Cleveland’s mayor, Seattle’s future: A conversation about what happens when a city’s economy shifts

A guest column on GeekWire warning Seattle not to become “the next Cleveland” has taken on a life of its own — culminating in a phone call Thursday morning between the author of the piece and the mayor of Cleveland himself.

On the call, Mayor Justin Bibb acknowledged the lessons of Cleveland’s decline, many decades ago, but pushed back on the framing and focus of the piece, asserting that the real story is the city’s ongoing revival. He said Seattle should be paying attention to Cleveland for different reasons than the column suggested.

“We didn’t pivot fast enough, and the world left us behind,” Bibb said. “And now we are a comeback story of reinvention and resilience. And I think there’s a lot the country can learn from what we’re doing.”

Bibb said the old national narrative of Cleveland as “the mistake on the lake” is tired and outdated.

“The new story that’s emerging is Cleveland is going to lead America in terms of how we think about our industrial revival,” he said. “We’re making things in America again, making things in Ohio again, and I want Cleveland to lead the way.”

Seattle tech veteran and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald, who wrote the original column, said his intent was to compare Seattle today to Cleveland at its peak, not to take a shot at the modern city. 

“We’re kind of fat, dumb and happy,” Fitzgerald said of Seattle. “My goal really is to get people to wake up and prepare the city for the next act, and remind them that prosperity is not guaranteed.”

Lessons from Seattle’s past: Bibb, a self-described student of history, said he’s studied Seattle’s own recovery from the Boeing bust of the early 1970s, when someone famously put up a billboard reading, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights.” 

Seattle responded by leveraging its research institutions and riding the technology boom, he said, and Cleveland is now trying to follow its own version of that playbook.

“I envy problems around growth,” Bibb said. “Those are the problems I want to have in the future in Cleveland, and I’m trying to create the baseline so we can have those problems.”

Fitzgerald agreed. “I think the cities are incredibly analogous,” he said. “We’re at the top of the world today, Cleveland was at the top of the world. … And we have the same risk in the sense that we’ve over-performed, and so we’ve got further to fall.”

Fitzgerald’s column, published Tuesday, drew parallels between Seattle today and Cleveland in the 1950s, when it was one of America’s largest and most prosperous cities. Bibb responded with a LinkedIn post that drew hundreds of reactions, defending Cleveland’s comeback and inviting Fitzgerald to visit.

GeekWire connected the two by phone on Thursday morning. Listen to highlights from the call on this bonus episode of the GeekWire Podcast.

Olympia and Columbus: For the Seattle tech community, the column was part of a broader debate over the region’s economic future in the midst of the AI frenzy and new efforts by lawmakers in Olympia to raise taxes on high-income earners and businesses in ways that many worry will undercut startups.

Bibb spoke to Cleveland’s experience in Ohio in comments on the call. Asked about Cleveland’s relationship with its state capital, Columbus, he said that despite being a blue city mayor in a red state, the partnership on jobs and the economy has been strong.

“We don’t tax corporate profits. We have great R&D tax credits statewide,” he said. “We want to compete with the best of them, from South Carolina to Texas to Washington to California. We want to make sure that Ohio is an easy place to do business, and that Cleveland is a city that’s moving at the speed of business.”

More broadly, Bibb cited billions in investments reshaping Cleveland, including a $1.6 billion airport modernization, a $4 billion tax increment financing district to redevelop the city’s waterfront, and Sherwin-Williams bringing 5,000 employees into a new downtown skyscraper. 

He pointed to aerospace, advanced manufacturing, and the city’s health-tech sector, anchored by the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, as engines of the revival.

A Seattle reality check: Of course, Seattle has its own strengths, including parallel institutions such as the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center, along with the AI and cloud computing operations of Microsoft and Amazon, and strength in areas such as fusion energy, space, and biotech.

In a post Thursday on LinkedIn, Jacob Colker, co-founder of the AI2 Incubator, pushed back on what he called the “breathless narrative” of Seattle’s decline, citing the region’s massive concentration of AI talent and capital, its dominance in the space economy, and its growing fusion and biotech sectors. 

“The sky isn’t falling,” Colker wrote.

But Fitzgerald’s argument is less about Seattle’s current strengths than about whether local and state leaders are doing the right things for the next phase of growth. Fitzgerald said multiple people have already asked to join him on a trip to Cleveland, taking the mayor up on his offer — at least when the weather gets warmer. 

“I love that,” Bibb said. “There is no better place than our respective cities, Cleveland and Seattle, to show the nation what’s possible.”