I caught up on my podcasts. One of the holdouts was a City Club Podcast about the Flats East Bank Wolstein Project . I have mixed feelings, but overall good-faith optimism that the development will inspire population movement to the center city. Most of that population influx will be fully tax abated (part of those mixed feelings).

In his introduction, Scott Wolstein spoke about baby boomers and echo boomers, who will form about ¾ of households in the near future. He hopes to entice those demographics and to “start to build an affluent, creative class community living in our downtown”. He goes on to say that baby boomers are empty nesters, so they don’t have to fret about the poor quality of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.

Then, he sounded quite pleased to share this nugget with the audience about echo boomers: “they demand a great education and you start to see a lot more progress . . . parents (will) follow-through the way they do in the suburbs. That will happen if you get the right people living in this town.”

So, who are the right people? I am guessing he means affluent and probably white. His generalizations about the parents who live in Cleveland and send their children to public school are an insult. Parents are demanding better education for their children. It is not living in suburbia that makes parental demand heard. Socio-economic status is the amplifier.

The main problem CMSD faces is not rotten parents who don’t know how to be suburban; it’s that CMSD is broke—a situation that certainly won’t be mended by the tax-lite development project. I found it absurd he felt entitled to speak about the school system that his development will financially forsake.