Economy
Cleveland's geographic location on the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie has been key to its growth. The Ohio and Erie Canal coupled with rail links helped establish the city as an important business center. Steel and many other manufactured goods emerged as leading industries.
The city diversified its economy in addition to its manufacturing sector. Cleveland is home to the corporate headquarters of many large companies such as Applied Industrial Technologies, Eaton, Forest City Enterprises, Sherwin-Williams Company and KeyCorp. NASA maintains a facility in Cleveland, the Glenn Research Center. Jones Day, one of the largest law firms in the U.S, began in Cleveland. Cleveland and its surrounding suburbs are also home to several private equity firms including The Riverside Company, Kirtland Capital Partners, Resilience Capital Partners and Primus Capital.
The Duke Realty Corp. is one of the area's largest landlords and holds a large office building portfolio in the southern suburbs. In 2007, Cleveland's commercial real estate market experienced rebound with a record pace of purchases, with a housing vacancy of ten percent.
The Cleveland Clinic is the city's largest private employer with a workforce of over 37,000. It carries the distinction as being among America's best hospitals with top ratings published in U.S. News & World Report Cleveland's healthcare sector includes University Hospitals of Cleveland, a renowned center for cancer treatment, and MetroHealth medical center. Cleveland is also noted in the fields of biotechnology and fuel cell research, led by Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospitals of Cleveland. Cleveland is among the top recipients of investment for biotech start-ups and research. Case Western Reserve, the Clinic, and University Hospitals have recently announced plans to build a large biotechnology research center and incubator on the site of the former Mt. Sinai Medical Center, creating a research campus to stimulate biotech startup companies that can be spun off from research conducted in the city.
City leaders stepped up efforts to grow the technology sector in the first decade of the 21st century. Former Mayor Jane L. Campbell appointed a "tech czar" whose job is to actively recruit tech companies to the downtown office market, offering connections to the high-speed fiber networks that run underneath downtown streets in several "high-tech offices" focused on the Euclid Avenue area. Cleveland State University hired a Technology Transfer Officer to work full time on cultivating technology transfers from CSU research to marketable ideas and companies in the Cleveland area, and appointed a Vice President for Economic Development to leverage the university's assets in expanding the city's economy. Case Western Reserve University participates in technology initiatives such as the OneCommunity project, a high-speed fiber optic network linking the area's major research centers intended to stimulate growth. OneCommunity's work attracted the attention of Intel and in mid-2005, Cleveland was named an Intel "Worldwide Digital Community" along with Corpus Christi, Texas, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Taipei, Taiwan. This distinction added about $12 million for marketing to expand regional technology partnerships, create a city-wide WiFi network, and develop a tech economy. In addition to this Intel initiative, in January 2006 a New York–based think tank, the Intelligent Community Forum, selected Cleveland as the sole American city among its seven finalists for the "Intelligent Community of the Year" award. The group announced that it nominated the city for its OneCommunity network with potential broadband applications. The OneCommunity Network is collaborating with Cisco Systems to deploy a cutting-edge wireless network that could provide widespread access to the region. Cisco is testing new technologies in wireless "mesh" networking. OneCommunity and Cisco officially launched the first phase in September 2006, blanketing several square miles of University Circle with wireless connectivity.
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Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“Everyone is always in favour of general economy and particular expenditure.”
—Anthony, Sir Eden (1897–1977)
“Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)