Officials react to census data on Ohio cities

Cleveland’s economic plight
is due in part to people migrating to the suburbs, one expert says.

CLEVELAND (AP) — Though no longer America’s poorest big city, Cleveland remains dead last in median income, a distinction shared by Youngstown among midsize cities.

Ohio also isn’t faring well in the category, seeing a steep decline since 1999. The remedies for the problem aren’t easy ones.

Cleveland actually had an increase in median income last year, up more than $2,400 from 2005 to $26,535, according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau this week. But it was still worst among cities with a population over 250,000.

The migration of people from Cleveland to its suburbs in Cuyahoga County — where the median income was $41,522 last year — and beyond is partly to blame, said Ned Hill, vice president for economic development at Cleveland State University.

“There really has to be product improvement by the city of Cleveland to be more attractive to people with means,” Hill said. “It means downtown housing. It means schools that will attract kids from middle-income families.”

The state’s median income, like Cleveland’s, rose more than $1,000 in 2006 to $44,532. But the state is down 10 percent in the category from 1999, a drop exceeded only by Michigan.

Changes

Hill believes state lawmakers have taken steps to attract businesses, such as revamping Ohio’s Depression-era tax code two years ago.

With the state suffering the loss of manufacturing jobs, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is focused on training people for jobs in the information technology, health care and service industries, said director Helen Jones-Kelley.

The department is working closely with the Ohio Department of Development to have a work force prepared for jobs the state is seeking to attract.

“We have several generations of workers who came into the workplace just based on their parents’ and grandparents’ line of work,” Jones-Kelley said.

Hill believes Ohio’s biggest problems aren’t in the metro areas of cities such as Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati but in Ohio’s small and midsize cities such as Youngstown, Lima and Mansfield along with the state’s Appalachian region.

“Many of those cities and towns were one-industry towns or one-corporation towns,” he said. “They’re having difficulty reloading their economic base.”

Youngstown’s situation

Youngstown’s median income was $21,850 last year, a more than 17 percent drop from 2005, according to the Census Bureau.

Cities like Youngstown are magnets for people with low incomes because of their low housing costs, said Thomas Finnerty, associate director of Youngstown State University’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies.

“We have these central cities that have become the collection sites for the poor,” he said. “We have an incredibly old population. When people retire, retirement income is less than working income. That’s a big factor, too.”

Bill D’Avignon, director of the city’s Community Development Agency, doesn’t question that the city has a low median income, but he’s skeptical of the Census Bureau’s data.

“It doesn’t make any sense. The chances are they didn’t get the right sampling,” he said. “Nothing major has happened in the past couple years that would have caused that.”

He points out that the margin of error for Youngstown’s median income was 9 percent. The margin of error for the state median income was less than 1 percent.

The Census Bureau is taking another look at the Youngstown data, a spokeswoman said.

The numbers are frustrating for a city trying to turn itself around, D’Avignon said.

“It has a negative effect on whether or not it’s a place people would want to move into. I don’t think it’s as bleak a picture as that data is painting,” he said.