A guest column on GeekWire warning Seattle not to become “the next Cleveland” took a life of its own — culminating in a phone call Thursday morning between the columnist and the mayor of Cleveland himself.
In this call, Mayor Justin Bibb acknowledged the lessons of Cleveland’s decline, many decades ago, but pushed back the frame and focus of the episode, asserting that the real story is the city’s ongoing revitalization. He said Seattle should pay attention to Cleveland for different reasons than the column suggested.
“We didn’t turn around fast enough, and the world left us behind,” Bibb said. “And now we’re a comeback story of innovation and resilience. And I think the world can learn a lot from what we’re doing.”
Bibb said the old national narrative of Cleveland as a “mistake in the pond” is tired and outdated.
“The new story that’s emerging is that Cleveland is going to lead America in terms of how we think about industrial renewal,” he said. “We’re doing things in America too, we’re doing things in Ohio too, and I want Cleveland to lead.”
Seattle tech veteran and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald, who wrote the original column, said his goal was to compare Seattle today to Cleveland at its peak, not to capture a modern city.
“We’re fat, dumb and happy,” Fitzgerald said of Seattle. “My goal is really to get people to wake up and prepare the city for the next move, and remind them that prosperity is not guaranteed.”
Lessons from Seattle’s past: Bibb, a self-described history student, said he read about Seattle’s recovery from the Boeing explosion in the early 1970s, when someone famously posted the caption, “Will the last person from Seattle turn out the lights.”
Seattle responded by using its research centers and riding the tech boom, he said, and Cleveland is now trying to follow its own version of that playbook.
“I’m jealous of the growth spurts,” Bibb said. “Those are the problems I want to have in the future in Cleveland, and I’m trying to build a foundation so we can have those problems.”
Fitzgerald agreed. “I think the cities are incredibly similar,” he said. “We’re on top of the world today, Cleveland was on top of the world. … And we have the same risk in the sense that we’ve done too much, so we’re going to keep falling.”
Fitzgerald’s column, published Tuesday, drew parallels between Seattle today and Cleveland in the 1950s, when it was one of the largest and most prosperous cities in America. Bibb responded with a LinkedIn post that drew hundreds of reactions, defending Cleveland’s return and inviting Fitzgerald to visit.
GeekWire caught up with the two by phone Thursday morning. Listen to the highlights of this bonus episode of the GeekWire Podcast.
Olympia and Columbus: In the Seattle tech community, the column was part of a broader debate about the region’s economic future amid the AI frenzy and new efforts by lawmakers in Olympia to raise taxes on high earners and businesses in a number of troubling ways that will slow startups.
Bibb spoke to Cleveland’s experience in Ohio in his comments on the phone. When asked about Cleveland’s relationship with the capital of its region, Columbus, he said that although he is the mayor of a blue city in a red country, the cooperation in work and economy is strong.
“We don’t pay tax on corporate profits. We have good R&D credits all over the country,” he said. “We want to compete with the best, from South Carolina to Texas to Washington to California. We want to make sure that Ohio is the easiest place to do business, and that Cleveland is the fastest growing city for business.”
Broadly, Bibb cited billions of investments reshaping Cleveland, including a $1.6 billion airport renovation, a $4 billion tax-increment district to improve the city’s waterfront, and Sherwin-Williams bringing 5,000 workers to a new downtown building.
He pointed to aerospace, advanced manufacturing, and the city’s health sector, supported by the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, as engines of renewal.
Seattle reality check: Of course, Seattle has its strengths, including similar institutions such as the University of Washington and the Fred Hutch Cancer Center, as well as AI and cloud computing operations of Microsoft and Amazon, and strengths in areas such as fusion energy, space, and biotech.
In a post Thursday on LinkedIn, Jacob Colker, founder of the AI2 Incubator, hit back at what he called the “perpetual story” of Seattle’s decline, citing the influx of AI talent and the region’s capital, its dominance in the space economy, and its growing startup and biotech sectors.
“The sky is not falling,” wrote Colker.
But Fitzgerald’s argument is less about Seattle’s current strengths than about local and state leaders doing the right things for the next phase of growth. Fitzgerald said many people have asked to accompany him on the trip to Cleveland, taking the mayor on his own request – at least if the weather is warm.
“I like that,” said Bib. “There’s no better place than our hometowns, Cleveland and Seattle, to show the world what’s possible.”
