Time to shake hands…now that you’re on your way out the door.

While traveling one of the main thoroughfares in metro Detroit, I came along this modest little billboard.

I call it modest because the one behind it and above it—of Detroit’s omnipresent powerhouse litigator Joumana Kayrouz—is a little bit bigger.

In fact, from a moderate distance, Ms. Kayrouz not only dwarfs the Target Corporation, but the tree’s branches almost completely obscure the minor billboard.

Still, for the purposes of this meditation, this Target ad is more compelling, if a lot less assertive.  Sure, it’s nothing much to look at, but, as is often the case, the context is what really matters.  The billboard says “Hello Detroit” while featuring a bunch of fruits and vegetables.  Okay—no big deal.  To some extent, it makes perfect sense; the sign stands at Eight Mile Road and Woodward Avenue, the widely-known, almost mythologized boundary between the big city and its affluent northern suburbs.

What’s so special about this billboard?  Well, it sits at the north side of Eight Mile Road, in the suburb of Ferndale.  Not the city of Detroit at all.  Here’s what you’d see if you pivot 180 degrees.

On the opposite (south) side of Eight Mile Road sits the one and only Detroit location of a Meijer, Michigan’s highly successful alternative to Walmart.  This Meijer, which only opened earlier this previous summer, represented a coup for the Motor City, since it anchors a large shopping plaza that appears so far to be successful, thereby figuratively (and possibly literally) representing a much-needed infusion of taxable commercial real estate for a city that is revenue-starved, to put it delicately.

It still baffles the senses to see a “Hello Detroit” sign precisely targeting motorists as they leave the Motor City.  More likely than not, it is implicitly greeting Detroiters arriving in this suburb, welcoming them to the bounty of shopping available in wealthy Oakland County (including many Target stores).  But a huge proportion—perhaps a majority—of the people seeing this billboard are returning to their suburban homes after a commute from the big city’s downtown.  Otherwise, it is essentially bidding salutations to true-blue Detroiters—that same population that the suburbanites have been steadfastly fleeing for sixty years.

So is it fair of me to draw blanket conclusions about the prevailing sentiment fueling America’s 14th largest metro from a single billboard?  Of course it isn’t.  Still, it easily hints at something the Target Corporation seems to speculate about its regional consumer base: that Detroiters’ identification with their beleaguered city has grown increasingly untethered from the clearly defined political boundaries.  Hundreds of thousands of commuters pass this billboard daily, returning home from work, and most probably think nothing of it.  They are figurative Detroiters, even if they’ve never hung their hats in the city limits.  Even if they live in Auburn Hills or Brighton (25 and 30 miles from the outer Detroit border, respectively), Detroit is most likely where they’d claim they’re from if they encounter someone from Boise or Bradenton.

This ostensibly split personality doesn’t distinguish Detroit.  Virtually every large metropolitan area operates under similar conditions. As an economic engine, the core city of Michigan’s largest metro may sputter as it runs on seriously diluted oil, but the psychological centrality of Detroit (or Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City) remains the primary point of reference for the majority of Americans who have never heard of Auburn Hills or Brighton.  And Detroit might not even be an oddity for the share of its metro that lives outside of the city limits: the change in US Census parameters for metro areas between 2000 and 2010 makes it difficult to cross-reference, but rough 2010 estimates indicate that about 16.5% of those living in the MSA call the city home, a rate higher than similar former industrial strongholds such as Pittsburgh and St. Louis, where 12.9% and 11.4% of the metro residents live within the core city limits.

But the world hears much, much more about Detroit’s woes these days.  And even if dozens of Rust Belt cities continue to endure declining populations and tax bases, the only ones that can claim something on par with Detroit’s staggering 25% drop from 950,000 to 710,000 between 2000 and 2010 are places like Gary, IN (21.9%), East St. Louis, IL (14.4%), Cleveland (17.1%) and Youngstown, OH (18.3%) and Detroit’s neighbor Flint (18.0%).  Nonetheless, a first-grader could still point out that all of these numbers are lower than 25.  And, to Detroit’s detriment, the percentage of 25 has its own semantic equivalent that, denotatively, sinks like a stone: “Detroit lost one quarter of its population in the last decade!” 

Truth be told, the marketing team at Target probably thought nothing of leasing this advertising space, nor did CBS, who owns the billboard.  For me to infer both an underlying motive or some broader sociopolitical implications is more an indication of my own hyperanalytical zeal than any true issues at hand.  But it’s hard to fathom that no one considered the irony of a Detroit greeting standing just a stone’s throw from the actual municipal boundary—especially considering that this city of 700,000 people does not contain a single Target, nor is there evidence that it can expect one any time soon.  I can only guess if Target’s generally very savvy marketing campaign would plop a similar billboard ad right outside the boundary of any other American city.  Or whether Meijer would dream of doing the same in Detroit.  At least Meijer voluntarily opened a new store branch—in the Motor City limits, no less.

Retail's retreat from risk.

Forgive the hiatus.  I just relocated to the city featured in this article.  Set in metro Detroit (the first, no doubt, among many), it’s straightforward enough that it doesn’t really demand a long introduction or exposition.

From the outside, this unusual shopping center looks like it’s on the fritz:

 

No signs above any of the windows; it doesn’t seem like anything is going on.  The inside—in which the building reveals itself to be little more than a strip mall with an enclosed hallway linking all the stores—isn’t really any more promising.

After all, not a single storefront along this silent hallway has a tenant.  From the looks of things, this row of shops has been vacant for quite some time.  Notice the one on the left.

The color scheme should at least hint at the logo of this formerly ubiquitous chain, but if it doesn’t, the slot to the right of the gate is a dead giveaway.

That’s right; it’s the broadly recognizable as the after-hours depository for the once-mighty Blockbuster Video.  Since this company faded to nearly nothing about four years ago, chances are strong that this storefront has sat vacant for quite some time.  A few doors down, the rustic entryway suggests the former home of a Bath and Body Works.

The hallway is silent.  But this strip mall is L-shaped, with storefronts facing both of the intersecting streets. Turn the corner within the mall, and it’s an entirely different story.

All the storefronts are occupied, and the entire shopping center looks fine—quite nice, even.

The tenant mix includes both mom-and-pops and national chains.  If the mom-and-pops were fledgling establishments, one might still be able to argue that the strip mall is declining, and eventually all the chains will leave.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.  Buddy’s Pizza has multiple locations in the Detroit area.

And Gibb’s World Wide Wines has apparently been in business for 76 years.  Down the corner from the national mid-priced chain Dress Barn is a Barnes and Noble Booksellers, serving as the apparent anchor tenant—hardly one that you’d see in a dying retail center.

Interestingly, the Dress Barn is new…to that spot.  A label scar (which I regrettably failed to capture in a photo) revealed that it previously occupied a different space in the strip mall—in the half that is now completely vacant.  The relocation is recent.

So what’s going on with one half of the strip mall?  A little knowledge about the physicality of the structure might help.  Here’s another outside view of the vacant half of the L shape:

It’s the lowest level of a parking garage, and the entire structure is connected to the St. John Hospital and Medical Center, resulting in an unconventional healthcare/shopping complex.  The name of the retail component is Pointe Plaza.  After questioning a clerk at one of the fully operating stores, I learned why one side was so vacant.  The row of vacant storefronts will allow enough consolidated space for one of the major gym/health clubs to move in, such as an LA Fitness.  I was unsuccessful in reaching Schostak Brothers, the property management company, to confirm this rumor, but it makes sense: a gym seems like an appropriate tenant for a complex that directly abuts a hospital.  Due to the gym’s size, it might serve as an additional anchor counterpart to the Barnes and Noble at the opposite end of the L shape.

But the peculiarities to Pointe Plaza extend well beyond the structure itself.  They’re political too.

This strip mall/garage/hospital sits right at the corner of Mack Avenue and Moross Road, as indicated in the map above (the small red circle is the site of the Plaza), and in the photo below, with the garage poking above the trees in the background:

Detroiters generally know this intersection as the boundary between Detroit the city and two of its suburbs: Grosse Pointe Farms, to the east of Mack Avenue, and Grosse Pointe Woods, to the north of the hospital.  In most metros, central city/suburb boundaries carry obvious significance in terms of distinctions between municipal tax burdens and ordinances, but in this case, those differences are unusually pronounced.  Detroit, as virtually everyone knows at this point, is among the most impoverished and economically challenged large cities in the country.  Meanwhile, Grosse Pointe Farms and Grosse Pointe Woods each have median household incomes of over $85,000.  I have yet to witness such an extreme juxtaposition between two municipalities anywhere in this country.  While the Detroit side of Mack Avenue in this district is in significantly better economic health than many other parts of the city, it still visibly lags far behind the affluent suburb on the opposite side of the street.

Pointe Plaza sits at the absolute easternmost vertex in Detroit city limits.  And, as the map indicates, it hugs the Detroit side of this inordinately influential boundary.  (The actual Detroit line is at Kingsville Avenue, just to the north of Pointe Plaza, which forms a three-way boundary between Detroit, Grosse Pointe Farms, and Grosse Pointe Woods.)  The proximity of the shopping center to this boundary inevitably complicates the property management agency’s ability to attract tenants, because its identity straddles sociological extremes.  One might expect that the management company would prefer a tenant mix more reflective of the affluent Grosse Points than the long-embattled Motor City, and the best way, of course, is to suppress every potential reference to Detroit.  A simple online search suggests that Google is giving Schostak Brothers, the property managers, an intrinsic advantage:

Not only does Google yield an address that incorrectly lists the facility’s address as Grosse Pointe Woods, but the thumbnail map falsely depicts the facility north of Kingsville Avenue—the boundary that would place it in Grosse Pointe Woods instead of Detroit.  The structure listed where Google Maps shows “Pointe Plaza Shopping Center” is something completely unrelated and definitely not a strip mall.  Meanwhile, Pointe Plaza’s identity online places it squarely in posh suburbia.

I decided to test this locational confusion a bit further, by asking each of the Pointe Plaza tenants a simple question: “Which city are you in?”  Of the seven tenants, only two correctly responded with Detroit.  Just to make sure I wasn’t misinterpreting the information available to me, I also rephrased my inquiry as a leading question: “Are you guys in Detroit?”  Interesting, all but one respondent conceded that yes, they were in Detroit, but most of them mentioned that they were right on the boundary with two of the Grosse Pointes.

Retail has long enjoyed a privileged status in the American commercial landscape: we always build far more facilities than there are tenants, meaning the majority of them can be incredibly picky about location.  The emergence of online shopping has only compounded the issue, because fewer goods and service providers depend upon bricks-and-mortar facilities to conduct their trades.  The fact that Pointe Plaza has avoided any stigma of sitting within the Detroit boundaries is a boon to this bankrupt city, since, for taxation purposes, the assessed value of the commercial property is undoubtedly higher than it would be if it could only attract marginal local tenants.  Only time will tell if this shopping center actually does absorb a major health club chain.  If it doesn’t, it may affirm my initial suspicions: that the vacant wing of this L-shaped strip mall has to overcome the challenge of directly looking out upon the impecunious city of Detroit.  Hopefully a revisit to Pointe Plaza in 2014 will prove me wrong.

Speed surveillance scamming spreads statewide.

I don't usually highlight topical events, and certainly not in a way that they become central to a blog post.  But in this case, I just couldn't resist--the news is too timely, and it eerily echoes a subject I've covered on this blog as well as a rewrite at New Geography: the jurisdictionally defined speed trap.  More often than not, a tiny community—a village, an impoverished town, a designated special services district endowed with a certain degree of autonomy—will harness whatever police power it has and turn it into a source of revenue.  I've explored this trend in East Cleveland, a impoverished inner-ring suburb of Ohio's largest metro, which has struggled to raise revenue after decades of watching its middle class tax base dwindle to nothing. 

Based on the placard, it would appear that entire city is hotwired with cameras and radar detectors, and that apparently is the reputation the city carries with it among locals.  Speeding carries a stiff penalty in East Cleveland, but a jurisdiction with high poverty, notorious struggles with violent crime, persistent population loss, and failing schools has few alternatives to raising revenue for city services.  Thus, it issues rampant traffic citations.  Here’s another, more permanent warning about speed limits just a few blocks away from the placard:

In most jurisdictions, school zones employ even more aggressive enforcement and result in particularly steep fines.  East Cleveland is inevitably no different.

A more subversive example featured on the same blog, is (or was) the Village of New Rome, a tiny municipality of less than a tenth of a square mile in size and less than 100 people, which Ohio's capital, Columbus, nearly surrounded.  New Rome had little to its name beyond a notorious stretch of U.S. Highway 40.  By passing an ordinance that shifted the speed limit from 45 to 35 mph years ago, the Village used this road segment within its jurisdiction as a ruthless bait to catch unsuspecting motorists.  This twilight photo, though not winning any National Geographic prizes, still conveys the ordinariness of the stretch of road that snagged so many unwitting speeders.

While speeding served as the public justification for New Rome's many, many citations, the police force would flag motorists for dirty plates, burned-out tail lights, driving too slowly, tailgating...you name it.  Eventually, many motorists had learned that they had to circumvent this stretch of the highway to avoid getting ticketed.  Further research from concerned citizens—who founded the now-defunct website New Rome Sucks to inform the community of this village's perfidy)--revealed that New Rome was funding its own government solely through traffic citations.  In 2004, the Attorney General of Ohio ruled that New Rome had displayed persistent corruption and incompetence in self-governance, and he forced the town to disincorporate, to the relief of just about everyone beyond New Rome itself.  For decades, New Rome managed to exploit its size, relative obscurity, and its jurisdiction over a major arterial to enrich its constituents throw citing motorists just passing through.

Linndale, a micro-suburb on the south side of Cleveland, suffers a similar reputation as New Rome for being a speed trap that, within its pinky-toenail boundaries, makes the most of a clipping of I-71 that passes through it.  I only covered the village peripherally in my blog post, first because I only learned of its reputation ex post facto, but also because the Supreme Court of Ohio has defended the town's right to patrol its boundaries as an appropriate use of police power--apparently the village's leaders have not indulged in the same duplicity in local governance as their Columbus counterpart.   However, Gov. John Kasich did sign a bill in late 2012 dissolving the Mayor's Court for villages with fewer than 200 residents; Linndale had 178.   Mayor's Courts are the primary means of processing and collecting fines for traffic tickets.  While this law does not inhibit the right for municipalities to enforce their speed limits, it ostensibly targets errant jurisdictions that the State feels have abused their police power.  Linndale and other municipalities aggressively appealed this decision but failed to thwart it; Assistant Ohio Attorney General Richard Coglianese and Senator Tom Patton have supported it, conceding that it clearly targets "rogue villages gone wild" through their issuance of speeding tickets.  The Assistant AG provided a telling analogy: if the entire State of Ohio issued tickets at the same rate as Linndale, state's police would have given out 531,140,644 driving citations in 2012--over 1,000 times more than it actually typically issues.  Linndale has little hope of winning the suit, and Village leaders say they will continue to handle speeding cases through Municipal Court of Parma, a much larger neighboring suburb.  But Sen. Patton, whose jurisdiction includes the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, admits that he hopes this measure forces the leadership of Linndale to reconsider its methods of collecting revenue. “This really gives law enforcement a bad name, “ Patton observed. “I've never seen a Linndale police officer trying to offer assistance to a stranded motorist or help an older lady fix a tire or write up an accident report. They're there to write tickets.”

Now, what’s the latest kerfuffle in Ohio regarding speed traps?  This time, the controversy heads south to Cincinnati, where the adjacent suburb of Elmwood Place (surrounded on three sides by Cincinnati limits) hired an outside company to install speed monitoring cameras last year, in order to record traffic violations and hand out citations to motorists passing through, largely in response to a pedestrian fatality the previous year.  Like its counterparts of Linndale and New Rome, Elmwood Place is tiny (about one-third of a square mile in size), and hugs some major arterials: though I-75 only skirts the edge of the village, two other arterials intersect in the heart of the town.  And like New Rome and the much larger East Cleveland, Elmwood Place is not prosperous: most estimates place the poverty rate of the population at well over 20%, and it lost about 20% of its inhabitants between 2000 and 2010.

Needless to say, the speed trap was an economic boon.  Within a month of installing the cameras, the Village issued 6,600 tickets—more than three times its population.  But the negative fallout was almost immediate: Facebook pages encouraging a boycott; a lawsuit issued in part by a pastor whose attendance plummeted after more than half of the parishioners received tickets on a Sunday after Mass; decreased patronage by the local businesses; increasing hardship by the already low-income population that has also received these citations; the resignation of four councilmembers and push for the Mayor to resign.  A county judge has labeled the practice as a “scam”—an initiative that fosters more ill-will toward law enforcement than it does at promoting a culture of improved road safety.  If litigation succeeds in making Elmwood Place pay back all the fines collected plus legal costs, the Village will suffer greater hardship than it ever experienced before the installation of the cameras.  Meanwhile, continued implementation of the speed monitoring may eventually kill off long-standing businesses due to diminishing patronage.

Interestingly, none of the articles regarding the Elmwood Place controversy show any awareness that this situation has reared its head in Ohio in the past—repeatedly.  Are the parties involved in litigation at Elmwood Place aware of the long-brewing trouble in Linndale and New Rome?  The national attitudes toward speed cameras or other speed traps seem bipolar.  According to the Yahoo article, even as 12 states have banned speed cameras and nine have banned red-light cameras, overall use has increased fivefold in the past decade—and is growing.  At the same time, Ohio seems to be retreating from its practice of monitoring motorists.  Aside from the Assistant AG’s clampdown on Linndale mentioned earlier, a bill passed 61-32 in late June by the Ohio House proposes to outlaw both speeding and red-light camera monitoring.  During the hearing for the bill (which showed little partisan divide), defenders of cameras argue that overwhelming evidence shows that they do improve safety.  Most law enforcement supports the cameras; so do private citizens who have lost family members to other people’s reckless driving. Meanwhile, the opponents of these cameras nearly always recalled the apparent history of moneymaking schemes; one Democratic representative evoked Elmwood Place as evidence of corruption, specifically referencing how 40% of the proceeds collected for tickets go directly to an out-of-state private company whose primary profit motive encourages it to issue as many tickets as possible.

While these scenarios might finally have reached the boiling point in Ohio to impel more statewide unity in traffic safety enforcement, the overall approach to camera monitoring is likely to remain fragmented at the national level.  One might suspect that the international controversy regarding Edward Snowden’s revelations of National Security Agency’s intensive monitoring of private citizens might provoke further backlash, but at this point no evidence suggests that state lawmakers are correlating the Snowden affair with traffic cameras.  By and large, complaints against speed traps have little to do with privacy invasions—after all, the monitoring virtually always takes pace on public ROWs—but the interest of public roadside safety may have helped spawn the proliferation of surveillance infrastructure across a variety of other settings, both public and private.  Ohio may be icing the sting from this practice a bit more vigorously than most other states, but the persistent resurfacing of this issue suggests that the real ethical questioning at a national or even global level has yet to come.

REWIND: It may take a village, but what if the village is the taker?

My latest is now posted at New Geography.  Truth be told, it’s not exactly a brand new article; I originally featured it here last December, as an exploration of municipalities (mostly in Ohio) that use speed traps as a primary means of generating revenue. Since then, I have significantly revised the final analysis, including material that focuses on the broader implications of “speed trap towns”, along with a few additional photographs.  The article that features in New Geography is slightly abridged, so here at American Dirt I have attached the full-length version seen below, which includes all the text featured on New Geography plus a bit more vigorous analysis.  The second half of this article, in particular, differs considerably from the original version that I featured here last December.

With few exceptions, the typical Metropolitan Statistical Area over 100,000 people contains at least one additional incorporated municipality beyond the core city.  The larger ones—those over half million—typically include several municipalities, while the largest MSAs may contain hundreds.  Like the variegated colors in a mosaic, the incorporated communities in an MSA often differ greatly from one another, and not just because they comprise discrete, bounded territories.  Ideally, each municipality offers a distinct approach to self-governance that directly reflects the wills of its electorates. Thus, we recognize core differences in the appearance of infrastructure between two adjacent municipalities: street signs, lighting, or even paving surfaces, let alone their financing.  I observed this in a recent blog post focusing upon a road that formed the boundary between two Cleveland suburbs.

Meanwhile, most constituents will assess the aptitude of their officials through two basic means: the election process in the short term, and maintaining a residence in the municipality over the long term, which collectively provide the incentive for a mayoral administration to perform its duties capably.  If public servants want to keep their jobs, they will carry out the will of the electorate, while a well-managed city is far more likely to retain its tax base than one that is not.

But what happens when a town’s leadership chooses an ethically or legally dubious management practice?  The suburb of East Cleveland has acquired an infelicitous reputation over the years.

It abuts the core city to its west and the north, and in terms of the physical appearance, the boundary between the two is indistinct.  A century ago, the City of Cleveland unsuccessfully attempted to annex East Cleveland on two occasions.

These days, Cleveland is unlikely to perceive its eastern neighbor as much of a catch.  East Cleveland fell on hard times during the deindustrialization that took place throughout the Cuyahoga Valley: since 1970, it has lost more than half of its population.  What was once a predominantly white suburb is now almost exclusively African American, with nearly 40% of the 2010 population falling below the poverty level.

Not surprisingly, East Cleveland’s impecunious residents and depressed real estate do not contribute a tax base by which the City can provide fundamental services.  So what does it do?

It shifts the burden to motorists by saddling them with hefty speeding tickets.  While visiting Cleveland, friends had warned me that the 2.5-mile stretch of Euclid Avenue that passes through East Cleveland was a fierce speed trap—I shouldn’t go even a few miles per hour over the limit.  Now this sign on the sidewalk confirms it.  The City probably decided to install cameras to prevent law enforcement officers from squandering time on petty infractions, especially considering East Cleveland’s high rate of violent crime. A few blocks away, an unusually large sign announces the approaching school zone, which no doubt has even more onerous speeding restrictions—and steeper fines.

At least the City of East Cleveland is candid about its method of generating revenue.  The same couldn’t be said about New Rome, outside Columbus, Ohio.  This tiny village comprised only about nine city blocks (approximately twelve acres), and even at its peak, no more than 150 people called it home; the 2000 Census estimated its population at 60.  It would probably go completely ignored if it weren’t for a four-block stretch of U.S. 40 (West Broad Street in Columbus) that fell within the corporate limits.  This twilight photo captures the essence of New Rome’s claim to U.S. 40 well enough.

And this photo in the opposite direction (looking away from Broad Street) shows the commercial/residential heart of New Rome.

Considering how hard it is to imagine that the village ever claimed more than a few houses, apartments, and small businesses, one can only marvel under how New Rome could justify its incorporation back in 1947.  But it did, and that 1000-foot segment of US 40 clearly fell within its municipal boundaries, and it was there that the speed limit dropped from 45 mph to 35.  Another trap.

The New Rome Police Department had every right to issue $90 citations to motorists going 42 mph within this speed zone.  But, according to an April 2003 issue of Car and Driver magazine, speeding tickets only accounted for about 12% of New Rome’s citations.  The remainder?  Fines for cracked or excessively tinted windshields, dirt on the license plate, chipped taillights, faulty mufflers, tailgating, and driving too slowly, among others.  Officers asked stopped motorists where they work, and failure to pay in time could result in an arrest at the workplace.  This village of a dozen ramshackle houses, three apartment buildings, and a handful of small businesses earned nearly all its revenue (nearly $400,000) from traffic tickets.  Since the village had no other real public agencies, all of this money paid for the police force—an operation that existed to fund itself and the village council.

New Rome’s speed trap earned it a far more insidious reputation than East Cleveland.  Motorists used alternate routes in order to avoid the gauntlet, traveling through residential neighborhoods unequipped to handle the traffic.  Businesses in the area acknowledged their struggles as people consciously circumvented New Rome.  A few neighbors eventually grew so frustrated that they launched the website New Rome Sucks in order to let more people voice their Tales of Woe.  Further research on the village’s operations revealed that the speed trap was just the tip of a corrupt iceberg.  Village leaders inappropriately used a 1996 federal grant intended to fight burglaries and vandalism to fund yet more traffic enforcement.  This police force at times employed as many as 14 people, almost one quarter of the 2000 population.  Furthermore, past audits revealed embezzlement by various council members, virtually all of whom were related to one another.  And the State Highway Department claimed that the Village’s sudden speed limit drop on U.S. 40 was unjustified.

At last, in 2002, a neighboring business owner, angered by New Rome’s influence, moved to an apartment building in town and successfully ran for mayor, winning with six votes against zero.  However, the council refused to recognize his victory; one member called him a carpetbagger.  This controversy attracted the attention of the Franklin County Prosecutor and Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, who determined that, after decades of incompetent management, New Rome should be abolished.  By the end of the year, Petro convinced the Ohio General Assembly to pass a law allowing the State to seek dissolution of a village under 150 people if the State Auditor found that it provided few public services and demonstrated a pattern of wrongdoing.  When New Rome officials successfully challenged the statute as contrary to the home rule provisions in the Ohio Constitution, a judge ruled in July of 2004 that, since the electorate had allowed key offices such as village council to remain vacant since 1979, the village had effectively dissolved itself.  By September of that year, the Village of New Rome was irrevocably absorbed into Prairie Township of Franklin County, Ohio.

The suburb of East Cleveland is a “Community of Strict Enforcement” that may not have high road fatalities, but city’s socioeconomics give it few other options to generate the revenue it needs.  I have no doubt that the placard on the sidewalk owes its existence to the debacle that brought about the demise of New Rome.  In most municipalities, good governance is a selling point.  However, New Rome’s malfeasance was unequivocally a reflection of the will of its constituents: they got the racket that an apparent majority of them wanted.  And eventually the village forfeited its very existence.

While human vagaries organized into a collective force could realistically allow the emergence of New Rome anywhere in the country, it is worth questioning whether that municipal incorporation structure in Ohio—and, furthermore, other Midwestern/Northeastern states—particularly abets the process.  Tiny municipalities exist everywhere.  But they seem particularly prevalent in the industrial heartland.  Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County has 57 incorporated municipalities; Columbus’ Franklin County has 25; Cincinnati’s Hamilton County has 38.  Most states to Ohio’s northeast are almost completely incorporated: William Penn mandated this characteristic in his original charter for Pennsylvania; New Jersey is 99% incorporated. It is not uncommon to find boroughs as small as New Rome in these two states; the Philadelphia suburb of Millbourne measures only .07 square miles.  Conversely, southern states are more likely to opt for either expanses of unincorporated urbanized land (which characterizes the vast New Orleans suburb of Metairie) or mega-municipalities, such as the “town” of Gilbert outside Phoenix, with a population over 200,000.

This broad-brush distinction between North and South may not yield any further conclusions, but even laypersons know these days that majorities of shrinking cities—and towns, villages, boroughs, and townships—span the Northeast and Midwest.  The home rule provision, coupled with a small population, allows for a disproportionate amount of self-actualization through legislation…for better or worse.  Cleveland’s most prosperous microsuburbs can wield it effectively to stem the erosion of their tax base; I have also noted another tiny Cleveland suburb of Linndale that transforms its stretch of I-71 into a speed zone; so far the municipality has defended its right to police the interstate under the constitution’s Home Rule Provisions.  And the affluent Bratenahl (pop. 1150), hemmed in by Lake Erie on one side and the largely impoverished City of Cleveland on the other three.  Meanwhile, just a mile from Bratenahl sits East Cleveland, in perpetual struggle.  At the very least, the Rust Belt states must carefully weigh the benefits of entitling tiny population through geographically refined control, versus the sociological and fiduciary costs of excessive density of politicization.  Otherwise, the only way many communities in a metropolitan mosaic will ever paint themselves out of the red is through surreptitious speed traps.

Buckeye boundary balderdash.

Here’s a rarity for me: plunging right into the photographs, with nary an introduction.  I don’t think it’s necessary this time.

A few months ago, I was leaving Cleveland, Ohio on Interstate 71, headed southwestward toward Columbus. 

(Yes, that VW Beetle in front of me really is missing its rear windshield, in 25 degree weather.)  While driving on the freeway, I spotted some unusual signage along the side of the road.  At one point, between mile marker 244 and 245, a sign indicated that I was leaving Cleveland city limits and entering a suburb called Brooklyn.

Nothing too remarkable there; I was crossing municipal line.  However, I only had to continue driving for a few seconds before I saw another sign.

Returning to the corporate boundaries of Cleveland.  Either Brooklyn, Ohio is that tiny of a municipality, or I just skirted the very edge of it.  It turns out neither is the case.  Another few seconds later (going slowly along the shoulder of the highway), and a new sign:

Back to Brooklyn.  But this time the duration seems to be even shorter.  The photo below shows the same sign as the above photograph, only proceeding a little bit further down I-71.

This time, the next municipal boundary sign is plainly visible, in the photo just to the right of the speed limit sign and a little further down the road.  So, standing at this point, one could lob a football from the City of Cleveland, let it soar across Brooklyn, then cross the line again only to land in the Cleveland end zone.  Put a receiver at the latest Cleveland boundary and it might make a good practice strategy for the Browns offense.  Here is the previous “Cleveland corp limit” sign, as the motorist is passing it once more.

But it’s not over. This time the duration is a bit longer, but still less than a quarter of a mile down the road, we cross into Brooklyn yet again.

That makes a whopping five municipal boundary crossings between Cleveland and Brooklyn over the course of, at most, one half of a mile.  What’s going on here?  The map below should come as no surprise:

I have circled the area featured in the above photos in blue, and the Cleveland municipal boundaries are highlighted with a dashed line and pink transparency.  As the map indicates, Cleveland in this section has what one might call a “sawtooth” boundary, and, at least at this specific stretch of I-71 (known here as the Medina Freeway), anything that is not the City of Cleveland is the City of Brooklyn.  The freeway cuts across this boundary at one of its most irregular locations, and, in order to maintain the integrity of these actual municipal limits, these signs stand at every change—with a separate set of signs on the opposite side of this wide freeway.  That makes for ten signs.

Not surprisingly, I wasn’t the first to notice this idiosyncrasy.  A friend had already pointed it out to me, before I decided to chronicle it photographically during a most recent visit.  And John Horton, a reporter for the Plain-Dealer, noticed it two years ago.  Apparently at that point, the Ohio DOT had just installed them, rectifying a decades-long oversight, because the state’s traffic manual requires the installation of a municipal marker whenever a route crosses into new incorporated boundaries.  The estimated cost for a sign is $273.63, most likely putting the total installation cost, when factoring in labor, at well over $3,000.

While I don’t know a great deal about the nuances of publicly funded signage along interstate highways, I don’t really need to.  I can tell that majority of navigational indicators along roadsides are electives; individual States decide what they would like to include.  For example, Indiana nearly always features a sign indicating the name of a road (no matter how minor) that passes either over or under a limited access highway; Ohio does not.  Conversely, Ohio usually indicates to the motorist when he or she has entered a new incorporated area, but not Indiana.

Ohio statutes mandate signage every time a limited access highway passes through a new municipality, even if the freeway provides no exit ramps for a motorist to access the municipality, as is the case in each of these segments of I-71 that pass through Brooklyn. Such an initiative casts the appropriate stewardship of taxpayer dollars into serious doubt.  Is it really necessary for motorists to know each and every time the highway traverses the Brooklyn/Cleveland boundary?  Based on Horton’s reporting, the two communities find those signs critical in determining which municipal police force will need to respond to various calls.  But a lawyer conducting thorough cross-examination would not content him or herself with that answer.  Don’t most emergency response vehicles these days have sophisticated enough GPS to render these signs obsolete?  Let the lawyer cross-examine the fictitious witness about the larger issue at hand: what impelled the two municipalities to share such an irregular border in the first place?  According to Horton, once again, the original boundary made perfect sense: a body of water called the Big Creek formed a logical demarcation.  However, during the construction of Interstate 71 in the 1960s, the State relocated the creek, allowing a clean trajectory for the new roadway…but no one bothered to reconsider or reconfigure the odd (and now inexplicable) shape of the municipal boundaries.

Over the years, I have referenced other similar instances of municipalities attaching what one might call a disproportionate amount of importance to their boundaries.  Incidentally, several situations that I have recognized have taken place in Ohio, a heavily urbanized state with a statutory culture that does not mandate incorporation (in contrast with neighboring Pennsylvania and most of the states of the northeast, which are nearly 100% incorporated).  Ohio offers such extreme contrasts between its industrialized urban centers and agrarian flatlands—the Rust Belt around Lake Erie and the Appalachia in the southeast—it apparently doesn’t take much for an agglomeration of houses to organize itself as an incorporated municipality.  Not surprisingly, a home-rule culture often pervades in municipalities both large and small, with each seeking to distinguish itself from another.  I referenced one example—also in metro Cleveland—where a single road had different speed limits, depending on which direction a motorists was traveling, due to the fact that a municipal boundary split the crown of the road across two towns, each of which passed distinct speed limit laws.

Speed limits may seem like highly fungible context from which to observe municipal megalomania, but they’re effective because they hit many people close to home.  Viewing the Cleveland/Brooklyn boundary signs again, one can notice that speed limit signs accompany a few of them.  That’s right: cars may be forced to accelerate or decelerate to accommodate shifting speed limit regulations between Cleveland and Brooklyn.  But apparently that isn’t the worst of it.  Just a half mile to the east along the Medina Freeway, motorists will confront yet another municipal boundary: entering the tiny village of Linndale.  Unfortunately, I was unable to capture the predictably unremarkable sign, but Google Streetview offers a good enough representation.  Outlined in purple, to the west of the blue circle, are the general boundaries of Linndale.

At only .08 square miles and a little over 100 people, Linndale’s most distinctive feature is the 200-yard stretch of I-71 that bisects it completely.  As a fairly recent issue of Cleveland Magazine recalls, the municipality lost half its population when the DOT tore the homes down to make room for the freeway.  Despite what most would see as an incorrigible setback, Linndale has supported itself quite comfortably over the ensuing decades.  How?  You probably guessed it already: it’s a notorious speed trap, earning approximately 80% of its $1 million municipal budget (a very generous budget for a town of its size) through citations.  The Village has aggressively and successfully defended its legal right to enforce the 60 mph speed limit of this segment of I-71 in courtrooms, using the Home Rule provisions of the Ohio constitution to justify its four full-time and ten part-time police officers.  Locals know that for the 20 seconds or so that it takes to drive through Linndale on I-71, they cannot be complacent behind the wheel.  But then—with a sigh of relief—they return to comparatively unregulated Cleveland, thanks to the greeting of yet another municipal sign.

Although Linndale currently appears to thrive, its leaders may need to read yet another of my blog articles, to serve as a caveat of what could happen if a subsequent court finds the village’s leadership is abusing its power.  East Cleveland, a much larger nearby suburb, has copious signage warning motorists using all city arterial, collector, and local roads that the consequences for speeding are steep; tickets are more or less the only way the impoverished community has of funding basic services.  Meanwhile, metro Columbus offers a scenario that could augur Linndale’s fate if it isn’t careful: the tiny village of New Rome claimed a stretch of US Highway 40 on Columbus’s near west side, which it monitored fiercely as a speed trap to the point of corruption.  State Auditor investigations provided inconclusive evidence that this village had ever even had a mayor in the last thirty years, or that it offered any real services to the constituents, aside from citing speeding vehicles passing through.  In 2004, a State judge ruled that New Rome (with a population hovering between 60 and 115) had showed persistent inability to govern itself through the transparent provision of actual city services, and the judge effectively dissolved the village into Prairie Township of Franklin County, Ohio.  New Rome no longer exists.

Municipal incorporations no doubt reinforce widely embraced American values of self-determination, but Ohio isn’t alone in revealing how the practice, when taken to an extreme, turns these fractured fiefdoms into crucibles of dysfunction.  Cuyahoga County, Ohio’s most populous county (despite decades of population loss), contains nearly 40 cities and 30 municipalities, yet only a handful of them gained population between the 2000 and 2010 Census.  (Incidentally, Linndale was among the fastest growing, leading some to speculate if the Village unreasonably enforced US Census bureau self-reporting to boost population, in order to justify its survival after the New Rome debacle.)  No individual municipality, not even the mother ship Cleveland, can necessarily claim responsibility for the post-industrial stagnancy that has afflicted the region for decades.  But piecing together 70 municipal governments calls into question whether the benefits of self-determination outweigh the costs of unnecessary, redundant public services, or internecine squabbles between two adjacent towns that cannot put their differences aside, sometimes over matters as petty as the speed limit on a shared street.

Cuyahoga County may not be flourishing if, as some have proposed, the majority of these municipalities consolidated into a significantly smaller number of city governments, as Metro Louisville did in 2003, merging the city’s borders with Jefferson County.  But the dialogue considering such a radical change is escalating in frequency and intensity, as more people voice their frustrations toward superfluous signage at the Brooklyn line…or the ridiculous speed limit enforcement in tiny Linndale, the most well-policed community in the county.  Framing the debate into an ultimatum between autonomy and efficiency results in an undeniable oversimplification of the issues at hand, but it’s no less factitious or loopy than the bizarre boundary between Brooklyn and Cleveland.