The Rust Belt would include large parts of the Midwest and Northeast as well as small parts of the Upper South in the United States. It would typically include cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Toledo, Huntington (WV), and many others. The aforementioned cities have long suffered urban blight and I’m wondering if they will ever recover.
Moderator Action
While a certain amount of this can be answered factually with things like current economic statistics and trends, answering overall whether or not these areas will recover in the future requires a bit too much speculation for GQ. Let’s give IMHO a try for now.
Moving thread from GQ to IMHO.
I personally grew up in northern WV, not too far from Pittsburgh.
One thing I can tell you is that the days of the coal mines and steel mills are all long gone. A lot of people in WV kept thinking that the coal mines and the various industries along the Ohio River would recover. While some industrial plants along the river are doing well, most of the industry is gone and isn’t going to recover.
WV and western PA has high sulfur coal. You can burn it in a power plant and still meet EPA regulations, but you spend a lot more on scrubbers. At the power plant I used to work at in Ohio, we had a mix of cheap local coal, which was high in sulfur, and more expensive western coal, which was low in sulfur. The bean counters got paid big bucks to figure out exactly how much low sulfur and how much high sulfur to mix together. The low sulfur coal was more expensive, since it had to be shipped in from the western US, but cost less to burn since it didn’t impact the scrubbers as much. Anyway, the point is that the high sulfur coal is always a pain in the backside to burn just because of EPA regulations, which makes it much less desirable. That, combined with the overall trend to get away from fossil fuels as much as possible due to their global warming impact, and it doesn’t take a genius to see why coal has been on the decline and is likely to continue declining in the foreseeable future.
Steel production has mostly gone oversees, and cheap foreign steel means that local steel isn’t likely to recover.
West Virginia hasn’t coped with this very well. They’ve tried a few things to improve their economy, but overall their economy is still in the crapper and I personally don’t see it getting better any time soon.
Pittsburgh has really invested a lot in bringing new (and non-industrial) businesses to the city. I moved away from that area thirty years ago because the economy was so bad. These days things are getting better, but they still have a long way to go. Like I said, the days of big steel and big industry in that area are gone, but Pittsburgh continues to make steady improvements. They aren’t going to go back to what they once were overnight, but they are slowly recovering.
Yeah, this definitely calls for speculation, not only in general vocational and economic trends, but in whether the city and state governments in that region can capitalize on changes in those trends. The days of massive steel mills and labor-intensive auto manufacturing are gone; even if states could lure those industries back, they have transformed so much that it wouldn’t represent an increase in employment comparable to that of the heydays of the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties, nor do we really want heavily polluting steel mills when we can purchase inexpensive steel from China or Japan and let them worry about the pollution (which is still kind of short-sighted, but whatever).
Many of the cities you list, like Gary, IN, Buffalo, NY, and Toledo, OH, have never had great wealth and many of the blighted areas were lower middle class developments to begin with which are now degrading through age as well as neglect. The combination of housing that is substandard in modern terms combined with the need to remediate contaminants like lead paint and asbestos insulation and tile make it more feasible to essentially raze these neighborhoods and replace them with newer housing, which can not only be built to modern standards of comfort and aesthetics but can also be made more energy efficient as well as built around well-planned communities with public transportation and mixed use areas to reduce traffic congestion, and hopefully incorporating mixed income housing to reduce socioeconomic disparity between higher income ‘white collar’ and lower income service industry workers by offering the benefit of access to quality public and commercial amenities afforded by a healthy tax base.
But all of this assumes good urban planning and a sufficient tax base to build from, which is the kind of bootstrapping problem that cities like Baltimore, MD, Milwaukee, WI and Montgomery, AL have struggled with despite efforts at revitalization. It is difficult to clear blighted regions when the people living there have nowhere else to go, and encouraging developers to invest in such areas without manifest improvements to assure that the value of their investment will increase meets opposition from both budgetmakers and obviously the people who stand to be displaced by higher taxes or rents. So, it is a very difficult problem with no simplistic solutions other than to try to attract employers who bring enough jobs to force people with decent incomes out into less desireable neighborhoods in hope of individual investment and improvement.
Stranger
I was going to mention Pittsburgh, but not having lived there I didn’t feel as if I could speak with any authority about it. Pittsburgh has certainly tried to reinvent itself as not a steel town, and to some extent it has succeeded, although as you note it has a way to go. It does have the benefit of having some historically wealthy neighborhoods, some good scenery, and if the Ohio River isn’t the cleanest, it is at least not on fire. It does have a fair amount of academic and research employment, and enough investment to keep revitalization efforts moving forward. It’s biggest problem in terms of development is the lack of diversity and attracting outside investment. It also has a couple of major professional sport franchises, although the degree to which those are a net economic benefit is highly questionable.
One thing that cities need to consider when trying to revitalize is to not focus on any specific industry or attracting major employers like Amazon or Boeing (which may flirt with moving their headquarters there for a few years and then up and move when they find somewhere cheaper), but instead try to diversify the local industries as much as possible and support local development so that investors have incentives to look at long term growth. Sometimes a city can get fortunate and attract a whole industry like Atlanta has with the film industry (albeit through a number of tax incentives which, again, may be of questionable net fiscal value in the short term) but building a stable economy with sustainable growth requires having industries which maintain employment over a long term and are willing to pay their share of taxes to sustain the infrastructure. That is difficult to do when your main industry is dollar stores and opiate dealers and your city is in default, but sticking your hand out for federal dollars just invites corruption and failure; witness Detroit, MI, or San Bernardino, CA.
Stranger
Due to the massive sea rise because of climate change the coastal areas will be buried under water and consequently the Rust belt will recover. [It’s a fantasy that the countries of the world will do anything about climate change before it’s too late]
I grew up in Buffalo and always knew it was a dying city. There were some comical efforts at revitalization which I won’t go into–they were along the lines of what Flint MI tried to do, only more boring.
However, Buffalo seems to be revitalizing these days. It seems there are three drivers of growth–not necessarily created by local government, though perhaps encouraged, I just don’t know as I fled long ago.
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The state University at Buffalo has grown and that has pulled more professionals and more money into the city/county, and of course blue/pink collar jobs to support the expansion.
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There was always a decent group of hospitals; these have also grown and brought in some biotech industry as a result.
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I don’t know why but there’s always been some small-scale aerospace industry and that seems currently to be thriving. Maybe synergistic with the university growth.
The overall population of the region appears to be shrinking, though slowly; possible this is just loss/attrition in what used to be local heavy industry as the economy finally evolves.
I don’t know what climate change will do to the Great Lakes, but if they rise Buffalo will be (literally) sunk. The suburb my parents live in is formerly, arguably currently, a swamp, and below lake level.
That’s interesting since much of northern Ohio that I am familiar with has a sharp rise from the water to the land. It is often a near vertical cliff of some dozens of feet.
Dennis
Climate change is not expected to have much of an effect on inland lake levels, at least not for the foreseeable future. Unless ocean levels rise high enough to actually flood low-laying inland areas, the Great Lakes levels will be largely driven by runoff and evaporation and outflow as they do now.
Stranger
If it does, could we call it the Bondo Belt?
For the people mentioned in that article, unless a place is exactly how they remember it being in their highly romanticized youth (or their parents’ romanticized youth), then the place just ain’t no good.
It’s not surprise why these people are seduced by the “Make America Great Again” slogan.
That’s not the case with the Lake Erie waterfront around Buffalo, though I’m not an expert on all the geography of the area. I was exaggerating a little, and per Stranger flooding probably won’t happen anyway, but there aren’t cliffs I’m aware of. Along Lake Ontario, yes–that’s after Niagara Falls, obviously.
For most of humanity’s history, 90% of the population were farmers. With productivity increases since the 1500s, that has kept declining and will not rise again.
Something similar has been happening with manufacturing. Steel productivity per worker has gone up a few orders of magnitude since its heyday. If you produce 100 times more steel per worker than in the '60s, most of that productivity increase will go to employing fewer people, not making more steel.
Keep in mind the distinction between what is happening in 1 company or a cluster of companies vs what is happening at the national or species level. If a company becomes much better at making high quantities of something, the number of people it employes may well grow but if humans as a whole become much better at making high quantities of something, typically the number of people employed in making it will decrease.
The trend to concentrate into ever fewer larger urban centers which benefit from network effects will accelerate.
So, no, the Rust Belt won’t be what it was in the '60s anymore than the Fertile Crescent will be what it was 10 000 years ago.
There may still be a few centers which do well. Pittsburgh has already been mentioned. Sheffield was used as a backdrop of industrial decay 20 years ago in The Full Monty and is now doing well. I don’t know what Birmingham (UK), Sheffield and Pittsburg did and how well that could be copied. Industrial centers which succeed in reinventing themselves are going to be a minority though.
Out of the cities you listed, I’d think Pittsburgh does have the greatest chance of long term success as it does have universities, which can certainly help. It really is too bad that the capital is all the way over in Harrisburg. Columbus, Ohio is a successful Midwestern city, but it has the advantage of a highly educated population along with Ohio State University and the state capital.
The problem with the arguments about bringing manufacturing back is that you’re not going to overnight have large factories with hundreds of men showing up to work with their lunchpail. Those factories are going to be staffed with robots and a few engineers, not hundreds of blue collar workers.
Coal is dead. Any smart business plans for the future. Trump won’t be in office forever and whatever short term bones he’s throwing out can easily be reversed by the next administration. Also, Trump didn’t come into office in a wave of popularity demanding that his policies be implemented. He won by fewer votes than the attendance at a major Big 10 football game. So, there’s no massive pressure out there to immediately implement a return to a 1950s style manufacturing economy.
Most of the cities you’ve mentioned are stuck with a lousy climate, an aging population, and suffer from brain drain. There’s no reason to suspect that they’ll return to vitality any more than some of the mining ghost towns in the West.
we couldn’t do that no matter how hard we tried. The primary (if not the only) reason we were such a powerhouse in the '50s and '60s is WWII.
Some will, and some won’t. Those that can adapt to the new reality will do well, those who are still hoping that Trump or someone will bring back those great low skill high wage and high density jobs will be waiting essentially forever. They will never come back, even if car manufacturers and steel mills return, since automation is actually why most of those jobs are gone, not offshoring.
Perhaps as access to fresh water becomes more and more of a crisis worldwide, cities like Detroit will see population growth because they have access to fresh water?
The problem of fresh water isn’t really a regional one. While it is true that many major cities are facing crises of access to potable water, the larger looming issue is irrigation for agriculture, both for food and consumer products such as textiles and vegetable oils, and these are global in nature. The areas around the Great Lakes are already large agricultural holdings, but these are largely run by collectives and large corporations using modern agricultural methods with relatively low labor demands. This isn’t going to support a large, well-paid workforce necessary to support revitalization of the upper Midwest “Rust Belt” region.
Stranger
I’m glad somebody wrote this kind of story.
It seems that every few weeks, some coastal reporter shows up in a city with below-average unemployment and rising wages and uncritically repeats the claims of a random Trump-supporting diner patron about how things are circling the drain because the local factory isn’t what it was in 1972.