Most of us believe Chattanooga is the greatest place in the world to live. There are many wonderful people in a delightfully temperate natural setting, and we are working to making our community even better.
Although our country is in economic recession, there are great prospects for economic improvement in Chattanooga, as Volkswagen and a number of other fine companies are planning to locate or expand here, offering our people greater job opportunities.
There's lots of "good news."
For example, in a recent speech to the Chattanooga Rotary Club, David Eichenthal, president and CEO of the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies, gave this happy report: "Since 1980, 20 U.S. cities with more than 100,000 residents have lost -- or are on track to lose -- more than 10 percent of their population in a single decade. By and large, these are cities -- like Buffalo, Flint or Gary, Indiana -- that have seen consistent and constant population declines for decades. In places like Detroit, people are now talking about a version of planned depopulation and turning back former residential neighborhoods to prairies. ...
"In 1990, Chattanooga made the list -- having lost just over 10 percent of its population in the prior decade.
"But in the 1990s, because of the efforts of many in this room (Rotary Club meeting) today, Chattanooga began its turnaround.
"By 2000, Chattanooga had gained population -- making it the one U.S. city with more than 100,000 residents to have lost more than 10 percent of its population in the 1980s and then gain population in the 1990s."
Mr. Eichenthal said our Chattanooga growth rate is now greater than Hamilton County's overall rate of growth. "And more people live in Chattanooga today than ever before."
Obviously, many people see desirable things in our city.
But all is not "perfect," unfortunately. We do have problems.
For example:
* In 2008, 35,000 Chattanoogans were living in poverty -- with income less than $10,830 for an individual or $22,050 for a family of four.
* Parts of the city have half of our robberies and 40 percent of aggravated assaults.
* In these areas, a third of public school students fail to attend classes regularly. We are 48th among our 50 states in education!
There were more such facts and figures, but you get the idea.
In our wonderful, delightful, progress-minded city, there are many good things -- but some serious challenges we need to overcome.
That's our big job, and opportunity.
Mr. Eichenthal is helping alert us: "Today, the question is, can all of us continue to work together to build a city -- a community -- where we can take on the tough challenges that I have described today and succeed?
"If we do, Chattanooga will continue to prosper, to grow and to be the great success story of urban America in the 21st century."
We have lots of advantages -- and some tough challenges. Facing them should help us to -- as the old popular song says, "Accentuate the positive -- eliminate the negative -- and don't mess with Mr. In-Between."
Nobody wants higher taxes. The poor are suspicious of costs associated with anything they do not already have, and the rich can afford to buy any book or use their high-speed Internet service for anything they want. Instead of considering “extras,” we appear determined to focus on shelters for poor children, schools, and prisons as mandatory and exclusive solutions, and giveaways of “good” items as our charity. When reviewing the typical solutions chosen for our area, have you seen that we spend dramatically less on education that other more successful Southern communities our size, do we have fewer foundations than most, do we give away fewer books with programs like Read20 or Project Ready for School, do we have substantially fewer charities devoted to young children? The answers to all of these questions is no. Where we have always failed to care and what we continue to avoid is belief in the enterprise of our poorest citizens.
As one example, and the one dearest to my heart, there is the local public library. The public library movement was founded precisely to address similar conditions during the last time there was such a disparity between the rich and the poor in the 1890s. Before then, the Victorian solution was precisely the one this area continues to follow. The wealthy understood the value of what they enjoyed and attempted to remake the poor in their image by giving them “good” literature, instructions on hygiene and fitness, and encouraging them to apply themselves at school. This outward push to be like them was perhaps best exemplified in places like Pullman in Chicago, an entire factory town built around a rich man’s idea of paradise. I will believe that our area really cares about the poor when it provides more support for things designed to help people help themselves in the ways they choose.
The public library in our area is bursting at the seams with demand for computers to file job and aid applications, demand for office software to complete assignments and resumes, demand for free classes and information, and demand for books providing information, direction, or escape. It doesn’t matter why a person wants to read or learn; if reading is self-directed, you can count on the person wanting to do it and progressing because of it. If you want an example of our community’s abject failure in comparison to others our size, compare the capital support for building and renovating public libraries in our area (less that $6 million since 1905) to that of any other urban county of similar size. We are unique in the near complete lack of local support for self-directed reading for learning and enjoyment. Though this is just a symptom of a larger problem not the solution to everything, it does reflect a local bias.
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