Reflecting on Tom Bier's The Way We Are: 100 Plain Dealer Op-eds.

Editor’s Note: Although subscribers to The Urban Lens are generally spread all around the English-speaking world, I think most readers know someone like Tom Bier, Ph.D., whose work is the topic of this week’s guest essay by Robert Jaquay. As Jaquay asserts, Tom Bier is an excellent example of the category “civic intellectual.”

The best urban universities, civic agencies, and/or private philanthropies in most cities try to create careers for such intellectuals. Many civic intellectuals downplay national audiences for their work and focus instead on informing and improving local and regional policy making. They seek to be independent voices, carefully navigating their way through complex local policy choices, local power politics, and the local dynamics of ensuring their continued access to secure funding so they can continue crafting unbiased assessments of local policy choices. This work is not for the faint-of-heart.

Our guest author today, Robert Jaquay, is retired from a remarkable career spanning law, local government service, nonprofit civic governance, and philanthropic grantmaking, with his primary focus on the Cleveland region. Jaquay currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education at Cleveland State University. He and other civic leaders in the Cleveland area have benefitted from Tom Bier’s prodigious writing about the economic & social dynamics of the Cleveland region for almost forty years.

Now is a good time for those who care about cities to remember the extraordinary value created by civic intellectuals. In the U.S., we are experiencing an unprecedented national attack on the financial sources of support for independent analysis and debate about local and regional policy choices as well as national policy choices. Tom Bier’s body of work stands as an inspiration for thousands of courageous civic intellectuals in cities throughout the U.S. and around the world.

Bob Gleeson

Reflecting on Tom Bier’s The Way We Are: 100 Plain Dealer Op-eds.

By the time we met in May of 2024, my lunchtime dialogues with Tom Bier had been occurring for nearly four decades. Typically, we begin by discussing the latest baseball news before launching into a serious discussion about some aspect of the future of Greater Cleveland. Since we are both now retired from full-time employment our lunches have become less frequent. But we both remain focused on our shared passion for the region’s future.

Toward the end of this lunch, Tom set a large manila envelope on the table and slid it across to me. Inside was a hard copy of his new publication, The Way We Are: 100 Plain Dealer Op-eds. Tom’s latest publication is a compilation of essays he wrote for the Cleveland newspaper’s editorial section between 1977 and 2022. On other occasions, Tom mentioned that he was urged to pull these columns together by another long-time friend, attorney Rick Taft. Cleveland State University, where Bier directed the Center for Housing Research and Policy for many years, published the work in a freely accessible e-book format under its Michael Schwartz Library Imprint.^[i]

One hundred columns published in the Plain Dealer by a fellow with a family and a full-time university job is quite an accomplishment. These essays were crafted in addition to scores of academic articles, white papers, demographic analyses and formal presentation that Bier produced. Prolific is the word that readily comes to mind. (It should be noted that Bier has not stopped. He has published other Op-eds since 2022, well into his eighties!)

Dr. Thomas Bier is perhaps best known for his insights into the dynamics of the Greater Cleveland housing markets. He has written extensively about the broad post World War Two shift in new residential construction from neighborhoods within the City of Cleveland and its first-ring suburbs to areas further from the core. His independent research about housing and neighborhoods has focused on land issues from the urban core to the agricultural outskirts of the region, code enforcement, consequences – intended and unintended – of highway investments, the Federal Housing Administration, Section 8 rental vouchers, federal tax policy, bank lending and other related topics. His research findings are summarized in all forms of his writing, including the Plain Dealer op-ed pieces.

Yet, The Way We Are: 100 Plain Dealer Op-eds covers a much wider range of urban subjects than housing and neighborhoods. Columns discuss issues around Cleveland’s downtown with frequency, starting with the 1977 proposal for an elevated transit loop called the People Mover. In subsequent years, Bier writes about Playhouse Square, the evolution of Cleveland State University’s campus, the Flats area alongside the Cuyahoga River, and the development of major sports venues within the context of Downtown. Threaded throughout all these topics is Bier’s continued reminder that suburbanites need to maintain a commitment to maintaining a vibrant and thriving Downtown.

Other topics he addressed in the Plain Dealer include prospects for the regional economy, the well-being of specific suburbs, comparison of Cleveland to other cities around the country and the English (rather New English) origins of Cleveland and its unique civic culture. Opinions on what Cleveland needs from City Hall, county government, state government, the business community and foundations are offered at various points in time.

Neil Pierce, whose writing on American cities was syndicated nationally by the Washington Post, provided Bier with a role model when he began writing op-eds in the mid-1970s. Could Bier become a “local version of Neil Pierce?” Tom Bier certainly succeeded in that.

Chris Quinn, Plain Dealer editor, perhaps said it best: “Tom’s op-eds were grist for many conversations over the years in government halls and across dining tables. Sparking discussion is why we publish op-eds … And no one outside our newsroom has done more to spark that conversation than Tom.”

For me, poring once again over the essays contained in this newly released collection stirred a flood of nostalgic reveries and thoughts about the future of Cleveland’s civic dialogue that Bier advanced so well over the years.

I recall that despite being considerably younger than Tom by nearly twenty years, he always treated me as a colleague and friend. In addition to our luncheon dialogues, we occasionally exchanged topical articles and writing we produced. For decades, we each grappled over the same set of issues, seeking deeper insight by pondering the same maps and data sets.

As our comraderie developed, I learned much about Tom Bier’s background that I see clearly reflected in his work. Tom has an endless curiosity about how things both large and small work. Growing up in Cleveland’s working-class Collinwood neighborhood, Tom lived near a corridor of the city’s around-the-clock manufacturing might. He witnessed post-war suburbanization and racial and ethnic migrations outward from the core. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Dayton and earned a PhD in organizational development at Case Western Reserve University.

Corporate jobs enabled Tom to live in Los Angeles and England. While in England Tom consider British land use patterns versus those in the United States, with specific comparative thinking about Newcastle upon Tyne and Cleveland, Ohio. Upon returning home and settling with his family in the old streetcar suburb of Cleveland Heights, Tom volunteered with the Forest Hills Housing Corporation. In addition to serving as a trustee, Tom enjoyed hands-on work and challenges to maintain and upgrade the residential stock of Cleveland Heights. Depending on the structure, he might wrestle with old pocket doors, replace outmoded wiring or update a kitchen to contemporary standards. He loves thinking about community systems of all kinds and sizes.

By carving out his distinctive role as a regular contributor to the Plain Dealer's opinion pages, Tom Bier became an important part of a cadre of Cleveland-based civic intellectuals who deeply influenced me and countless other civic professionals early in my own career. Among them were: Norman Krumholz, the city planner; Don Reed, a community-minded banker; Steven Minter, the philanthropic leader; Richard Shatten, a brilliant organizer who used civic agencies to convene government, civic and business leaders; Kathleen Barber and B. James Kweder, professors inspiring their students to public service; and journalists Tom Andrejewski and Roldo Bartimole who wrote about urban issues in Cleveland. This valuable collection of civic intellectuals fed my own burgeoning interest in cities and regions.

This phrase "civic intellectual" raises a point that Tom Bier and every academic must face when devoting creative energy to drafting op-eds. This type of writing is not a refereed publication that counts toward tenure in most universities. Especially for younger tenure-track academics, the incentives for writing op-eds are low. Academic mentors often see this work as a distraction from one's proper career development. Academic administrators often see it as interference in their own engagements with state, regional, and local leaders.

I spoke on numerous occasions about this dilemma with Dr. Ned Hill, former Dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State. Bier, like many of his colleagues at the Levin College, was well published in both academic journals and general audience publications. (In addition to his Plain Dealer op-eds, Bier’s work has been published by Journal of Urban Affairs, Economic Development Quarterly, Urban Geography, Housing Policy Debate, Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, U.S. Department of Urban Development, Brookings Institution and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, among others.) Dean Hill expressed hope that academic institutions would one day find a way to properly value faculty and staff who were committed to moving research insights into local and regional public policy dialogues.

Around the Cleveland area, Tom Bier is widely understood to be both a thought-provoking columnist and engaged scholar. Is it possible to say whether that reputation rests more on his scholarly research or his journalistic endeavors? Does the question matter? Perhaps it is enough to say that each sort of writing bolsters the other. Over the decades, Tom Bier has been sought out for advice by all sorts of Northeast Ohio non-profits, professional associations, governments and collaborations, such as the First Suburbs Consortium. Practically minded civic decision-makers likely don’t care about such distinctions.

The recent publication of Tom Bier’s The Way We Are: 100 Plain Dealer Op-eds leads me to wonder whether Cleveland-based civic institutions are still creating career opportunities to grow the next generation of civic intellectuals who can use careful research to project their own independent voices about important local and regional policy issues.

State and federal funding for such activities has been reduced sharply in recent years, and philanthropy faces its own challenges. The internal structures of Cleveland State University have also been evolving in response to demographic changes and the changing priorities of state funding for higher education in Ohio.

Yet many factors remain in place. Cleveland State University remains anchored in the heart of the city and its region. Students continue to seek an education to prepare them for public service. Dedicated faculty still strive to deliver excellence in both teaching and research that are relevant and useful to urban communities in the Cleveland region and beyond.

Tom Bier’s career stands as an excellent example of how a civic intellectual can adapt to ever-changing conditions to produce important contributions to the Greater Cleveland community. His work provides a high standard of excellence to inspire current and future civic intellectuals who are committed to informing and improving important policy choices moving forward.

Robert Jaquay

---

^[i] See: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clevmembks/67/ . The Way We Are: 100 Plain Dealer Op-eds is a recent edition to the growing treasure trove of publications made available online free of charge by the Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University. I also urge readers to check out the many other fine urban-related works at http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/

.