The property next to me has been for sale for over 2 years. And after a similar fruitless wait, the owner of the house two doors up just last week pulled their house back off the market. Nothing is selling in my neighborhood. In Parma – where I took the “rent to own” and “cash at closing” photos the neighborhoods are littered with empty for-sale houses. In Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights a few houses are even being auctioned – very unusual for those suburbs. Then there’s Cleveland and East Cleveland.
So when I see the Greater Cleveland Partnership hanging self-promotion banners over the windows of the Masonic Auditorium on Chester and the Terminal Tower in Public Square, Cleveland I am alarmed:
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People, organizations, governments or whole societies may be presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information 'registers' well enough, but its implications -- cognitive, emotional or moral -- are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away. (p. 1)
From Stanley Cohen's book States of Denial (from this [1] web site)
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Today Brewed Fresh Daily [2] pickup up the Distracted Mind [3] panicked substantiation of the NY Times Maple Heights [4] real estate crash. All over NEO the real estate market is headed to the bottom of the tank – deeper to the bottom than Boston or Los Angeles or Toronto. Drive around NEO and drive around those towns as I have, and you’ll see it yourself.
So why is money being spent by the Greater Cleveland Partnership on a campaign advertising that “We’ve got it all – Together” when it is painfully clear that we are dramatically falling apart?
At the Cuyahoga County Commissioners public meetings regarding their intention to raise the sales tax, I said that the County had become so fiscally desperate that we had become delusional – believing that a concenter would be our savior. But there may be a silver lining in the tax increase.
The passage of the tax increase means another million dollars per week will be sucked out of Cuyahoga County taxpayers. This will accelerate Cuyahoga County’s fiscal submersion – with the new highest sales tax in Ohio businesses will be driven out even faster.
But the persons and businesses (including the Plain Dealer) with the $60,000 behind the Cleveland “has it all together” Banner campaign see NEO differently. Are they delusional, in denial, or willingly self deceptive? Or just propagandists?
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