ear” – canvassing door-to-door, making phone calls and recruiting local volunteers. Cleveland, especially the area I am involved with, is rife with history and currently in financial upheaval. Hough, one of the neighborhoods in my ward, was the site of the Hough Race Riots in 1966, when the city was shut down for an entire week with National Guard troops. Subsequently, these areas fell into disrepair and when the bottom feel out from under subprime financed houses, these neighborhoods and these families were devastated. Its easy to use language like devastated, but take a look at some of the pictures attached and you get a sense that when 50% of homes are boarded up and there are houses for sale for $6,000, devastated only begins to describes this community. These days, suburban families looking to help hurting neighborhoods move back to Hough bringing their money and leading by example. The result is an amalgam of brand new houses, boarded up/leveled plots and small apartment buildings -- all on the same street. To further i
llustrate the bipolar nature of the community look no further than ward 6 and the Cleveland Clinic. Ward 6 -- boarded up houses, the highest prisoner reentry in the state, rampant unemployment, unsafe when the sun goes down and as you walk the street the grandeur and clean lines of Cleveland Clinic break the horizon. There is much more to say about work I’m doing as a member of Obama’s national health care committee, the people I work with and random conversations with voters, but for the sake of keeping this short, I’ll wrap up here. At the suggestion of some I created a blog and will try to post daily to talk about other facets of life on the trail in Cleveland.This house (left) was one of on our canvass list and across the street was a brand new home
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