The borough of Delfshaven in Rotterdam was moved to action when vacant buildings were transformed into bright blight.

. . . and almost instantly, what was once an overlooked and easily ignorable area became one of the most seen places in the city.

This solution is similar to Detriot's Heidleberg Project.

What if we tried painting urban blight with bright in Cleveland? The city would look like a box of Crayolas from the vantage of Google's satellite map. Maybe tourists would come from all over to see the spectacle. Maybe Sherwin Williams could donate the paint and sponsor the guided audio tour of Slavic Village and East Cleveland. I imagine houses, apartments, warehouses and office buildings empty on the inside, but bright on the outside. Meanwhile Cleveland's homeless shelters will be bursting at their dull, dingy, unpainted seams.

HOWEVER . . .

A paint job wouldn't stop scrappers from taking copper and aluminum, rooftops from leaking, pipes from freezing, animals from nesting, squatters from squattting . . . Seems to me there should be a better solution than letting buildings and housing stock rot until they must be demolished (adding to the lost value of the home, the cost of demolition). My inner- re-user and reducer squirms that the solution for vacancy and abandonment is the bull dozer, but I am not sure that vigilante art installations and monochromatic paint-jobs are the solution. I do think that they serve to draw attention to the problem. However, I think Cleveland's problem is becoming too large to ignore.