I moved to Cleveland from Chicago a year ago. After not visiting my old home town for many, many months I spent the last two weekends in the Windy City: once for a wedding, and once because Beyonce refuses to acknowledge that Ohio exists.
My Chicago friends had questions about my life since I left their fair city, such as, “How much worse is it in Cleveland? Like, 100% worse or just 90% worse?” Excuse me as I draw out the differences between these two cities scientifically:
Category: People’s reactions when you tell them where you live
· Chicago – oh! Nice. I have an uncle who lives there it’s pretty cool
· Cleveland… like, the Drew Carey place? Oh. OK then.
Winner: Chicago
Category: Shelter
· I used to live in a neighborhood of Chicago called Lincoln Square. I just checked online and in this neighborhood, which is not near downtown, or close to the highway, or anywhere near the lake, a three bedroom, two bath, 1219 sq. ft, no-garage-having home is currently listed for $400K. Also, it is being sold as-is with the seller’s recommendation that you tear it down and start over because the house is in really bad shape.
· While I was in Chicago I performed in a terrific show called The Paper Machete and informed the audience of 80 people that, in Cleveland, you can purchase a decent home for $120,000. The audience gasped and then fell silent with only the slight murmur of 80 people suddenly questioning all of their life choices.
Winner: Cleveland
Category: Highly functional alcoholics
· In Chicago, they like to drink. They like to drink so much that they made Malort, which is liqueur made by taking perfectly good booze and filtering it through a fart. When you drink Malort it tastes terrible and also mugs you and gives you permanent mouth herpes. But we still drink it because: Makes you drunk and shows others that you have no weakness because Malort is currently in your body, murdering your weaknesses one by one.
· During my Chicago show, I also informed the audience that we in Ohio have drive through liquor stores. The hush that fell over the crowd was one of awe and wonder.
Winner: the waiting list for liver transplants
Category: Traffic
· In Chicago traffic is so bad that it renders the city basically uninhabitable. It’s hard to explain to people here because when you say it out loud it sounds so incredibly awful, so mind-bendingly horrible, that it makes me wonder why I ever accepted such a state of affairs as ‘normal.’ It used to take me 60 minutes to travel 18 miles to get to work in the morning, and then 82 minutes to travel that same 18 miles back to my home at night. Those are the travel times for a good day. If it was snowing, or raining, or there was a convention/sporting event/Obama in town, the traffic would become so, so much worse. Avoiding the highways didn’t even work because half of the population was doing the same thing. In order to save my sanity I joined a gym by my work and went there to work out after work most days. By the time I left the gym at 7:30PM traffic would still be bad, but at least then I could make it home in less than an hour.
· Cleveland: Your traffic is adorable.
Winner: The Land
Category: Sports
· Chicago – winning! Lots of winning! Not you Cubs, but otherwise: win!!!
· Cleveland – has not had a national championship since 1964. Seriously – it’s so bleak that some Cleveland dude just won a UFC championship and people are trying to make it count.
Winner: The Chi
Category: Free Shit
· In Chicago, only breathing and complaining about the traffic are free. Everything else has a fee. There’s a $85.97 sticker you have to buy each year so you can park on the street, the $6.50 per hour you have to pay a meter to park on the street, 9.5% tax on restaurant meals, 10.25% sales tax on all other items, and a 9% “cloud tax” on Netflix. If you want to distract yourself from how broke you are with beautiful art, it costs $20 to get into the art museum.
· In Cleveland, by comparison, everything is free. No Netflix tax! No grocery tax! If you need a parking sticker it only costs $10 funky dollars! Also, the museums are SO FREE!
Winner: Cleveland
Category: Public Schools
· Bruce Rauner, the Illinois governor, is currently trying to cut funding for Chicago public schools again because isn’t that really the problem? All these goddamn educated children tanking the state budget?
· Cleveland public schools also have budget issues plus, according to 2015 test scores, only 39% of 4th graders are reading at grade level.
Winner: the school to prison pipeline
Category: Killing Ourselves and Each Other
· In 2015 Chicago had 492 shooting deaths and 692 heroin overdose deaths.
· In 2015 Cleveland had 81 shooting deaths and 183 heroin deaths, which sounds better, but when you account for population Chicago has slightly more gun deaths while Cleveland has significantly more heroin deaths.
Winner: None of us. Not one.
Cleveland and Chicago are, in many ways, the same. Both cities have the same problems for the same reasons. Two cities on two great lakes, built because waterways allowed them to easily distribute any goods we created. So they created. They created steel, iron, oil, plastics, chemicals. They created without major competition. But then the steel belt oxidized, turned red, and began to corrode. Southern states started to attract companies due to their lower labor prices, globalization introduced even more competition. Industries collapsed, buildings were abandoned, people left. Poverty, violence, and hopelessness increased.
American economist Richard Florida believes that the key to the Rust Belt revival lies in the creative class – young, college educated individuals who can help pivot a city from an industrial-based economy to a service-based economy fueled by workers who contribute ideas instead of physically making objects. He cites San Francisco as a city benefiting from a creative class revival.
But no one wants that Google Bus $8 artisinal toast San Fran revival mess. It helps the new, young folks, the folks spending their days developing an app that delivers frittatas to your house and their nights developing a drinking problem. But it doesn’t return us to the days when jobs existed that both did not require a college degree and could easily support a family. Developing a service-based economy helps attract newcomers, but it leaves the people who stayed, who were born here and grew up here and did not leave here, to rot. Aiming for that type of revival is one of the reasons that Chicago is now shedding people – soon only those who make a ton of money or who are too poor to leave will be left, but those who can afford to move but can’t afford to stay are leaving. In 2015 Chicago saw the greatest population loss of any major city.
Chicago has more art and cultural events and young people racing to create apps, but Cleveland has what I need. I need a place to raise a family where I can afford to raise a family. I need a place where I can go to the grocery store without fighting ten people in the parking lot. I need a place where people embrace newcomers, but don’t sell them the city. Cleveland still has problems, Cleveland still needs help, and Cleveland is my home.
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2016.
Nice!!!!
Pretty well kept secret so lets keep it that way!!!!!
Not gonna snark at you this time. You picked a very worthwhile topic. Here’s my two cents, based on my observations. And I’ve had more time to form them than you have…36 years in Chicago and suburbs (born and raised, and half those years as an adult), plus 24 years in Cleveland (married, homeowner, outer edge of the city). Here goes nothing:
People’s reactions: Chicago? Oh, that’s a cool city. So much to do. But isn’t it expensive and dangerous?
Cleveland? They either shrug or look at you with pity or maybe say Oh, yeah…isn’t that the one with the burning river? (Yes, people still do that…but at least you don’t hear all that Al Capone crap about Chicago anymore).
Gimme Shelter: Chicago’s housing costs are ridiculous…it is rapidly going the way of San Francisco, Boston, and New York…but has a way to go yet to get to those levels. But they’re gaining on those towns.
Lincoln Square is an old formerly-German neighborhood with not much going for it, but it’s on a rapid transit line and makes commuting downtown easy. It’s the location, stupid. The 400 K is for the location and the land itself…forget the house. Tear-downs are big in the inner ring suburbs (think Skokie) and in smaller cities (think Minneapolis). In Cleveland, 400 K will buy you a whole street. No contest on this category. Cleveland wins.
Booze: They didn’t call Chicago that toddlin’ town for nothing. It was, after all, the home of Capone and Eliot Ness (although everything you saw on TV was Hollywood bullshit). It has had many, many 4 AM bars for decades, without the incentive of an RNC. But Cleveland is one of the drinkingest towns in America…I’ve lived in six states, and I have never lived in a place where people like to drink so much. They drink to celebrate, to forget, to ease the pain of awful winters and crappy jobs and lost loves and shit teams. Cleveland wins this one.
Traffic: You drove. You didn’t take the L. That is unfortunate. That is also s daily trip to hell and back on the worst expressways in the country, traffic-wise…probably worse than in SoCal. You have to remember that Cleveland designed and built its expressway network in a different world…when the population was twice what it is now. So traffic tie-ups are far fewer here. Also, it’s 1.5 million versus 9 million, so who do you think wins? Of course…
Sports: Bears and Bulls were crap until the Eighties and Nineties, White Sox have had one title (2005) in almost a century, Black Hawks are the best Chicago team at the moment…unless the Cubs finally…no, I won’t say it. Put that on ice (excuse the pun) until October. Cleveland –NO national championship since 1964. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Get back to me in another week on this one…and the Monsters don’t really count.
Free shit: Chicago? Little or nothing. Cleveland: Almost everything. Happy birthday CMA. Great free party! It was a real nice clambake. We had a real nice time.
Schools: Both systems suck. A tie for suckiness.
Killing Floor: Chicago (the city) is six times bigger. So the floors are more slippery with blood. And more shell casings from more guns. Cleveland has had s serious hard drug problem for a long time now. It’s a wash.
White-collar and service jobs attract newcomers, from both bigger, pricier cities and smaller, less hip ones, but many who grew up here and did not…or COULD NOT… or WOULD NOT leave here are suffering. An influx of the young, the rich,and the young rich is forcing older, poorer, non-hipster/yupster Chicagoans to the boonies or to other states. Only the rich and the truly destitute will one day be competing for a smaller and smaller pie. Those in between will be long-distant memories.
Cleveland has a long way to go before gentrification is truly a problem…but it is happening or has already happened in certain pockets, especially to the west. One can only hope that Cleveland does not follow in the path of Chicago, and that it long remains an affordable alternative to the Chicagos of the world for those just starting out in life. For without a constant transfusion of new blood, cities wither and die…just look out over the lake to those vapor trails on the horizon. Those vapor trails that come from…yeah, right! Detroit!
Chuckles the Clown
This is funny, I was just in Chicago visiting my brother (we’re Cleveland born and raised) and he lives in Lincoln Square. I love it there. Chicago is awesome and expensive but there are so many cool things there and I have faith that Cleveland is on an upswing and it’s an exciting time to be here!
“Cleveland and Chicago are, in many ways, the same. Both cities have the same problems for the same reasons. Two cities on two great lakes, built because waterways allowed them to easily distribute any goods we created. So they created. They created steel, iron, oil, plastics, chemicals. They created without major competition.”
True dat…up to a point. But they haven’t been anything close to the same since about 1950, when Chicago was still #2 in the U.S. (about 3.5 million) and Cleveland was…what…the Sixth City (just under a million, the most ever)?
Chicago fell from second to third, losing about a million in the process. Cleveland became the Incredible Shrinking City, losing half its population. It went from 6th (?) to 44th.
In the end, attempting to compare the two cities is like comparing a tennis ball with a volleyball…both are round and filled with air and designed to be hit. But neither sphere is anything like the other, especially in size and density.
Chicago (the city) has six times the population of Cleveland , and is three times the physical size, thereby making Chicago’s population density twice that of Cleveland’s. Which is a huge difference.
It is almost the same as when you try match Cleveland against Brooklyn, even though both are the same size physically…roughly 75 square miles in area. But one has seven times the population density of the other .Again, that has made all the difference.
Chuckles the Clown
I recently left Chicago after 10 years and am breathing a sigh of relief! I needed a break ya’ll. Like I was having fantasies of living in a yurt in the desert for past year before I moved.
Chicago IS amazing, but I was tired of paying a premium for living a nice, comfortable life there where I could avoid traffic and walk to work and take taxis and blahdity blah.
Cleveland may not have the cachet of NY/LA/Chi, but that’s ok. With less tourists and people schlepping in from the very large metro areas, and the lower cost of living, it makes it much easier to enjoy what the city does have to offer.
The greater Cleveland film commission is also bringing a friggin hoard of large scale hollywood films here. All needing those exact creative jobs youre speaking of. Im sure alot of us have seen the F&F set right on the shoreway, And as someone just getting into film-making, that is music to my ears and my city.
Ive lived in Various cities and done my share of scootin, like San Diego for example.. That is an umbrella laden, expensive bar on the beach.
Well, Cleveland is my scummy dive bar tucked in an alley. We have grit. We’re not pretentious. And were truthful.
Love Chicago though. Giordanos can just frigg right off with their Sorcery.
I’ve lived all over the world since I left the Cleveland suburbs at 18 for the Navy and then a business career. From Rhode Island to Florida, Virginia and Japan. Even worked in Chicago for a bit. The last few years in NJ while I work in NYC. 30+ years later..I can’t wait to get back to Cleveland. I never forgot where I am from… and I’m looking forward to going back soon. Very soon. If you never left Cleveland, you probably don’t realize what you have but take it from one who did, despite whatever problems it has, it is a very special place.
I’ve lived in Chicago almost 10 years and traffic has never been a problem for me at all. That’s because I get everywhere on public transportation…something you can’t do so well in Cleveland. Also, you save thousands upon thousands of dollars over the years by not buying, gassing up, repairing, and insuring a car.
Nobody will probably see this because this article is going on a year old. But I just have to gripe about people ragging on huge cities for their traffic problems. Chicago isn’t Los Angeles, you don’t need a car there, in fact you’re the only one to blame for your problems if you do decide to drive. People often forget that cars are the enemy of urbanism. Most problems that cities experience boils down to America’s car culture. The ease of driving a car in Cleveland that is so often cited as awesome by the sprawl crowd is a very real very devastating problem to this city. We have to fight just to get buses to be able to drive on roads where they were slated to go in the first place because the population is spread across the suburbs who are in turn able to strong arm the city. If you want to compare which city is easier and cheaper to live in a drab suburb with no culture then by all means write that article. But don’t masquerade your quest to live a quiet life in Anytown, USA as a comparison of two historically significant, culture driven, lively urban cores.
I saw it…two months after you wrote it. And unless you live in the city proper or the inner-ring suburbs, and if yo are a reverse commuter…city to suburbs and back again every day, you DO need a car in Chicago. The city may not have the awful commute times and distances that SoCal has, but it’s right up there for slow travel times and backed-up expressways. Plus, you have the winter weather, that California does not need to deal with.
Ask the man who knows. I lived in Chicago for 36 years. I could see the L from my windows. But I still needed a car when I didn’t work downtown and had to commute from the city to the suburbs or from suburb to suburb. The transit system…and I mean trains…not the awful bus rides…only works for those who need to go downtown.
After almost 25 years in Cleveland, it still amazes me how you can get from one side of town to the other in a half-hour…not in the two hours it takes you in Chicago. I wish we had more train lines, and that they were more efficient…it takes me half the time to drive downtown…the trains are slow. And if only we had the light-rail like Boston and San Francisco. But we are too big and the population isn’t dense enough. So I end up driving everywhere, and seldom wind up taking a train, and NEVER ride a bus. Sad, but true.
Chuckles the Clown
As a recent Chicago to Cleveland transplant who is missing home terribly, in more ways than I even thought possible, I have to disagree with a lot of the methods used to reach your scientific conclusions.
The lower cost of living is great, but it can be a bit deceptive. Certainly a home is less expensive, but if I were to buy in my neighborhood, I would have to try and find a place for my overnight guests to park since street parking overnight (2 to 6am) will get you a ticket. Or I guess I’d have to buy a giant piece of property and build a parking lot. Yes, it’s a bazillion dollars in savings to buy a home here and not in Chicago, but something about all the little asinine rules and regulations just irks me.
Your only metric for measuring traffic woes appears to be the amount of time it adds to your commute. Yes, it takes forever and a day to drive anywhere in Chicago. However, you can take the El and read a book all the way home, which I did for years and it was just lovely. If you do have to drive, you can reasonably expect to arrive home with your car in one piece. In the two months I’ve lived in Cleveland, I’ve seen drivers swerve in and out of lanes on busy, packed streets, never so much as a flash of a signal. I’ve seen people driving with their hazards on as if they’re 100% certain their junker will explode at any second and they just want to be sure you know. I’ve seen drivers turn right from the left lane, tearing across two right lanes of moving traffic to do so, laying on the horn all the way like, “HERE I COME!” When approaching a green traffic light, I keep my foot hovering over the brake since everyone and their mother seems to think it’s A-OK to turn in front of oncoming traffic as long as you do it really fast and you think you can make it. The other day I had to lay on my horn for what felt like an hour to alert the driver in front of me that he was in the wrong lane: he had pulled out of a gas station and into the left lane of oncoming traffic and was headed straight for me, but was too busy staring at his phone to notice. He finally looked up and swerved out of the way, only about 4-feet from my bumper. Cars in Cleveland are in bad shape: they’ve got trash bags for windows, bumpers and license plates held on with duct tape, chasms of twisted metal in the sides, gaping holes in the floors, and these are the A-holes who rip around you to cut you off going 50 in a school zone, like they haven’t yet figured out the correlation between the way they drive and the state of their trashed-out, taped-up vehicle. (Though maybe they’d notice if they weren’t too busy tossing huge handfuls of trash out of their windows onto the street.) I’m paying a fortune for car insurance here, through the same company I’ve always used, and according to the company, it’s due to the higher rate of smash-ups in this city. I balked at this at first, but now I keep a little tally in my head of all the fender benders, bumps, scrapes, and major accidents I see on my way to and from work. The lowest number I saw in one day was two. Two, in a 20-minute drive. I will say here and now that I fully predict one of these numbskulls to tear off my mirror or slam right into my driver’s side door any day now, because they’re screeching into their phone or playing Candy Crush on the road while they do risky, stupid maneuvers just to get one spot ahead of you on the road. Chicago driving sucks, sure, but at least most people are paying attention, and the cops seem to care if they’re not. (You also mention that you don’t have to fight for parking at the grocery store here, and I laughed out loud when I read that, because I went to the grocery store last week and had to park across the street in the hardware store lot because two people had smashed into each other’s cars and proceeded to scream threats at each other, so the entire lot was blocked by cop cars, smoking smashed-up cars, and onlookers.)
Oh, and, that same weekend: my neighbor pulled out of her driveway and smacked into my friend’s car, which was parked on the street. She got out, looked around for any witnesses, then hopped back in her SUV and took off.
But…traffic. Sure. Okay.
Finally, I take issue with your “creative class revival” comment, not because it’s off base to describe the Chicago hipster foodie techie scene that way, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that Cleveland is not also striving for that culture. I’ve been to so many brand new restaurants here, restaurants which are billed the same as those Chicago artisanal farm-to-table ingredient brunch places that are all over the place. The difference is that the Chicago market is pretty saturated, so to rise to the top, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. Cleveland doesn’t have a top to rise to yet, so when you go to a 5-star on Yelp taco joint and order a house margarita, you’re definitely paying $10 for a Jose Cuervo mix with bottom shelf tequila, they just throw it in a mason jar and some guy hollers “Artisanal!” I ordered lunch via a restaurant’s online ordering system the other day and then walked over to the address listed on their site to pick it up. Guess what?! It wasn’t there. It has never been there, ever, in that empty parking lot of a strip mall. I called the number on the emailed receipt and they wanted to know how I got that phone number (their corporate line), and that address? I told them it all came from their website and their email, and they still had no idea how or why these things happened. They blamed it on Google and vowed to “figure out” how to change the info on their own website. SHEESH. I would have been happy to use the phone to place my order, and to ask someone who knew where they were actually located, but they were all “Look at us, we have ONLINE ORDERING now! Please try it!” So, let’s not pretend that Cleveland isn’t aiming for that creative class revival too. It’s just failing.
Lots of things annoyed me about Chicago: the expense, the ridiculous taxes, the crowds, tourists, dibs on parking in the winter. However, Cleveland is still second rate in every way that I have found so far. The art museum is free, but it’s small and boring (there are free days in Chicago by the way, and free passes to any cultural institution can be borrowed from any branch of the Chicago Public Library, to be used any day). Cheaper doesn’t always mean better. Good services are also difficult to find here: so far I’ve been ripped off by a dog daycare, an auto detailer who wiped down my dashboard and charged me $108, and a pizza restaurant whose delivery guy dropped my pizza on the ground sideways and still tried to hand it to me at the door with the whole thing slopping out of the busted box.
Sure, Chicago’s expensive, but at least you get what you pay for. In Cleveland, you pay and you get whatever they want to give you.