'not Everyone Can Move To Southern California, You Know'

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"Kucinich must have cost this city untold jobs," Smith says, "because guys like me would listen to him and say, 'I've got to get out of here. This guy is going to kill us.' But I couldn't move. I'd put everything I could into making this a good building. Other people around here were in the same situation. They couldn't leave either. I thought, If we're going to protect our investment, we've got to do something. We need some allies in the city. I had an investment here that was larger than my house, and yet they said I didn't belong in the city. They said I didn't have any rights here."

So Smith visited his business neighbor, Sam Alesci, a sprightly, elfin Italian who had built a neighborhood grocery store into a company employing nearly 100 people. His bakery and commissary, both situated within two blocks of Smith's painting plant, supply pasta, pizza, cakes, cookies, sausages, and salads to his own retail stores and to supermarkets and specialty stores across the Northeast.

Alesci and Smith called a meeting. They met a lot of business owners with many of the same fears and frustrations they had -- neighbors, but strangers nonetheless.

The Southeast Improvement Association, as they now call themselves, contacted the local city councilman, a young man named Earle Turner. Turner gave them a sympathetic hearing, so they helped him raise a little campaign money. Now when Sam Alesci, Austin Smith, or someone else from the SIA calls, Turner knows who they are.

Turner took them downtown to the City's community planning department. He told the city officials that these people were providing jobs in his district and that he would appreciate any help the city could give them. Now the city officials know who Alesci, Smith, and the SIA are, and their neighborhood gets a little special attention from downtown.

An SIA member heard that residents were interested in starting an auxiliary police force, so the organization budgeted $500 to help them buy walkie-talkies. Now the regular cops and the neighborhood auxiliaries also know something about the SIA and its members.

A nonprofit development corporation that buys, renovates, and resells houses in the neighborhood didn't know about the SIA, and the SIA didn't know about them until a city planning official introduced them to each other. Now SIA members help market the refurbished houses to their employees.

All of this costs Smith and his colleagues a little time -- there is a monthly session of the board and sometimes a meeting downtown or with a local group -- and a little money. Dues and contributions to the SIA and occasional pass-the-hat collections -- at Christmas, for example -- add up to several hundred dollars a year.

"We try," Smith says, "to make the councilman look good. We try to make the planning department and the ministers look good. They look good, and we benefit. I'm not a civic booster. I'm just a small businessman who plans to work here and survive here."

"I hire people from the neighborhood for two reasons," Alesci says. "They live here. If my building's burning, they can see it. They've got a stake in it. They're also the first ones that could be a source of problems, you know. What we're doing may sound selfish, but it's good for everybody, too."

The fact is that Smith, Alesci, Young, and others in cities like Cleveland have relatively few options. Because their businesses are no more portable than an Iowa corn farm, they have to make the most of where they are. So, they have become pragmatists, willing to invest money and time in projects and causes in which the paybacks are frequently delayed and indirect but tangible nonetheless.

But they are also pragmatists on the other side of the equation. If they can get some help, they will take it. "Thank God for the [Community Development Block Grant] program," Young says. "If it hadn't come along we couldn't have done it. You can cuss federal spending all you want -- I'm as conservative as the next fellow -- but we saved a neighborhood where 40,000 people live. That's got to be worth something."

One of Alesci's industrial neighbors in southeast Cleveland is Gerald Lancaster, whose gray flattop haircut stands at stiff attention. He is a good Reagan Republican. If you work for Lancaster and go to college part-time, he will pay half your tuition -- a fine example of what people in Washington would call private-sector initiative. But Lancaster doesn't blanch at the idea of accepting some help himself.

His company, which manufactures specialty chemicals for industry and performs environmental testing, outgrew its plant in a particularly mean area of the city. He couldn't afford a shiny new plant in the suburbs, so he moved one block west. He got a federal loan at lower than market rate through the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program, another loan guaranteed by the Small Business Administration, and a small relocation grant from the city government.

"The bottom line of any UDAG assistance," Lancaster says, "is to do something for the community. We had a payroll of 18 or 19. Within two years we had grown to 42. I think that more than compensated for any help we got. Here's something I put blood and tears into for years, and I saw a chance to make it big. The only option open to us was UDAG. So I took the help. So did Chrysler."

Leo and Brad Demsey, father and son, employ 25 people nearby, and maintain a no-layoff policy. Recently they used a federally subsidized $2 million industrial revenue bond (IRB) to buy and renovate a steel warehouse on the other side of the railroad tracks from Alesci's bakery. Demsey & Associates, a steel service center, buys rolled steel from the mills, inventories it, processes it, and sells it to users. Because Demsey & Associates and another, larger company have both renovated warehouses, thus becoming anchors in their immediate neighborhood, a third company is considering doing the same. "The only way we could afford the project was to get the interest rate down through the IRB," Brad Demsey says. "It's hard to say what we would have done without it."

It is hard to say what Cleveland would have done without the federal aid and without the Demseys, Lancasters, Smiths, and Youngs to make it work. "Not everyone," says Sam Alesci, "can move to Southern California, you know." With people like these continuing to operate in their own best interests, fewer people may want to.

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