There's Still No Agreement on How Many Clevelanders Actually Live Downtown

Downtown Cleveland, Inc. slots the center city population at a breezy 21,000 . Bedrock gloats its " more than 20,000 residents ." Point2Homes says it's a paltry 8,052 .  And a CBRE advertisement for the old Taco Bell space on Public Square  notes "now with over 15,000 residents in a one-mile radius ."

So, as this publication asked with hands raised back in 2021 , what is the true, verifiable population of Downtown Cleveland?

Last week, for the first time in three years, the Center for Community Solutions, a think tank based in the AECOM Building, released a report detailing the headcount for every one of Cleveland's 34 neighborhoods.

And the numbers once again were at loggerheads with those propagated by city boosters: 12,797 people live downtown, including 79 minors, 110 infants and 961 seniors. Nine in ten rent. Most are white. Most make over $80,000 a year.

You don't even have to bust out a calculator: CCS' data is very different than what Downtown Cleveland, Inc. has in its 2023 recap report.

Scene reached out to Alex Dorman, a research fellow at CCS, to once again try and pin down why Cleveland can't agree on how many occupy its city center.

"We got the same exact question with our 2021 fact sheets," Dorman said. (True.)

"What is likely happening is, we use the City of Cleveland's Statistical Planning Area boundaries for the Downtown neighborhood," he added. "And the last time this came up we guessed that DCA is using a different boundary, like perhaps the Downtown Improvement District boundary, which would be larger and capture more people."

"It's also possible that for an area experiencing year-over-year growth, using five-year Census estimates may slightly underreport that growth," Dorman went on. "This certainly wouldn't explain all the difference however. So it has to be something related to the boundaries."

That Statistical Planning Area, the go-to for any work the Cleveland Planning Commission does involving Downtown, includes every apartment and household nestled inside a boundary that runs from the Port of Cleveland, to Burke Lakefront Airport, along I-71 and the Cuyahoga River.

Thought DCI didn't return an email from Scene in time for publication, the nonprofit typically uses a boundary quite similar, at least on paper, to the U.S. Census and the SPA.

As DCI's Jonathan Stone said in 2021: "East 30th to the Cuyahoga River, and Lake Erie to the Innerbelt." A population estimated, he told Scene, "by conducting quarterly occupancy surveys of downtown residential properties and incorporating real-time results from other data sources.”

Could those other data sources include the U.S. Census?

Regardless, a slew of calculation discrepancies could be at play here, from how students at Cleveland State are tallied to how accurate downtown property owners are disclosing their tenant counts.

Accurate counts are a city's most important currency, so to speak. Population numbers—either right or wrong—are marketed to fill up empty storefronts, to win state and federal dollars, to trumpet as bragging rights. (And getting over tired inferiority complexes.)

Yet, all sources can at least agree on one fact: Downtown Cleveland has grown a lot in the past ten years, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon.
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