While Cleveland isn’t especially prosperous, the Clinic’s campus is a world apart, evoking an upscale resort or an airport’s international terminal — an alternate universe where smokers and fast-food restaurants are banned, where foreign-language speakers are numerous and where live music and farmers markets are frequent. [...]
The beautiful, sheltered campus reflects decades of willful development, says Richey Piiparinen, who studies urban planning at Cleveland State University and says that the Clinic — like many big-city institutions — has deliberately walled itself off. “It’s divorced from the neighborhood. It’s [even] policed differently,” Piiparinen said, referencing the Clinic’s private force of 122 officers. [...]
Just a few blocks from the Clinic’s high-end Intercontinental Hotel — where the flagship restaurant serves $49 steaks and $220 bottles of Dom Perignon — a McDonald’s sign announces $1 soft drinks. There are boarded-up buildings and weed-choked vacant lots. One store advertises bail bonds.
The population of the two neighborhoods that surround the Clinic — Fairfax and Hough, which are about 95 percent African-American — dwindled to 18,000 as of 2010, down from more than 38,000 in 1980 and more than 100,000 in 1960. There’s visible blight and houses with peeling paint. One fence was draped by an assortment of raggedy clothes, slowly getting soaked in a rainstorm. Unlike the Clinic just blocks away, there are no bike lanes.
And the poverty manifests in poor health outcomes, with the rate of preventable illnesses like chronic heart disease and high cholesterol well above the local and national averages. The Clinic’s own community assessment, published last year, ranked Fairfax and Hough as “highest need” possible in terms of health care access.
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