Suburban Sprawl In Cleveland Persuasive Essay

Will Krew

Professor Rosado-Ramirez

ANTHRO 101-6

2 March 2023

Argumentative Essay

Often nicknamed the factory of sadness, Cleveland, Ohio has recently struggled to retain its population. In its early years, Cleveland, a key city in the Rust Belt, experienced immense growth with the manufacturing boom of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, Cleveland’s population peaked at 900,000 residents in 1950; however, as manufacturing subsided across the United States in favor of a technological era, Cleveland’s current population has declined to below 370,000 (“Cleveland”). Although many cities with economies based around manufacturing encountered similar declines in the late twentieth century, many of these cities, such as Chicago and

Despite this population exodus, Cleveland’s metropolitan population has remained stagnant over the past decade, and has actually increased since the 1950s (“Cleveland”). Therefore, as residents of Cleveland move to the suburbs, Cleveland faces an issue of suburban sprawl in the twenty-first century. This suburban sprawl has posed problems for Cleveland, as population decline within the city limits has diminished Cleveland’s economic status, causing drastic economic inequalities, such as differences in income and opportunity, between Cleveland and its surrounding suburbs. Since attracting more residents into Cleveland brings greater economic activity into the city, identifying the key factors that continue to fuel this substantial migration away from the city will help attract former residents back to Cleveland and reduce the city’s economic disparities. Although some may argue Cleveland has sufficiently invested in its community, I argue that Cleveland’s lack of investment into economic attractions and public resources, including housing, schools, and businesses, has caused suburban sprawl and population decline, as residents search for greater opportunities in the suburbs; this has driven stark economic inequalities

Over the past twenty-five years, the value of industrial real estate decreased by $0.5 billion in Cleveland and $1.7 billion in all of Cuyahoga County; however, the value of industrial real estate actually increased by almost one billion dollars in the six adjacent counties (Bier 8). Certainly, manufacturing and the industrial sector across the United States have generally declined since manufacturing’s peak around the mid twentieth century. This general decline in the industrial industry, however, cannot explain how Cleveland’s manufacturing slump has persisted into the twenty-first century, since Cleveland’s adjacent counties have grown their industrial real estate values and, thus, their manufacturing production. Cleveland’s lack of business investment to prevent manufacturing facilities from closing has created an unstable job market pushing manufacturing jobs to the suburbs. For example, in 2011, Ford Motor Co. announced the demolition of its foundry and plant in Brook Park, an inner suburb of Cleveland, forcing hundreds of workers to relocate to a new plant in Cleveland (Schoenberger). As these layoffs and closures generate instability within Cleveland’s job market