Second of two parts
Joe Napoli has spent more than two decades in Toledo, but he still doesn’t understand the way people here talk about their city.
They remember what was instead of recognizing what is, and mention what we lack instead of what we have. They lead with the city’s warts before working their way to its gems.
“Growing up in New York, we would brag about the fact that the city smelled and was dirty,” joked Mr. Napoli, a Brooklyn native who is now president and general manager of the Toledo Mud Hens and Toledo Walleye.
He’s happier here than he was in New York, Chicago, or Detroit. And he’s happy to brag about Toledo, even if others won’t.
“It would be easy for us to rattle off a list of positives, leading with the quality of life you can achieve here and the relationships you can develop with your friends, family, and the people you do business with,” Mr. Napoli said.
“Put it in the proper context,” he said. “We as a community don’t do that well, and I don’t know why.”
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Toledo certainly has its problems. Real ones. Deep ones. But experts say the situation isn’t so cataclysmic that it can’t be addressed. And while there’s no easy answer when it comes to rebuilding Rust Belt economies, there is wide agreement that education is crucial.
Like many other industrial cities in the United States, Toledo has gone through a long period of change.
Though there are still thousands of men and women who earn a living in manufacturing, factory jobs are far fewer than they once were. As a result of that, the city has lost population and lost jobs. That has contributed to pockets of deep poverty and streets where crumbling and abandoned homes outnumber those with well-kept lawns and crisply painted shutters.
The first step back, experts say, is coming to terms with the fact that the city can’t build itself out of this. The manufacturing industry has changed too much.
“We can sit and wish to get the economy of the late 1960s to early 1970s back, but it’s not going to happen,” said Ned Hill, a Cleveland State University economist. “We can’t allow ourselves to be victims. It has nothing to do with NAFTA, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It has everything to do with the digitization of a modern factory. We have to set our expectations for educational achievement higher.”
U.S. factories are as productive as they’ve ever been, but they’re doing it with far fewer people. Other sectors of the economy have changed too. Mr. Hill points to retail, which he said has shifted away from using full-time employees in favor of part-time workers.
“There’s no easy answer to this. We have an oversupply of unskilled and semiskilled people relative to demand, and when you have that, wages drop,” he said.
Mr. Hill believes eventually we’ll figure out what he calls the “new blue-collar work force.” In the meantime, steps must be taken to change how people feel about entrepreneurship, risk taking, and perhaps most important, education.
Romules Durant laughs about a pair of recent visitors to Scott High School who seemed surprised to find there weren’t any kids in the halls.
“They’re not supposed to be in the hallways, they’re supposed to be in class,” the Toledo Public Schools superintendent booms.
It’s a light moment for Mr. Durant, who seems to be constantly in motion. Though he’s clearly proud of the district and the progress it has made — he wears shirts with TPS boldly embroidered on the cuffs and collars — he doesn’t downplay the district’s problems.
“We’re finding that we’re dealing with intervention,” he said in an interview at his office. “A school district, if they’re always dealing with intervention, then all they’re doing is managing the problem to some degree.”
Universal preschool
Mr. Durant strongly believes universal preschool would help TPS. A kindergarten-ready child, he says, has a better chance of doing well in the third grade, which puts that child on a path to doing better in high school, which puts that child on a path to being better prepared for college and careers.
“If you don’t invest on the front end, you get no return on the back end,” he said. “And all you're doing is paying twice as much and providing social assistance.”
A 2014 analysis by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers noted that researchers have calculated every $1 spent on early childhood education returns about $8.60. Half of that, the report said, comes from increased earnings when the children are adults.
But only about 2,000 of the 10,000 Lucas County children eligible for Head Start are enrolled. Beyond the problem of funding is convincing parents the program is worthwhile.
“You’ll find that people kind of dismiss it as if ‘they’re just kids, they’re not very verbal.’ At the end of the day, they don’t realize how essential that time-frame is to a child’s learning, and setting a foundation for academia,” Superintendent Durant said.
There are success stories — cities that have shaken themselves of the post-industrial stagnation that looms over so many factory towns.
Experts say that should be noted, but it can’t be copied. Economic success isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. Toledo isn’t Silicon Valley. It isn’t Austin. It isn’t even Pittsburgh, where the economy has diversified out of steel and into health care and education.
Own strengths
“What we hope metro areas and metro leaders think about are their own regional strengths,” said Sid Kulkarni, senior research assistant at the Brookings Institute’s metropolitan policy program.
In Toledo, that means easy access to two major U.S. highways, a Lake Erie port, proximity to a huge airport in Detroit, fertile farmland, a strong creative community, and efficient manufacturing, among other things.
Economists and policy experts say leaders need to think about how to play up and leverage those assets. Businesses need to be educated about why Toledo could work for them. Potential employees need to be educated about Toledo’s quality of life.
Despite warnings levied against trying to duplicate the successes of other cities, there may be lessons in how they addressed their problems.
Structural unemployment, said Huntington economist George Mokrzan, is not an issue unique to Toledo or even the United States. Spain, for example, has been dealing with youth unemployment levels exceeding 50 percent.
“There are fundamental problems, and it’s worth studying different countries,” Mr. Mokzran said. “It seems like some countries do a better job than others of bringing people into the work force. For example, Germany seems to do an incredibly good job with training workers [and] having bridges between the private sectors and education.”
Late last year, Mr. Durant went to Germany to see those efforts firsthand. He marveled at just how young children are guided toward specific career paths. Mr. Durant doesn’t want TPS to do that, but he does want to get kids thinking about careers earlier. The district is using a diagnostic test to assess students’ skills and suggest potential occupations based on those strengths.
“We’re going to use that as a discussion piece,” Mr. Durant said. “We’re starting with freshmen and going to work our way down to the fifth grade. Those become the discussions at parent-teacher conferences.”
The district also is working with the Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce to help connect students and parents with industry representatives.
Oklahoma river
Like Toledo, Oklahoma City has a river that cuts through its downtown. Unlike Toledo, it cost taxpayers some $54 million to put it there.
“There are communities around the country that because they want that same experience, they make them. They’re man-made. Oklahoma City has done a wonderful job with their downtown. Well, they built a river that snakes through their downtown,” Mr. Napoli said. “Here we live on a river and a lake and again, we don’t brag about it.”
The North Canadian River used to go through Oklahoma City, but a number of floods in the 1920s and 1930s made the river a nuisance that needed to be tamed. Authorities redirected the flow and widened the channel to reduce the risk of flooding. That left what amounted to a big dry ditch in the center of downtown.
A little more than 20 years ago, as part of a downtown redevelopment project, efforts began to restore the waterway and rename it the Oklahoma River. It was expensive, but successful. The New York Times reported on the project in 2008, noting that the river had help attract $700 million in new development.
Mr. Napoli’s point isn’t to compare Toledo with Oklahoma City, but to highlight how much we may be overlooking assets we take for granted, and how we fail to notice the good because we’re looking for the bad.
His sixth-floor office overlooks the city’s Warehouse District, which has gone from a virtual concrete-and-brick desert to an up-and-coming neighborhood. Fifth Third Field, the ballpark where the Mud Hens play, was the first big project there, but it has ushered in more.
“You have 70 new businesses in the Warehouse District. Payroll went from like zero to $12 million. Real estate values are up 112 percent, so all of these great numbers, and it was all organic and it was with the recession right in the middle of it. And things have picked up now again,” Mr. Napoli said.
His organization is investing $18 million around the park to develop more entertainment venues and park space. And ProMedica will spend $50 million downtown in the next couple years to relocate its headquarters along the riverfront, along with 3,000 employees.
What Toledo needs, Mr. Napoli argues, is a clearly defined downtown development plan that involves the public and private sectors.
Though he believes the city and county need to be more strategic and proactive in finding end users and reputable developers to redevelop properties they own downtown, Mr. Napoli thinks the private sector has to take the lead.
Contact Tyrel Linkhorn at tlinkhorn@theblade.com or 419-724-6134 or on Twitter @BladeAutoWriter.
First Published June 8, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
