I’d say for the ones that won’t, they could become ghost towns, and go the direction of Elcor, MN and Porterville, TX.
I will say that the working class is disappearing as a result, and they have been flocking to the Sun Belt as a result. Poverty is now a huge issue in the Rust Belt mainly because of difficulty to seek any kind of employment. You’d be lucky if you work the drive thru at any fast food place. Service jobs also face the threat of automation as well. Who knows automation may transform us into a laborless society.
I was going to mention Pittsburg as well. The Allentown / Bethlehem / Easton area has also seen some improvements after the Bethlehem Steel plant went out of business and was converted into a casino/conference center/condos/entertainment complex.
Yes, they’re all wearing burlap and living in shanties under the local bridge.
Buffalo won’t drown unless there is a huge increase in precipitation in the upper great lakes region. Looks like there is more than a 2x leeway in how much water can flow over the falls per Wikipedia:
So assuming Buffalo was not flooded during that peak (which I am not certain of since as a rough guess it implies Lake Erie water levels were at least a couple feet higher than average), the Niagara River could drain 225,000 cfps sustainably without flooding Buffalo. Now it might lead to increased erosion of Niagara Falls but that’s a different issue.
And that’s just the maximum recorded flow rate, it’s possible that more flow than that is possible without flooding Buffalo. So unless precipitation rates in the Great Lakes region triple or more, Buffalo is safe.
Lots of Italian lastnames listed among those who are afraid of the Hispanics. Excuse me while I go search for my eyes, they rolled off…
I’m not sure how well UK solutions would copy over to the US. I can only speak from a UK perspective, but it seems to me that the sheer scale difference makes it a whole different problem. The brain-drain impact is going to be far lower in a country where even moving as far away as you can get is still only a day’s drive away, and there’s likely another significant city within an hour or so’s drive.
Someone who lost their job in Sheffield could find work in Nottingham and commute; even major job loss doesn’t necessarily mean a major loss of tax payers or people in general. Add to that two universities, and it’s going to keep a decent pull even at its worst. I mean, I (briefly) went to University in Sheffield 16 years ago. There were bad areas, but also a lot of thriving ones even then.
Birmingham is at a transport bottleneck. Many of the major North/South routes go right past it, and its main train station is the biggest and busiest in the country. While the road and rail networks are as they are, it’s always going to have major draws for many businesses.
Plus, well, Sheffield and Birmingham are some of the biggest cities here, and we don’t have that many. It makes sense for much greater measures to be taken to keep them functioning. For a impact comparison, you’d probably have to look at somewhere smaller, like the old Lancashire mill towns, which are largely pretty well decaying after their major businesses went. They’re far smaller; more of a rust garter, but it’s still a big and largely unsolved problem to us.
Wouldn’t help. It’s a corrosive culture through the whole area.
not just Italian, but southern Italian. I wonder if Ms. Ricco, or Messrs. Sacco and Barletta know how “well-regarded” people with their last names were in this country in the early 1900s.
NM
Yeah, I’m offended at any implication that I, being descended from pre-1776 colonists of northern European descent, somehow have to have some racial anxiety on behalf of Italian-Americans and other relatively recent immigrants because they’re “white” and Dominicans are “non-white.” I think the Yanks of northern European (and Protestant) descent stopped being the “majority” a while back, since we included neither the “latinos” nor the “swarthy Latins”–and I’m not sure the WASP’s ever were a majority here. If we got through all right a generation ago (when Bloom County was joking about this kind of thing by one measure or another) there’s really no need to get exercised now about the incidence of a pale skin color.
And I could just as rationally consider West Indians as my fellow “American creoles” and the Italians as johnny-come-lately Europeans.
No. The days of tons of high paying jobs for people whose education stopped in middle school or high school are over. I don’t see them coming back (unless unions become a huge thing again, which probably won’t happen. But unions could raise wages/benefits in service sector jobs a bit).
Let’s put it this way. If we could strengthen the Rust Belt with unionized service jobs, then that might just work. But I will say one thing. People are instead attempting to revitalize the Rust Belt by bringing in the wrong industries such as high tech or healthcare, which require a more educated workforce, and by just looking at the Rust Belt’s long time working class population, they wouldn’t qualify for those industries. Of course manufacturing jobs are now scarce, if not completely gone. But I will say the decline of the working class has lead to the decline of the Rust Belt as a result. As you know a lot of the working class in the Rust Belt has flocked out to the Sun Belt, in light of having no work in the Rust Belt.
But in case you haven’t noticed, the working class may be disappearing, but the underclass aka the very poor is not disappearing. It has grown massively, an thanks to the loss of high paying jobs with minimal education, and the Rust Belt is nowadays loaded with the underclass. Don’t expect the more affluent classes to replace the working class, not just in the Rust Belt, but anywhere in the US.
Correct if I’m wrong but are you saying that being college educated is necessary because they are not a ton of jobs being available with minimal education? I’m open to any answer.
The days where you could get a decent job with just a high school diploma are mostly gone, now it is all lower wage work. I know people who had jobs that paid $30/hr with just a high school diploma when they worked in a factory. Nowadays people are lucky to get jobs in service industries for minimum wage.
However education alone isn’t the answer, there are more people than jobs. If everyone gets a degree in nursing then the field becomes oversaturated. I don’t think there are enough jobs for everyone, let alone decent jobs.
There are a lot of jobs going undone in the US because we don’t have the people with the right experience and credentials to do them. It’s untrue that there are more people than good jobs. The trouble is we have a lot of folks with either no education or skills in the vertical fields that need high end people or we have a lot of people with educations in fields other than those we need those high end people in. If you have a degree in political science it’s going to be hard for you to fill a role in biotech or engineering. Same goes for someone with just a high school education. But the jobs are there for people who have the training and skills.
In the US we’ve been lucky, since even though we don’t seem to be home growing the people with the skills and education needed we have over a million immigrants a year, many of who come in with exactly those skills and training. We have also, in the past, had a pretty robust visa program allowing companies to bring in people we need to fill the gaps. That might be changing now under Trump.
There would be no problem in releasing more water over the falls and down the St. Lawrence. There could be a problem with flooding if weather patterns are so unpredictiable that there is not enough lead time to release water, vis a vis last year’s flooding on Lake Ontario.
The problem is and will continue to be watershed management. Not a heck of a lot of water flows into the Great Lakes system, so any significant growth must take into account the need to return almost all water used back into the system. So far, it’s going fairly well, but there is pressure to permit diversion of water out of the system via (1) growth of populated areas across watersheds (have a look at western Lake Michigan, and (2) using Great Lakes system water to deal with the draining of the Ogallala Aquifer.
There is a lot of inertia when it comes to immigration, so the USA will not be running out of qualified immigrants any time soon, but in the long term, populism and racism will cause the USA to fall behind the other first world nations. To put this in perspective, imagine that you are from a second world country and that you want a better life for your children and future generations. Do you move to Chicago, Detroit or Buffalo where racism is a huge – and I mean a yuuge – problem, health care is not affordable, and education is spotty depending on which school board you are financially able to relocate to, or do you relocate to Toronto (and yes, Toronto is or was part of the rust belt auto manufacturer economy), where racism exists to some degree but is not a major problem, where school funding is strong and consistent on a per-child basis, and where single payor heath care provides excellent health care to everyone other than remote fly-in communities, not to mention the fourth largest city in North America, in which about half of the people are immigrants and about half of the people are visible minorities which makes landing up in Toronto less stressful for new immigrants, for people immigrate to Toronto from every corner of the world. Quite simply, it is not the Great Lakes region that is unappealing or economically unsustainable. The trick now is to turn things around for the cities in the region that have not kept up.
A city to watch in the Great Lakes region is Windsor, Ontario, which rose and fell along with Detroit and many other automotive cities in the region. Thanks to the recent uptick in the automotive industry, Windsor is back on its feet again, but is focusing in diversifying rather than betting its entire future on one horse, particularly with Trump wanting to kill off trade. Windsor is pinning its future on diversification and quality of life. We’ll see how that plays out in the next couple of decades, but my guess it that it will come out on top while many communities south of the border will flounder because they cannot compete on quality of life (e.g. top health care and top education available for all, in a culture that for the most part welcomes immigrants of all races and creeds).
Note how health care, education, and welcoming immigrants from all ethnic backgrounds is an important part of this. But it is very difficult for individual cities to compete in the world when they are in a country in which health care is for the financially well off, education is for the financially well off, and being a visible or religious minority is a wall to becoming financially well off. Folks, it’s this simple: to thrive you must have viable communities, to have viable communities you must offer quality of life, and to be able to offer quality of life you must set the stage for newcomers to rise rather than to be ground down. That will take a re-direction of state and federal governments, and for such a re-direction, the American people will have to take a long, hard look at themselves and be willing to make profound personal, cultural and systemic changes.
You are overall correct. I will say one thing. All the revitalization in the Rust Belt cities has been geared towards those of the professional class. But they haven’t done anything for the long time non-professional residents. They have gentrified the downtown areas some, but that was mainly by building condos and luxury apartments, which only affluent newcomers could afford. That’s not good enough. In order to revitalize a city, you’ve got to do more than downtown beautification. Just take a look at all the blighted neighborhoods in Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, and many other Rust Belt cities. They have yet to of been revitalized, and they are still in horrific condition. If only those neighborhoods could be revitalized, but not gentrified, then maybe just maybe we could see some optimal recovery in the Rust Belt. And investing into mixed income housing, would be great for the Rust Belt, that way there is no wealth inequality and nobody is left out.
Until we see the blighted neighborhoods fixed up, the Rust Belt will not recover.
Explain how you’re going to revitalize these neighborhoods, but not gentrify them.
Anyway, I hereby predict that in 50 years demographics are going to be different, and regions and cities that are struggling today will be much more successful, and regions and cities that are successful will be struggling.
What’s not going to happen is a bunch of factory jobs or coal mining jobs. What’s also not going to happen are a bunch of software development jobs. You’re not going to be the next Silicon Valley, because in 50 years there will be giant technology industry, but there probably won’t be lots of high-paying jobs in the technology industry. There will be developers and designers but only a handful of them, just like a modern auto factory or steel mill has workers, but only a fraction of what they had 50 years ago.
Rust belt cities could rebound, not as manufacturing or service economy centers, but just as places for people to live. they’ve got to live somewhere, right? But it could also be that people are moving to brand-new cities in X, X being somewhere that people in 50 years consider desirable and worth paying a premium for. Is that going to be New York, or Topeka? The trouble is that I don’t see the place for Detroit in any of this. What are the advantages of Detroit over other places? You don’t have the bright lights big city, and you don’t have the small town main street. Small towns all over the US might revive, but what’s the future of medium sized cities that aren’t part of a megalopolis?
Oh, yeah, you’re the “Gentrification is primal evil” guy. So, please explain how to “revitalize” “all the blighted neighborhoods” without raising rents and property taxes on people who often lack decent employment because the industries they relied upon have moved to other countries or turned to automation.
Stranger
We could invest into mixed income housing and make the neighborhood safer and cleaner.