the community hiring hall to do the landscaping work.

But as I understand it, and this was after I left, but as I understand it, Mayor Frank Jackson's administration, over a bid of a difference of $1, gave the contract to a for profit employment agency.

But the idea was that you could, in fact, work in many different jobs, you know, inherently cleaning the Browns Stadium.

There's only eight games a year, right?

Or nine.

I don't know how many these now, but.

But there's not that many times.

But then there's also, you know, of cleaning all the other stadiums, all the different kinds of work that one these workers were working a lot, right, in different kinds of positions that they could, in fact, get living wages and benefits.

There wasn't any reason that that wasn't possible.

But just because we have this structure and I will say that the employers, they want cheap labor.

You know, they don't want kind of workers to be organized, that this is, if anything, part of the message of my book is that to make changes requires going to require organizing a struggle.

It's not going to be because we go to city council and they're like, Oh, that's a good idea.

Right.

Exactly.

I would like to.

I'd like to invite the audience to begin preparing questions.

At this point.

I'll have one or two short ones for Dan here, but then we'll be turning to you.

Of course.

So if you have questions for Dan, begin to formulate them.

Now, you mentioned just just a moment ago that people largely aren't even aware of these issues.

And you have a moment in your in your conclusion, which I think everyone should read, even if you don't read the whole book.

But you say that the structural causes of homelessness, the things that we've been talking about, have been rendered largely invisible in our society.

And in fact, you say that that invisibility has been one of the biggest and most powerful mechanisms for suppressing dissent, suppressing even conversation about it, because people don't know about it.

Feel free to elaborate.

Well, and, you know, all of our every single you know, all of our social services are built on this notion of addressing the individual cause.

Right.

And that goes way, way back.

And, you know, I in the early days, it was because folks weren't able or willing to work.

They didn't want to work, which wasn't true at all.

But that's why they had the work test to prove that the deserving or the undeserving in the 1930s they came up with the there's a new kind of way in which they understood drinking and they introduced the notion of alcoholism.

And so by the 1940s the woodlot is replaced by the AA meeting, right?

And so that really persists all the way up through at least certainly close to the present.

I think we might be an interesting moment of change right now.

I'm not sure.

But but the idea is that we have to fix the individual, the personal that that whether it be whether it be that they're morally, you know, need fixing or whether that they have kind of a medical pathology, that that's the issue.

And so when things are outside of that, it looks a little crazy.

You know, when people decide to sleep outside, you know, there's many you can go to The Plain Dealer and find important figures saying that these people are insane.

They need to understand we have a shelter, you know, but they know those people know there is a shelter, I guarantee you that.

But we never think about, hey, what about all these urban elites that are coming up with the same solution over and over again?

That has clearly not worked.

Like nobody ever thinks that's insane.

Well, well, maybe you do, but.

Thank you, Dan.

And quickly before we go to audience questions, could you explain to this audien why Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Golden State Warriors, appears in the acknowledgments of Derek Paradise, as you said.

A quick question.

Okay.

So really quickly.

I guess so.

First of all, he's my first cousin, my dad's brother's son, and so Steve used to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers, as some of you all remember.

But I think actually and as you many those of you who follow sports may know that he is very kind of vested interested in issues of gun violence, etc..

So he's definitely a person who cares a lot.

And I think but I think to understand both of our, you know, certainly both of our kind of commitments come from we really have to look at our our mutual grandparents.

And my grandmother and grandfather met in present day Turkey in the midst of the Armenian genocide.

Why there?

There is a somewhat long story but that that kind of they ended up moving to Beirut, Lebanon.

They had set up a orphanage for Armenians, children that had lost their parents in the genocide in Lebanon.

But that, you know, to me, really the kind of that understanding of those deep traumas that were part of that, you know, and then my my my cousin's father himself was assassinated as a president of American University of Beirut.

And that, of course, had a deep impact on him, but also on me as well.

So know I think that those experiences certainly shaped my own role.

You know, when I asked him and I said, hey, can you support he?

So they donated $5,000.

So from 1999 to 2004, that was the money that for all the record, the recorder that I was using, the video cameras that I was using to do that work.

So, you know.

Thank you, Steve Kerr.

Yeah, her here.

I was thinking it was a nice lighthearted question.

Folks, we're about to begin the audience Q&A for our live stream and radio audience or those just joining.

My name is Sam Allard.

I'm a reporter with Axios and moderating today's discussion, joining me is Dan Kerr, assistant professor of history at American University and author of Derelict Paradise Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio.

We are discussing the history and current efforts to address homelessness right here in Cleveland.

We welcome questions from everyone city club members, guests, students and those joining via our live stream at City Club dot org or radio broadcast at 89.7 W WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our panelists, please text 23305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

Hello.

Our first question is a text question.

It says The city of Cleveland recently announced they were testing a pilot program called the Universal Basic Employment.

It will guarantee a job paying $50,000 a year to project Clevelanders.

Do you see this being a more effective solution to reducing homelessness than, say, a sister program?

Universal, basic income?

Well, first of all, let me just say if that is true and if folks are getting jobs that pay $50,000 a year, that would be a factor, right?

I don't think any of us would disagree with that.

One of the things that one would need to be wary of is whether that is a false promise or not.

If that is true, great.

I don't I, I don't necessarily think that that has to be exclusive of a universal basic income either, because there are many folks that won't be getting those jobs from the numbers that I heard.

And so yeah, go ahead.

Pay folks 50,000 but also do the universal basic income so that everybody is able to afford a you know, at least have greater ability to afford housing, if not be able to.

Hello, everyone.

My question is in line with your statement about organizing the struggle.

Many of us in this room and on house services understand that the fastest growing population of unhoused individuals are the aging.

Also take into consideration the findings of a recent AARP report.

Livable Cuyahoga By the year 2030, for the first time in this country, the largest population will be 65 years and older.

What strategy would you suggest we do when working with urban developers to ensure that housing options are available to allow people to age in place within communities that they are familiar with?

Sure, that's I mean, first of all, I you know, I think I'm thinking of Inez Killingsworth and Eastside Organizing Project in a work that they had done in the 19, I think early late eighties, early nineties, to deal with predatory lending, predominately with elders.

But but I do think that first and foremost, folks have to gather and build community and talk these issues over and figure out how they can do this together.

Right.

That the solutions will develop out of that process.

Right.

I'm I like I said, I could go to city council and say, hey, I got a great idea.

They're not going to listen.

Right.

The developer, I think we're all aware, wants to make money and wants a profit.

That's, you know, not to say they might not come around to something as long as it makes a profit right there.

That's what the interest is.

But the people who are impacted this, they need to think and they understand what are their home, their own needs.

Right.

And come together and understand that those are the things that we organize around.

Those are the issues that bring us together.

And then we start in all of the different places that folks are grappling with these struggles.

And you start there at that very at the very base.

Right.

And then you start interlinking and seeing how your struggles are related to those who are alongside us.

Right.

Who are also facing problems accessing the means to survive.

Right.

And so that that's then where we then start linking up.

Right.

And that's then where you get 15,000 people gathered outside of a single person's home to prevent an eviction.

And that happened in the 1930s.

Right.

And that's why we have the the there were significant changes that resulted from that.

Right.

But, you know, it's never the change.

Everyone really expects or wants, but it's but it's also creates difference, improve conditions and things that are you know, we like to think that we're now things are not.

You know, I recently read the Strategic Plan for Homelessness that was came out last year.

And the idea is that these were passed problems of of think these are ongoing struggles.

Right.

I mean, I don't I think it's safe to say that if you are going around the city and you look and you see every single vacant lot used to have a home, used be a community.

People used to live there and that those were demolished.

All of those buildings that we see in Cleveland Clinic like that are brand new or or at least built since the seventies were built on a community of people.

Right.

That those were displaced communities.

So if we look at all of the cont displacements and struggles that happened, you know, just recently we understood the trailer park that was demolished and removed to beautify the lakefront.

These things are ongoing.

Right.

And so what we need to do is figure out how do we build our voices, amplify the voices, get all these folks together.

We are we're going to lose certain struggles, as we've seen.

But that doesn't mean we stop struggling.

Right.

And that's what the only way forward.

And I will say, you know, I've been going through photos.

And if you look at the devastation in particular that took place in half in Fairfax, that is a war zone.

Right.

That's why I'm chapter six here is called a bombing run.

But it lit, you know, look at those photos and then look at the images we see in Gaza and in Ukraine.

And it's not that much different.

Right.

And so I think we need to start seeing who not who we need to see our struggles as important, not as individual, not just impact their packed others.

They may not be impacting you now, but they may be coming for you later.

Right.

So we need to stick up for those who are right now in the immediate face.

We need to regroup when things happen and and we may have our losses and go out there and reorganize.

Right.

But this is the only way forward because we know for a fact that Greater Cleveland Partnership has got the ears of city council.

You know, they just passed some law or they were trying to at least I don't know if it's passed.

Yeah.

They they pass it I don't know if it's been signed by the mayor to allow for $3,000 donations to their campaign.

We know that the median income in this city is 30,000, and that means 50% of households in this city make 30,000 or less.

How many of them are giving $3,000 to a city council member who's giving that 3000?

But they have their voices.

They're going to be there and they're going to continue to be there.

But we need to make sure that we organize and and from all the different spaces, whether you're elder or whether you're coming a returning citizen, whether you're unhoused, whether you're living in a tenant or public housing, everybody needs these issues.

Impact all the folks around these different communities.

So so they're more of us than now.

I'm here with several students who are working on a capstone project that's due in a week.

So I'm going to ask you the same question that I asked them.

So you might want to pay attention if he's got a good answer.

If not, ignore them.

But so the we're we're looking at the the North Shore Harbor Project, which I.

Are you aware of that project?

I am not aware of the specifics of it, but it sounds like I can gather what it's about.

It's it'd be built building a land bridge that would be meant to sort of beautify the downtown area and make a connection between Public Square and the stadium.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

I have a shore, two core, two shores, that part.

Of the North Shore Harbor Connector project.

But so the question we ask them for this project they're working on is how could a project like the North Shore Harbor be used to uplift communities of Cleveland and or support underrepresented, underrepresented and disenfranchized members of our community.

Well, good luck.

The way it's framed, I think, is a very maybe difficult, if not impossible question to answer, because it assumes that there is a way.

Let me just say this.

That very same area was the place where the largest chanty town in the Great Depression existed right.

That was the place they wanted to get rid of, to clear that out, to make it pretty for the Great Lakes Expo.

The very same location where I'm assuming we're talking about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Science Museum, etc., all that.

That's where that Chanty Town was.

Now, on that chanty town, folks had, you know, they had no jobs.

There were like thousand people living there.

And they were basically had gardens.

They had built their chanties.

They'd use their own labor to build a community there that would allow them to survive without any money.

Right.

And so they were fishing.

They were it was like a subsistence economy.

The city officials, of course, didn't like that because this was next to their new stadium they wanted.

And so what they did was they used the public dollars that were coming in first from the Civil Works Administration, then through the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal to pay the shantytown dwellers to clear the chanties.

So the work.

Think about this.

Who's actually doing this work to build the vision for the business, to leave this kind of utopian vision, which is is, I warn you, is deranged, is pathological.

You know, this vision of we're going to make downtown look real pretty.

They've been talking about this since 19 1899.

Right.

How has that has helped us much?

Has that helped the communities and the on the Near East Side?

Not at all led to the clearance for the creation of the Cedar since when they first built Cedar Central.

They designed that and built that thinking that would be white, white collar workers.

It was originally racially segregated.

The first tenants of Cedar Central were all white and their goal was that this was going to become like the luxury condominiums that we talk about downtown to bring, you know, the office workers to downtown.

You keep talking about the council, but we also have a mayor and the mayor's leader.

And he seems to have concentrated on downtown.

You're talking about this short core nonsense, like taking all the taxes from most of the downtown and get rich it throwing it into the lakeside and the riverside for two billionaires.

We've got three billionaire owners of sports teams here.

They all want either improvements or use the new stadium, which the house has.

It's insane.

Beyond insane.

But no one seems to be bothered by much.

And certainly there's no one in the newspapers that are taking us or what is silly news on television, which is how can you make it?

How can we be more smiley and laughing?

It's just so incredibly out of, as you say, insane.

Hi, my name is Daniel.

Across Time with Danny Rising and we serve single moms and veterans rising out of homelessness by renovating houses so that they have somewhere to go when they are ready.

And my question for you is, first of all, sir, I appreciate that you keep it very real.

And I think.

My biggest question is that, you know, as we were discussing where these policies and all of these restrictions come from, and we we talk about, you know, the business elite and, you know, how we wish that they had more awareness or were more in touch.

You know, we're in this room full of people that serve the homeless and have a passion for the homeless.

And so, you know, obviously, I guess we might be kind of preaching to the choir.

How do we reach the business elite?

You said there's more of us then of them, and that is absolutely accurate.

But how is there any way to gain access to the business elite?

As you said, it's not the mayor that has the power and makes these decisions.

And so as just a normal kind of class person and nonprofit president.

Like how how do you suggest we access the business elite and say, wake up, you know, this is the reality.

And so I we as we're talking about the business elite, I'm like, how do you even get to the three billionaires guys?

Are you okay?

So I will just say really quickly, if you start going with large numbers of people to city council making demands that will get the business elites attention.

I do.

So I don't necessarily think that's not a place of struggle.

Right.

But, you know, we know and we do know that we have to form some level of kind of autonomy from not being dependent on grant funding for these kinds of struggles.

Because we know that this city and various and we've got many kind of records that people will say, if you start speaking up too much, we're going to pull your funding.

We will not fund you to come to city council and complain about the way things are, because we'll do that to the business elite.

That's fine.

As long as they give me my $3,000 campaign donation.

But fine.

Yeah, but yeah.

Go for it.

Oh, no.

Anyway, Dan.

Kerr, Sam Elliott.

I hate to cut it off here, but the good news is we do have this book on sale in the.

Comments, and if you want to continue this conversation, it's best to do so with the book in his hand as he signs them in our library.

So I hope to see you in the comments.

I was in the economy director of programing here at the City Club and forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club dot org.

Today's forum is part of the City Club's Authors In Conversation series, with support from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

We would also like to thank the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless for their partnership to make today's forum possible.

We would like welcome our students.

Joining us from M.C.

Squared some high school as well as guests at the tables hosted by Church of the Redeemer, UMC, Community, West Foundation, Liberty Home Mortgage, Luther Metropolitan Ministry.

M.C.

Oh.

M.S.

scored some high school again.

Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless.

We love our students and the Northeast Ohio Worker Center, the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland.

Thank you so much for being here.

You can learn more about our upcoming forms at City Club dot org.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Sam and Dan and to all of you.

Have a great weekend.

This forum is now adjourned.

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