Will the Rust Belt ever recover?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Yes, I think the Rust Belt will recover, but it will be reborn as something other than the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh is showing the rest of the Rust Belt how it’s done, and there’s been a lot of interest from people in high tech fields to think beyond San Francisco, Boston, and New York when funding new ventures. The Rust Belt is attractive because of the opportunity for low real estate, and in a lot of cases, cities and states willing to play ball with companies on taxes and regulation (whether that’s good in the grander scheme is a separate discussion).

One thing that makes cities even more attractive is if they have research centers. Pittsburgh has two big ones: Carnegie Mellon, which is a leader in engineering, IT, robotics, and other techie fields, and it also has the University of Pittsburgh, which is a leading research centre in the health & sciences field. Cleveland has the Cleveland Clinic, and the Buffalo is also known as a health sciences center. I also think that the health science research areas can spawn off IT activity even if it doesn’t already exist. So in a lot of ways the future of the Rust Belt is bright - perhaps even brighter than what we think of as boom towns.

The key challenge is…getting around bad politics. If the Rust Belt cities can just keep the politics out of their business, they’ve got a bright future.

62

Duluth has seen quite a bit of revitalization - while technically not the rust belt, it has a lot in common with rust belt cities. I think its a better town now than it was before the steel collapse. Hibbing, Virginia and environs will probably never “recover” but will settle into small town economies - supporting tourists (campers and vacationers) and the localized economy. Part of the issue is that while they still pull taconite out, they need a lot fewer people to pull it out than they did in 1970.

And that leads me to believe that part of “recovery” will have to do with size. If you can be Virginia Minnesota and contract back (albeit with plenty of growing pains) into a right sized city, you’ll recover - but be different. If you are Duluth, and have a relatively small population - in comparison to Detroit or Cleveland - a few small businesses can make a significant difference. Pittsburgh has other resources - it was never really a single industry town and is close enough to other urban centers to get synergy, unlike Detroit.

West Virginia is a special place. Anyone younger than 40 in Hibbing has made the choice to stay or move - and there are places where you don’t need to move far or out of your culture and can still visit your friends and relatives on weekends. Duluth, Warroad (if you want to make windows or snowmobiles), the Twin Cities (which is a different culture than the Range, but still in state), St. Cloud, Rochester - all have decent economies in state. And schools here have been pretty good to date. It feels like in West Virginia people don’t feel like they have comfortable economic options - there isn’t a place they can move to without feeling like they are immigrating to a foreign country and I don’t get the feeling they are well prepared for that leap.

63

You’re not completely wrong but so far the kind of recovery you pointed out, has been geared towards those of the professional class, and it hasn’t been helping the nonprofessionals at all. By just taking a look at all the aforementioned cities, you still have struggling people of the lower class. In Pittsburgh you have out of work people from the steel industry, who could be either unemployed or underemployed. In the case of the former, that person could of gotten laid off from a number of jobs, and is willing to take any job it could get its hands on. As for the latter, that person could be working the minimum wage say at Burger King or Dunkin Donuts. And by just looking at the fields of engineering, IT, and many other high tech endeavors, those industries require a more educated workforce, and there’s no way working class Yinzers are going to qualify for those fields. In case you haven’t noticed, Pittsburgh still suffers from population erosion, and anyone of the lower class, is more likely to leave than stay.

As for Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic hasn’t exactly gotten Cleveland back on its feet. The aforementioned company again would require a more educated workforce. No working class Clevelander is going to say, “hey let’s go get a job at the Cleveland Clinic”. You know why. Because that person doesn’t have a medical degree or any kind of degree for that matter. The same could be said for Buffalo. Having the cities depend on the healthcare industry to revitalize is not the answer, because that industry depends on a more educated workforce.

And by just looking at the demographics of Rust Belt cities, most of the people are less educated and nonaffluent. And no the Rust Belt’s future isn’t so bright. It’s grimmer than you think.

64

Come to think of it you’ve managed to come up with a real argument. Prostitution is an industry that can really boost the economy. Not just for the Rust Belt but anywhere. It actually pays well and you don’t need any formal education for it, and it allows freedom of human well. Many people are suggesting more professional industries such as IT and healthcare, but that’s not exactly the answer. Prostitution allows more economic freedom. I’m pretty there’s desperate women, and maybe even some men, who have been doing illegal prostitution to make ends meet. Prostitution has been outlawed all for the wrong reasons and thanks to idiotic conservative politicians and let’s not forget the Mann Act. Prostitution should be legal all over the United States, and that can really, really help desperate people especially those living in economically depressed communities. It would even work for small towns that hardly have anything. Just take a look at some small towns in Nebraska. They are so depressed that people can live there anymore. It’s time we get a real industry to fix the economy, and that is prostitution.

65

Pics or I don’t believe you.

66

The Rust Belt will never recover as the Rust Belt. There just aren’t as many jobs in manufacturing any more, anywhere, and no amount of tarrifs or whatever will ever change that. But that doesn’t mean that those places can’t thrive again. They’ll just have to do it in ways other than manufacturing.

Take Cleveland, for example. Nowadays, the city’s top industry is banking, and the largest single employer is the Cleveland Clinic. Telecommunications is also big. And while the city is smaller than in its heyday in the 1950s, it’s also a heck of a lot less blighted.

67

And here are the problems. Banking is another industry that requires a more educated workforce, and anyone who works in banking in inner city Cleveland, most likely commutes from the more affluent suburbs. Most residents of inner city Cleveland don’t work in banking. And as for the Cleveland Clinic, again that employer requires a more educated workforce, especially those who have a Masters or PhD. It’s not an employer that can get working class Clevelanders to work. The same applies for telecommunications.

And Cleveland is actually far from recovery. It still suffers from population erosion and if you take a closer look, Cleveland has a nicer West Side and a more blighted and decrepit East Side. And as for the latter, most of it has yet to be revitalized. Those neighborhoods look like there out of the apocalypse. They have fixed up the downtown area some but it’s going to take more than downtown beautification to truly revitalize the city. If only they could fix up most of the East Side neighborhoods than they could give Cleveland a much greater chance to optimal recovery.

68

While it’s impossible to say for sure, the general consensus is that the Great Lakes will see a decline in water levels, not a rise.

69

South-western Ontario is mostly farmland, with a handful of communities that also have or had a manufacturing base. Guelph, which bounds south-western Ontario and the golden Horseshoe (Toronto, Hamilton etc.), has some people who commute into the GTA.

Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo to the west of it have substantial light industry, so they took a hit, but they were diversified enough to come through quite well. Note that Guelph has been an agricultural college town for over a century, and Waterloo is one of the top computer and engineering universities in the world. In the centre of the region, London is the financial centre of the region, and its University of Western Ontario has the top business school in the country that holds its own on the international stage, and excellent medical and law schools, so it pulled through OK, although half an hour south of it, St. Thomas took a beating because it was mostly dependant on the auto industry (well, that and however much tourism one gets for being the place where Jumbo the Elephant was hit by a train). At the western end, across the river from Detroit, Windsor took a beating and is not out of the hole yet because it was almost entirely dependant upon the automotive industry, and notably its university is not so much outstanding in its field, but rather is more along the lines of out standing in a field.

IMHP, the region as a whole has come through OK because the region, the province and the country all put in a lot of resources over many years to develop its universities which in turn have generated a metric shit-ton of businesses, so when the automotive industry crashed, the cites in the region were well positioned to absorb such a huge hit and emerge scarred but surviving and in one case thriving.

Apart from the rust belt, I’ve seen the same sort of thing in north eastern Ontario’s Sudbury and northwestern Ontario’s Thunder Bay, where there have been ups and downs in the two primary industries, mining and forestry. Long-term development of these cities’ universities have helped stabilize and grow their economies. For example, the future in hard rock mining is in robotics and automation. Sudbury Laurentian University, in conjunction with the mining industry in its region, is the leader in this. Lakehead’s forestry programs are preparing the forestry industry (which will never recover from the move away from pulp and paper) for changes anticipated by global climate change.

IMHP, for the rust belt or other regions hit with a game changer, the key to rolling with the punches is to start with a regional centre and put in a lot of resources over the years into education, which better prepares the regional centre and much of the rest of the region to roll with the punches rather than be steamrolled flat by them.

70

It’s not narrow-minded; I’m just not willing to waste twenty-odd minutes of my time watching yet another rambling TED talk with no actual point or logic, and your description has not convinced me that there is anything novel to be learned from the video which would fix the fundamental problems of the Rust Belt cities.

Displacement is a problem, but not one that is going to be magically solved by refurbishing existing housing versus the hated ‘gentrification’. If the people living in those houses don’t have jobs or income, they can’t pay rent or taxes and utilities regardless of whether they are old-new refurbished or new-new ‘gentrified’. And without a tax base a city cannot afford to do any ‘referbishment’ or attract investors and employers to bring in jobs. The notion that there was some kind of social perfection from 1955 to 1970 and we should somehow preserve jobs, industries, and people in the milieu of that period is not even remotely realistic. Manufacturing jobs aren’t just gone oversees; they are going, period, as the labor force shrinks and becomes more costly compared to demand for products, and the technology for automation becomes more capable. Some combination of job training, education, and (likely) basic guranteed income is going to become necessary to prevent urban blight from spreading; trying to fix up the present to look like a slightly better version of the past is almost literally creating a Potemkin village.

Holy motherfuck of atrocious notions, your plan to replace manufacturing is to have everyone fuck for a living? Setting aside the public health concerns with your plan to industrialize intercourse and commoditize blowjobs, have you considered what a dystopia your world populated by an underclass of fuck-slaves who live to be mounted and pounded for pay would look like? Notwithstanding the incredible opposition you’d get to this from the Internet streaming porn industry which makes tens of billions of dollars a year based upon peoples’ frustrations and unrealized sexual kinks. The kind of lobbying suction that industry could pull if they were so incentivized would make the NRA, commercial agriculture, and the tobacco industry look like street beggars by comparison. This is not even remotely plausible and would be rightly opposed by anyone concerned about human dignity or public health.

I’m not sure you actually live in the same reality as everyone else here. It is one thing to be entranced by the farcical notion that fixing up ratty old housing projects is going to somehow help the employment problem of the socioeconomic lower class, but suggesting that prostitution is the new growth industry that will save America from further social and economic stratification is one of the most perposterous ideas I’ve heard in the last couple of years, and we’ve all heard some crazy shit coming from normally grounded and sedate corners of the executive policy world.

Stranger

71

I never said that Cleveland is without blight. Every city everywhere, at every point in history, has had some amount of blight. I just said that it has less blight now than when it was an industrial powerhouse.

And it’s probably not true that most of the Cleveland Clinic employees have advanced degrees, and certainly not true that they don’t have any unskilled jobs. As with any employer, there’s a pyramid structure: There are more NPs than MDs, and more RNs than NPs, and more medical technicians than RNs, and you still need someone to sweep the hallways, take out the trash, and clear the snow off the sidewalks. Plus, even those MDs still mean more jobs for common schmoes: They eat food and wear clothes and live in houses, same as the rest of us, which means more demand for grocery-store cashiers and mall clerks and construction workers.

72

I agree the cities and towns affected by the flight of manufacturing jobs can re-invent themselves. I was thinking about how they could capitalize on the recent trend to “on-shore” customer service centers. It would seem logical that tapping into a native English speaking population would be attractive, and while the jobs are not professional class, they would offer steady employment, benefits, and stability to people in these communities. Perhaps with some training/retraining, people with at least a HS education could do some of these jobs. I think the drawback is that many customer service-type jobs that went overseas tap into a highly educated work force over there, at a fraction of minimum wage over here. This is certainly a barrier, but maybe there are ways to overcome this, and maybe there are some call centers where this could work?

The other barrier is the local population’s willingness to do this kind of work, if the culture and history has been in a different kind of industry.

73

It’s absolutely true that we need someone to sweep hallways and such but you also have to understand that those kinds of jobs don’t pay much.

74

I must say that you did manage to come up with a valid argument. As it stands out, if the Rust Belt can’t return to a manufacturing based economy, then it could just switch to a service based economy. Perhaps we could start offering folks nonprofessional service jobs. Thus we could get folks to work in retail, warehousing, customer service, etc. We of course still need people to bag groceries, load trucks, answer phones, wash dishes, and so forth.

75

Yeah, get people working in retail just before amazon destroys retail.

76

I just found a site that predicts that e-commerce sales will be 12.4% of all retail sales by 2020. In other words, seven of eight dollars spent at retail will still be by other means (B&M stores, for the most part). I think it’s an exaggeration to say that Amazon will destroy retail.

77

No, you’re missing the real objective. Bring back the Ben Franklin and Woolworths by refurbishing old storefronts and hiring disgruntled former steel and factory workers, because if there is anything people need, it is overpriced knick knacks and and mangy looking bedding from a harshly lit, dirty store with cranky staff and a self-serve Slurpee machine instead of the ubiquitous Starbucks franchise. Also, get rid of credit card readers and go back to those old manual credit card imprinters with the carbon copy sheets that would frequently tear or wrinkle up because nothing says “A Great Future Awaits!” like ‘Seventies era commerce technology.

The hookers can give blowjobs in the bathrooms, and handys out front from an Econoline. It’s like the version of Back To The Future, Part 2 where Marty doesn’t steal back the sports atlas and Biff Tannen becomes a gambling tycoon.

Stranger

78

Seems to me a lot of the issue in this thread is people disagreeing about what’s important about a city; is it simply the place? Is it the residents? Is it a mixture of place, people and culture?

Someone who’s looking at revitalising the place, but considers it irrelevant who lives there so long as there’s a functioning economy is arguing for something entirely different to someone who considers the place of secondary importance to the residents and culture.

From the second group’s perspective, you’re not revitalising a city if you create a situation where none of the existing residents can afford to live there, you’re destroying it. But that second group might consider (as an extreme example) rebuilding everything in a better location 200 miles away as ‘revitalising the city’, so long as the residents were in control of the decision, and the culture was preserved. From the first group’s perspective of course, the city is revitalised with the new residents and destroyed with the new location.

Personally, I’m somewhere in the middle, but tending more towards people than place.

79

Exactly. And why should they? They don’t exactly create a lot of added value, do they? Nor have the people who do these jobs have a lot of special skills to make their employers eager to keep them happy to be working there. So Chris decides he doesn’t want to work for minimum wage any more and walks away when you refuse to give him a raise? <shrug>

You can teach anyone with no worse than moderately below average intelligence/physical ability everything needed to empty wastebaskets and push a broom in, what, a couple hours? A day or two at most. So what if Chris had thirty years of experience as a janitor? He wasn’t doing an appreciably better job of it than Billy, the kid just hired last week. (Maybe worse, because Billy isn’t yet near suicidal over the boredom of the job.) So why should the experienced old hand be paid any more than the rank beginner is?

I think we are running out of jobs that don’t require prolonged training and acquired skills and the ability to learn and keep learning as the demands of the job constantly change.

Either we need to figure out how to educate everyone into programmers and CPAs and neurosurgeons and the like or we have to figure out how to run a society where a sizeable chunk of the population can’t add anything to the economy except by serving as a mass of people to keep consuming what the productive people make/do. Likely by just handing them the money to buy stuff with.

What do you think?

Is basically every human able to become trained to a high (professional?) level of some intellectually challenging task, and the problem is we need to figure out better education methods? Even if so, does society have a way absorb everyone into jobs on that level? What are we going to do with 100,000 more neurosurgeons once every hospital and clinic in the world already has twenty on staff?

Or, in fact, are there people who simply don’t have the intelligence/ambition/skillset to make the cut? Mary would have been an absolutely fine spindle changer at the old mill, but she cannot handle the math to be any kind of engineer. Bob would have been fine walking behind a plow and threshing grain, but he doesn’t have the memory and verbal skills to tackle being a lawyer.

Then the trouble is, there is very little need for spindle changers or farm hands these days. What do these people work at instead? Do we create make work jobs just so they’ll be busy and ‘earn’ their living? Or just give them money for nothing, so there’s enough people buying movie tickets and iPhones and everything else?

80

Gee, I’m surprised you have actually said something like this. I thought you were about romanticizing the future and not the past. But instead you romanticized the latter.