The Cleveland Browns ownership, Jimmy and Dee Haslem, is the latest billionaire welfare success story for Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Brook Park into an agreement to be the location for the Browns’ new stadium, another Northern U.S. city with a dome.
The Haslems were exhausted working with the city of Cleveland to use the land previously occupied by Burke Lakefront Airport for building a dome stadium, abandoning their 25-year-old open-air home on the shores of Lake Erie.
The Haslems wanted that location on the welfare plan, too.
There are far greater Chicago Bears fans than Cleveland Browns fans in the Times-Union readership area, but you’re seeing the future for your Bears in what just happened with the Browns.
They’ll be headed to Arlington Heights even after a lark look at another part of the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Much like Chicago’s civic leadership, Cleveland’s governing body does not have the appetite for indulging billionaire welfare while its taxpayers carry the already heavy load.
Is it easier to move through traffic and closer to walk to the stadium from a (Cleveland) suburb like Brook Park, or the (Chicago) suburb of Arlington Heights?
It certainly is.
Let me tell you about Brook Park.
It’s a city whose population flirts near 20,000 residents whose governing body exchanged airport extension land to the city of Cleveland for ten years of tax revenue for an exposition center that was razed for the expansion, and it was re-zoned to include NASA Glenn Research Center.
The ‘burb is also home to a massive Ford plant, and when viewed from the air as you land into Hopkins Airport, it looks like Brook Park is mostly NASA, the Ford Plant, the airport, and a smattering of houses that used to be good enough to look like the 1950s/1960s American dream.
These days, Brook Park sucks, but it won’t suck for long.
It’s comprised of hardworking middle-class families on the lower end of the middle class pay scale, and people don’t’ take care of their lots there like they used to when I was a high school kid going up there to run in track meets or to play an away football game.
My mother, divorced and raising my little brother in a poorly maintained townhouse, lived next to a railroad track there from 1988-1990 before she found a better apartment in another Cleveland first ring suburb, Parma.
Like Inglewood, California, the home of SoFi Stadium, Brook Park isn’t a terrible neighborhood, but if you were stuck living there due to affordability, or stuck because you couldn’t sell your house and make a decent buck from it, Brook Park wasn’t a dream destination.
My brother’s tragic return to Brook Park in 1992 to be interred at Holy Cross Cemetery (where other departed extended family are also buried), and my mom’s ashes in a mausoleum there, too, since 2009 are the only reasons to go to Brook Park for me.
Maybe my perception of the place sucking had more to do with my - on the smallest scale - athletic futility during football season there (track was actually OK), but on a larger scale recalling a rough patch my mom went through ion 1988-1990, and the death of my brother.
This explains why my lack of enthusiasm is biased. I don’t like the idea of going there for any event in a domed stadium, either.
However, for most people in Brook Park, I hope they have enough money after they’re taxed for a billion-dollar dome to afford a ticket to a Browns game or a concert in this likely dazzling new venue.
I don’t believe most Brook Park residents will be able to afford any Final Four or Super Bowl tickets a domed stadium in their ‘burb, close to the airport and the confluence of interstate highways, spurs and belts will afford travelers TO Cleveland to get to where they need to go with limited hassle.
The Haslems should be footing this bill, but instead many residents of Brook Park, again likely unable to attend most of the events held in the new domed venue, will bear the brunt of the tax bill instead.
My takeaway is perhaps businesspeople and folks in the area seeking work who aren’t already employed at the aforementioned major outfits, will have a chance to make a good buck from passers by among Cleveland area, and national fans of concerts, ballgames, and conventions.