1) Cleveland's metropolitan planning organization is spearheading an effort to do away with the Akron and Canton metropolitan areas and to merge them with Cleveland.

I have thoughts on this. Thread to follow. https://www.cleveland.com/news/2020/04/noaca-launches-regional-discussion-on-merging-metropolitan-statistical-areas-to-boost-neo-in-national-rankings.html

2) Grace Gallucci, the director of Cleveland's MPO, says that "this comes down to what makes sense".

I don't think that it makes sense, and I'll explain why.

3) The cultural complexity of our larger region has shipwrecked countless well-intentioned, but ill-conceived regional initiatives, which have tried in vain to put the square peg of treating the entire region as “Greater Cleveland” into the round hole of socio-cultural reality.

4) A good example is the ill-conceived "Cleveland+" campaign, launched back in 2007. Well intended. Poorly executed.

Akron, Canton, and Youngstown were the "+". That didn't go over very well.

5) The original map of the 16 county "Cleveland+" region had the inset map of downtown Cleveland sitting on top of and obscuring Youngstown and Warren.

An inauspicious beginning. The initiative never recovered.

6) There is nothing wrong with regional cooperation. It is critically important. But I'm going to explain why this type of thinking is not regional cooperation.

These efforts always fail, because they are always spearheaded by people who *do not understand* the larger region.

7) There are two fatal flaws with this most recent attempt to do away with the Akron and Canton metropolitan areas and to treat the entire thing as "Greater Cleveland".

8) First, it is not substantive, and it does nothing to help solve Cleveland's problems. Nor does it do anything to actually address the economic challenges that have plagued the entire region for decades.

9) Second, it is tone deaf, and it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Akron, Canton, their respective suburbs and commuter sheds, and how the region south of the Ohio Turnpike actually functions.

10) I'll take these two flaws in order.

First, it is not substantive. It is essentially trying to cook the books, by inflating the population of the Cleveland MSA, and pulling in the 1.1 million people living in the Akron and Canton MSAs.

11) The vast majority of people living in the Akron and Canton MSAs have (at best) a tenuous social & economic connection to Cleveland.

This is why the Census has classified Akron and Canton as separate metropolitan areas going all the way back to 1930:

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1930/metropolitan/03450421ch1.pdf

12) Gallucci is unhappy with the fact that the Cleveland MSA is now smaller than the Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Cincinnati MSAs.

And on that front, more sympathetic I could not be. MSAs are a lousy statistical unit, and they've only gotten worse over time.

13) Those other MSAs surpassed Cleveland in population primarily due to the fact that the Census MSA definitions have gotten so damn bloated. Every year, they pull in more and more rural counties, and the numbers get more and more inflated.

14) Unlike Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Columbus; Cleveland has the misfortune (in this particular case) of having a gigantic lake to its north, and having another city that is over half of its size sitting just 30 miles to its south.

15) But no one who knows anything about geography actually thinks that Cleveland is a smaller urban area than Cincinnati, Columbus, or Pittsburgh. In fact, Cleveland is still a larger urbanized area than any of those other cities, and rightfully so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas

16) But there is another reason that the Cleveland MSA has fallen behind some of its other peer metro areas in population, and that is because it has, in fact, gotten smaller.

17) In 1970, the Cleveland metropolitan area had 2,321,000 people. Today it has 2,048,000.

The Cleveland metropolitan area is almost nationally unparalleled in its level of population loss over the past 50 years.

18) The degree of population loss in the Cleveland metro area since 1970 is indicative of deep and profound social and economic problems.

Why? Books could be written. This thread isn't about that.

But these problems won't be solved by tacking a few more counties onto the MSA.

19) Gallucci argues that getting rid of the Akron and Canton MSAs and combining them with Cleveland will make the region more economically competitive.

How? Why?

And [spolier alert] the Census has already created a Cleveland-Akron-Canton combined statistical area.