If there’s a “Chicago model” (or “Daley model”) of urban development, it’s this: use public TIF subsidies to attract corporate headquarters and big-box retailers that sometimes pay poverty-level wages and send employees to public health programs, and to subsidize high-end real estate development that gentrifies and displaces; and privatize public services from schools to parking to airports, in a mad scramble for revenue.

Meanwhile, in the search for ever-elusive “bipartisanship,” federal jobs and economic stimulus policies are sapped by tax cuts while shortchanging direct stimulus like unemployment assistance and aid to states, and a “green” energy and jobs policy spends billions of dollars to subsidize nuclear power and “clean coal.”

Cleveland offers a better way.  As detailed in the Nation this week (and Yes magazine last year), Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland are creating large-scale employee-owned green businesses aimed at serving “anchor institutions,” particularly hospitals and universities, which purchase billions of dollars of goods and services every year.

Backed by the Cleveland Foundation and Shorebank Enterprise Cleveland among others, Evergreen Cooperative has launched  the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry to provide green services to hospitals and Ohio Cooperative Solar, which is weatherizing residences and installing solar panels on nonprofit and municipal buildings.  Also in the works is Green City Growers, a massive year-round hydroponic greenhouse which will be the largest urban food-production operation in the nation, and Neighborhood Voice, a community-based newspaper.

Based in low-income communities, all the businesses will pay living wages and provide health coverage.  And unlike multinational chains, where profits are whisked back to Wall Street, they will build assets for low-income families:  employee-owners are projected to build a $65,000 equity stake within eight years.  On top of that, 10 percent of profits from each enterprise will go back to the Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund to develop more jobs.

Here’s the video.  It’s pretty inspiring.

The project is modeled on the Mondragon Cooperatives, begun by a priest and five workers in Spain in 1953 and now comprising 200 enterprises in 40 countries with 100,000 employee-owners and annual sales of 16 billion Euros.  As Carl Davidson explains, Mondragon workers build buses and appliances and high-tech machine tools and operate a chain of supermarkets—and they run their own banks, health clinics, schools, and Mondragon University, all worker-owned co-ops.

Last year the United Steelworkers announced a partnership with Mondragon to develop manufacturing cooperatives here.  According to Davidson, the partnership is now looking for viable small enterprises where owners are interested in cashing out.

“Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants,” said USW President Leo Gerard.  “We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”