The Policy Link report provides insightful analysis of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and the surrounding counties. The overall picture is that population decline is happening not only in the central city, but people are leaving Northeast Ohio altogether.

The report studied five 'weak market' cities: Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (using 2000 Census and other data). Here are some salient points on population shifts:

• Many older suburbs are declining in tandem with, and sometimes more rapidly than, their central cities. They now face many of the same challenges of central cities, including a shrinking tax base, increasing poverty, and higher service burdens. In the 1990s, over half of the suburbs of Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh lost population.
• While declining suburbs tend to be older, first-tier communities located immediately adjacent to central cities, this is not always the case. In the Cleveland region some farther out suburbs (such as the older, industrial satellite cities in Ashtabula and Lorain counties) are also declining.
• Just as population has moved outward, so too has employment. Originally developed as bedroom communities for commuters to the central business district, the suburbs of core cities have grown into employment centers in their own right. In Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia, less than one out of every five jobs is now located within three miles of the downtown central business district.
• Workers increasingly live in one suburb and commute to another, completely bypassing the central city. In the Cleveland region, for example, less than one-third of workers commute to a job in the central city and over half of the commutes in the region (55 percent) begin and end in the suburbs.