1,800 jobs?
Listening to the Steelyard Commons debate yesterday on “90.3 at 9″, it occurred to me that I should post something I wrote for Cleveland Diary in March…
“1800 PERMANENT JOBS”: By now, if you live in the Cleveland media market you’ve heard it a hundred times: “Steelyard Commons would create 1,800 permanent jobs.” This is the killer argument, the reason no sane community leader should do anything that might jeopardize the project.But it doesn’t have much to do with reality.
Let’s assume that the new mall is built as projected, with five big-box stores (including an expandable Wal-Mart) and several dozen smaller spaces in adjacent strips. And let’s assume the vacancy rate is low and the stores are very successful (you’ll notice we’re doing a whole lot of assuming). And finally, let’s assume that the resulting work force is, indeed, around 1,800 people.
Does this mean we’ve “created” 1,800 new jobs? No, and here’s why: New retail floor space doesn’t create new retail jobs. Higher retail sales, i.e. more consumer spending, is what creates new jobs (sometimes). And since building a mall in the Flats will have no effect on the amount of money Cleveland-area consumers spend — only on where we spend it — it will result in little or no new job creation.
Here’s a chart of total retail employment in the Cleveland-Lorain region during the last eleven years. During this period, millions of square feet of retail space were built in Cuyahoga and Lorain Counties: the South Park mall in Strongsville, Avon Commons, Legacy Village, the Promenade in Westlake, most of the Ridge Park mall in Brooklyn, etc., etc., not to mention a half-dozen Wal-Marts, another half-dozen Targets, chain drugstores on every corner and many specialty big-boxes. So look at the resulting employment change:
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor StatisticsNot what you’d call a robust growth picture, eh?
Retail employment doesn’t grow when developers build more stores, it just moves around. This is especially true when the region’s retail space is already overbuilt, as ours is, according to the County Planning Department’s Northeast Ohio Regional Retail Analysis.
If eighteen hundred people get hired at Steelyard Commons, that will simply mean that a similar number of jobs are lost somewhere else in the area. And it’s a sure bet that many will be lost to Cleveland residents, over 15,000 of whom already work in city or suburban retail establishments.
So please, can we stop talking about “creating 1,800 jobs” in Steelyard Commons? It isn’t exactly a lie, but it’s even farther from being a meaningful truth.
Face it Bill, the Wal-Mart train has left the station. No amount of Monday moring quarterbacking ans/or grousing is gonna change that. What you should really be examining is the trail of events that led to the 127-acre site becoming the site for a big box development. “Sanctimonious” Joe Cimperman could not come across as more two-faced. He fully knew more than two years ago that the ISG site was on the market. Rather than grandstanding after the fact, a responsible politician would have initially assembled a coalition of interests that would have advocated for a reuse more in line with the 21st century economy we live in: eco or straight industrial park, research park, bio-tech park…whatever you want to call it.
But where were Cimperman’s possible allies in such an effort? The Downtown Cleveland Partnership and Greater Cleveland Partnerships, with all their high-priced talent couldn’t have cared less. WIRE-Net, with their well-renowned mission to strengthen the area’s manufacturing economy was never able, for unexplained reasons, to mount a credible campaign to advocate for an industrial re-use. CNDC made a half-hearted attempt to influence events. Problem was, several of its member CDCs were more concerned with removing obnoxious NIMBY uses from their service areas. The obvious relocation site: ISG properties adjoining the 127-acre site. I could specifically cite two businesses that either relocated there or are in the process of doing so. So much for constructing an effective coalition.
You make some good points w/respect to the net job loss/gain situation. But rather than being the tail that wags the dog, you and your supporters and the CD-related groups cited above need to rally around the issue of job creation with more deeds and less words. Talk is cheap. Taking effective action is, as our esteemed President Bush has pointed out, “hard work”. It’s time to get to work.
[...] until it isn’t and with an annual employee turn-over rate hovering near 50 percent, the 300 people who did find jobs shouldn’t feel all that [...]