Mayors Project High Hopes for a Revival Under Clinton : Cities: Rust Belt areas such as Cleveland expect President-elect to make good on promises. Fiscal realities may dash dreams.

If President-elect Bill Clinton ever doubts that his promise for a better future has raised hopes across America, even in places where expectations are notoriously low, he should talk to the people of this struggling, often-ridiculed Rust Belt city.

Led by Mayor Michael White, an outspoken Clinton supporter, Cleveland’s Democratic majority voted heavily for Clinton in the presidential election and now these voters are waiting anxiously for him to make good on his pledge to begin programs aimed at reviving the nation’s deteriorating cities.

In fact, in unguarded moments, some Clevelanders seem downright giddy over what they expect the new President to do for them.

“Bill Clinton has tapped something in me that’s made me believe again,” confided Ann Bloomberg, who oversees volunteer programs and other community activities for the mayor’s office. “I hate to sound like a sap, but there’s a real excitement here. I guess the word is hope.”

Her sentiments are shared by many city government officials in Cleveland and all across the country. At a meeting of big-city mayors in Atlanta last week, according to Mayor White, “the Democrats were unceasingly jubilant and the Republicans tried fiercely to hide their excitement.”

Cleveland is plainly emblematic of the situation that most American cities find themselves in as they anticipate the new Administration. In Boston, Newark, Baltimore, Atlanta, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago and Los Angeles as well as in Cleveland, city leaders are dusting off old proposals for federal assistance that were never funded by the Bush Administration.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors has compiled a list of 7,252 projects in cities all over the country that they hope will be funded after Clinton takes office in January. The conference estimates these projects will generate 418,000 jobs.

Louisville, Ky., Mayor Jerry Abramson says the cities see themselves as “the delivery system for President-elect Clinton to be able to provide immediate economic stimulus to create jobs.”

For Clinton, such enthusiasm is no doubt encouraging, but it also presents a dangerous political problem. No matter how sincere the President-elect’s commitment to the cities may be, there is little doubt that fiscal realities and competing demands will limit the impact he can have on urban America.

“The greatest problem the Clinton Administration faces is unrealistic expectations,” observed Dorothy B. James, a presidential scholar.

In an effort to lower expectations a bit, the President-elect is warning Americans that they should not expect “miracles” from him.

In Cleveland, high hopes for the new Administration are shared by a surprisingly diverse group of city officials, community leaders and local citizens.

Mike McDermott, who runs a city-wide housing rehabilitation program, says “there is no doubt in my mind that things are going to get better” for Cleveland under Clinton. Ben Walker, a disabled engineer who sits on the board of a local volunteer agency, views Clinton’s election as “a time for rejoicing.” And Evelyn Logan, a local Democratic ward leader, adds: “I campaigned hard for him because I believe he’s going to do things he said he was going to do for our city.”

Even members of the city’s wealthy Republican business Establishment, such as Richard Pogue, a staunch supporter of President Bush and managing partner of the law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, shares the notion that the new Administration may be good for Cleveland.

“I think most of us feel the odds are pretty good that some of the new programs will be beneficial to us,” said Pogue.

Yet while Clevelanders clearly expect Clinton to make good on his promise to beef up urban programs, they still know that all the problems of their city are not going to be solved by new federal aid alone. They insist they will be satisfied if Clinton simply brings about a change of direction in federal policy, which they think has punished the cities in recent years.

“I am a pragmatic idealist,” said White in a lengthy interview. “I know it won’t happen overnight, or even in one term. But if we could just turn the boat around and get it going in the right way . . . . We’ll never get there if we keep going the wrong way.”

Perhaps nowhere in the United States does the desire for a dramatic change in urban policy seem more palpable than in Cleveland, a city that has been the butt of jokes since the 1970s, when one mayor gained notoriety by setting his hair on fire and another mayor allowed the city to default on its debts.

Ever since, Clevelanders have been striving hard with a minimum of federal assistance to correct some of the problems that have contributed to their city’s embarrassing reputation. To that end, corporate and community leaders spent the past decade working closely together to bring about some dramatic improvements in the city.

Today, the skyline of Cleveland gleams with new buildings. Construction is under way on a new stadium and arena, and the city fathers have just completed a financing package to build what they hope will be their biggest tourist attraction: the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

“We’ve had a tremendous comeback,” says Pogue. “It’s a great time for Cleveland.”

But development of downtown has done little or nothing to cure the real, intractable problems that plague the poor neighborhoods of Cleveland: an effective unemployment rate of 50% among black males, a high school dropout rate of more than 50% and more than 40% of its people living in poverty.

“This is a tough town with a lot of problems,” observes Norman Krumholz, urban affairs professor at Cleveland State University. “The building of the downtown has been primarily beneficial to the brick-and-mortar lobby, the developers and the construction unions.”

Even highly successful neighborhood programs such as McDermott’s Cleveland Housing Network, which recently rehabilitated its 1,000th low-income dwelling, are making only a small mark on a city where businesses are folding at a frightening pace and poverty continues to rise unabated every year.

As Cleveland’s problems have grown, the federal government has seemed more remote to city officials. White, who was elected three years ago, complains he never met any top Bush Administration officials--except HUD Secretary Jack Kemp--until the 1992 election season commenced and they came seeking votes in Cleveland.

If the new President does little more than talk directly to the inner-city leaders, some disgruntled Clevelanders say, he will have given them more than they received during the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush era. “It can’t get any worse,” insisted Gail Long, who runs a community center in the city’s Tremont section.

To that end, city leaders have been encouraged by rumors that Clinton is thinking of appointing some big-city mayors such as Boston’s Raymond L. Flynn and Baltimore’s Kurt Schmoke as well as experts in urban problems to occupy key positions in the Administration.

But in the final analysis, Clevelanders are not likely to be satisfied if Clinton simply lends a sympathetic ear and makes a couple of favorable appointments. While they crave a new attitude in Washington, they also want Clinton to make good on the commitments he made in the domestic policy plan he published during his campaign, known as “Putting People First.”

During the campaign, he promised to “restore urban economic vitality” by increasing funding for urban roads, bridges and sewage treatment plants; establishing a network of community development banks to loan money to inner-city entrepreneurs; putting 100,000 more police officers on the beat, and creating urban enterprise zones to lure new business to the cities.

White notes that neither he nor any of the nation’s big-city mayors are asking Clinton to do anything that the President-elect himself has not already promised to them. Instead of drafting their own proposals to submit to Clinton, White noted, members of the U.S. Conference of Mayors have simply endorsed the programs outlined in “Putting People First.”

“If Bill Clinton put ‘Putting People First’ into a bill, we would support it and I don’t mean just support it like, ‘Dear Senator, we support it.’ I mean down there in Washington, in their face, saying, ‘gentlemen, ladies, we support this and you’ve got to do it,’ ” White said.

White is especially enthusiastic about Clinton’s pledge to abolish the current welfare system, upon which many poor Clevelanders depend. “Eradicate welfare,” the mayor says, emphatically. “Burn it up; destroy it!” In its place, the President-elect has proposed to substitute job training, child care and other reforms to enable welfare recipients to work.

The obvious shortage of federal funds to finance Clinton’s many and ambitious proposals for the cities does not seem to bother White or other Clevelanders.

“The problem in this country is not the money, it’s the will,” insisted White. “We’ve got to have the will to do things differently.”

Community leaders concur with White, saying that many urban programs could be instantly improved by changes in federal regulations that cost no money.

According to McDermott, Cleveland could rehabilitate more housing if the federal government simply dropped senseless restrictions governing the purchase of two-family dwellings. Long said the city could get more of the available funds for day care if the state matching rules were altered.

Jobs, of course, are the first item on every Clevelander’s wish list. Donna Nelson, who runs the city’s employment training programs, says there is no shortage of funds for job training, but the graduates of these programs are routinely frustrated because they find no one is hiring.

Since 1979, metropolitan Cleveland has suffered a 38% decline in manufacturing jobs, bringing the number of factory workers to its lowest level since before World War II. “There’s simply been a collapse in the blue-collar labor market,” observes George Keller of the local Council of Economic Opportunity.

Not surprisingly, Clevlanders do not agree when it comes to selecting the other promises that Clinton must keep to satisfy them. Community activists focus on programs to improve welfare, housing, health care and education. Business leaders emphasize the importance of tax incentives to stimulate economic development in the city.

It is also no surprise that the city’s business leaders, who did not support Clinton, are still leery of the long-term impact the new Administration’s policies will have on the country. As Pogue explained it, “What we’re all terrified of is the long term--that he’s going to spend us into oblivion, that nothing will be done about the deficit and that environmental controls are going to kill industry.”

In truth, while a wide range of people expect that Cleveland will receive more help from Clinton than it did from Bush, their individual expectations are strongly colored by experience, political persuasion and even by their age.

At age 50, Bloomberg admits she is longing for a Democratic leader who can inspire her the way John F. Kennedy did. “At my age,” she said, “you want some assurance the world is going to be better.”

At age 35, McDermott notes he has known nothing but Republican presidents throughout his professional career as a community leader. “I guess I am just too young to know firsthand what kind of commitment to expect from a Democratic Administration,” he said.