I’m not “about” romanticizing anything, and certainly not some fantasy worker’s paradise of returning to an employment base of men working in polluting steel mills and then coming home to their cheaply built tract homes punctuated by strip malls and package stores to swill weak pilsner and yell at their wives for burning the meatloaf again. Nor do I think your promotion of legalized prostitution as the next employment growth area is anything but horrific obtusity in the face of evidence to the contrary. That you have not one actual original idea or foresight except repeating your mantra that “Gentrification is bad!” and that somehow cities on the edge of insolvency should contrive to “revitalize” blighted neighborhoods without actually changing anything or attracting people and employers which can provide a growing tax base is neither my responsibility nor a point of legitimate debate.
Prostitution as a cure for rust belt cities? That’s nothing but the fantasy of an immature young man who is failing to thrive.
As far as gentrification being beneficial despite being disruptive to the existing impoverished community, that’s true, but it beats the alternative, for attracting new business requires attracting people with the necessary education and skills, who will not be interested in living in a slum. As new businesses improve the city’s economy, some dislocated people will have some limited opportunity at getting employed, and those who are not lucky enough to get employed will end up moving on to other slums. That’s bad for them, but gives the city the opportunity to get back on its feet rather than continue on a downward spiral.
Where the USA often shoots itself in the foot in this regard is by insisting that poor people must pull themselves up by the bootstraps despite not having the resources to do so. If city, state and federal resources were better used to actually help poor people succeed rather than only marginally sustain them, the dislocation of poor people due to gentrification would be lessened, and the never-ending poverty trap would not be never-ending.
I’m going to throw in a slightly different point of view. Where do retirees go? It’s the fastest growing demographic group and, as others have pointed out, anyone with an income is going to need grocery stores, health services, and other services that lead to more local employment. If you can attract retirees to an area, that’s a big plus.
But who retires to Pittsburgh, or any of the areas under discussion? My wife retired from working for the State of CT and every single person she worked with was looking for places to retire to that did not include CT (primarily due to climate and property taxes). They were looking for better weather, nice environment, reasonable property taxes, good health care, ease of transportation, and so forth.
I’m not suggesting that a city or a whole geographic area should be relying on retirees to make their economy, but it’s certainly helpful to get a mix. Whether there’s a way to make that happen is debatable (unless you’re FL or AZ).
My wife was born and raised in Buffalo and her father was a union official for the steel industry. She remembers the city when it was a good place to live and when union jobs were plentiful. She also remembers its demise. We went there for a visit last year and it does seem that the city is trying hard to reinvent itself and clean up after years of decline and lack of will to pump money into it. The old sanitarium is now a modern hotel (where we stayed), and as you noted, the university has grown and is thriving. Lots of good art museums in the city, and the waterfront transformation is an ongoing source of work and revenue. The downtown area is also undergoing renovation. It’s clear that there are still large areas where poorer folk live that are in dire need of attention, but there is a lot of hope there that it can all be turned around.
I don’t want to jump in over my head here in an already well established conversation, but my concern is that we are going towards a society where all you have are very high skills and very low skills. It is the result of the eroding of the middle. Sure, we need people to sweep the floor and wash the dishes, and we need engineers and lawyers and other professionals, but what is lacking more and more are the jobs that fill the gap in between. One group shouldn’t exist to merely serve the other.
My thoughts are that this is what people feel so nostalgic for, a career where you didn’t need an advanced degree but you possess skills and smarts that were needed above the average schmoe to get that job & you could feed your family and live decently with some pride and dignity. At the end of the day, people feel a sense of satisfaction when they feel they are part of tapestry of a society and their contribution to the community is meaningful.
And it doesn’t help that most technical college systems are now more about milking financial aid than actually producing people with skills that match what the market needs. We still need plumbers and electricians and welders, and while good programs are hard to find, folks walking around with useless certificates are not.
It just feels more and more like communities of peasants and nobles all over the country.
There is still a need for “pumbers and electricians and welders”, and in fact, experienced people with these skills are often difficult to find. The problem is that the demand for these skills is not in the Rust Belt cities experiencing massive blight and loss of manufacturing jobs. They require people to travel or relocate to where the work is. And that is the history of the world; over any significant period of time, people have had to move for work or opportunities, and in fact, this is what stimulated masses of Europeans (and later people from Asia and Central and South America) to come to the United States in search of a better life.
But just “revitalizing” run down neighborhoods of cheap tract and project housing in decaying former industrial cities (with whose money?) is not going to make the work or opportunities reappear. If these cities are ever going to return to any state approximating their glory days, it will be by developing or attracting employers and cultivating a tax base to fund urban renewal. And the tracts of ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties era rowhouses, tract homes, and housing projects, often containing noxious materials, not built to modern safety and convenience standards, and difficult and costly to renovate for good energy efficiency are going to be demolished to make way for more appealing, efficient, and hopefully better designed and constructed housing, including mixed use and mixed income housing with integrated community green space that will hopefully reduce socioeconomic stratification and provide better options for transportation to reduce excessive fuel consumption. Which, by the way, will create more jobs in construction and maintenance, and provide a basis for sustainable retail sales versus giant big box stores competing with online retailers.
I hear ya on all that and I don’t disagree. Now granted, maybe I jumped in on the wrong conversation because my experiences are with dying towns in the south, and I know very little of specific things in the Rust Belt, but complaints against revitalization versus gentrification, and exactly which is which, and just who will benefit from it are pretty much the same everywhere.
In the South, nobody wants to go back to Mill Towns and Company Stores any more than Rust Belt towns want to go back to the tract housing and dirty industry run off you are describing.
I think people now, as in the past, will move to where the jobs are, and realize that doesn’t necessarily mean some great migration away from where your roots are. People are more and more accepting that your work and life no longer have to keep you bound or “tied down” as people used to say to 1 physical place of work.
I was just making the point that there is a real mismatch between actual middle skill range jobs, The Trades, if you will, and the training needed and how people can actually get there. As you said, these people are difficult to find, and yet they are so necessary in the world of work. Many young people have misperceptions about The Trades or a lack of information. They think you either have to be a chemist or a ditch digger with nothing in between.
I am all for tearing down blight & increasing green spaces, etc…but the people who are not rich but not poor are the ones bringing some good stuff to the table as well. It just seems like the current road we are going down is designed to push most of those would-be middle-level people into the lower end, creating more underemployed and poor people. Towns of peasants and nobles, just like down in Palm Beach, FL.
And I understand it is multi-factoral, I am not of the opinion we should hate on developers. It is an education problem, a political problem, a social problem. At the end of the day, there is no shame in being a carpenter or welder, and truth be told people who make things with their hands may have more of a sense of satisfaction than those of us who bang on keyboards all day.
I just know that people who build things are vital to rebuilding a community, and I mean the ones who turn those blueprints into buildings. Revitalization doesn’t have to create a wasteland in the middle, but it often does.
Unfortunately skilled trades jobs does not solve the problem. For all that a demand exists, the fact of the matter is a large chunk of the “middle” used to come from well-paid manufacturing jobs. Most/many of those( many of which fell into the category of “semi-skilled labor”, now often roboticized in what industry is left )are gone and will not be returning. There are not enough skilled trades positions to make up for that loss. The middle-wage segment has shifted from substantially blue collar to substantially white collar, which requires degrees/specialized education. And at that there seems to be fewer middle-wage positions to begin with.
I really do wonder how much society will continue to stratify. The 1940’s-early 1960’s really do seem to stick out more and more as an anomalously economically egalitarian era( for white males, let it be said ).
It has worked nicely for Elliot Lake, Ontario, which used to be a mining town until the mine closed. It has not worked as well for Manitowadge, Ontario, which also used to be a mining town until the mine closed, but which due to its location (by Northern Ontario wilderness standards, Elliot Lake is on the edge of nowhere, but Manitouwadge is in the middle of nowhere) has attracted a rougher crowd of retirees who often cannot afford to live there and move back south.
It’s a matter of having the right combination of healthcare facilities, housing, infrastructure, recreation, and transportation all wrapped up in and affordable package, which is workable for communities that were doing well before they lost their main business but then moved quickly to attract pensioners and thereby maintain enough of a tax base to remain a nice place. It would not work well for communities that went to rot before marketing themselves to retirees.
Um, you seemed to of adopted the mentality of a religious fundamentalist. Legalized prostitution has been supported by human rights activists, and legalized prostitution would offer a lot more dignity than celibacy. Celibacy is one of the most artificial ideas anyone could ever come up with, especially if you have the no sex rule pushed onto you.
And to further my explanation legalized prostitution as you know would be an optional enterprise. Nobody would be forced to become a prostitute. You could become one if you want to, but no one would force you if you don’t want to. And I didn’t just suggest legalized prostitution for the Rust Belt, but for anywhere in the US.
Columbus is a successful city as much as Lincoln, Nebraska is. Thus, they are both state capitals. If Columbus wasn’t the capital of Ohio, then it would be struggling as much as all the other Ohio cities are. Somehow I feel that Chillicothe should still be the capital of Ohio.
I meant to say “pretty sure”. If only Straight Dope would allow me to edit my posts, I would do it. And you don’t need pics of me, and it doesn’t matter even if I have warts on every inch of my body.
If it wasn’t the capital, it wouldn’t exist. The city was founded to sidestep the claims of all the other towns that wanted it.
The economy of Columbus is driven by state government and OSU, which is there because it’s the capital, and insurance, which is there because of the first two. It never had a lot of industry to lose, although what it had is as gone as in the northern tier of the state. If Chillicothe were the capital, it would be today what Columbus is today, and a somewhat-larger Franklinton would be what Chillicothe is.
And Eastern Ontario. Well, all of Southern Ontario, outside the megalopolis of Toronto, the city of Ottawa, and maybe some smaller places like Kitchener-Waterloo and Kingston. I am in the city of Peterborough, and it is a classic Rust Belt town.
In my grandfather’s time, GE alone had five thousand employees in Peterborough. And there were many other manufacturing companies, like Quaker Oats, Ovaltine, Outboard Marine, and others. (These are all names I remember my parents speaking of…) There were railways and meat-packing plants and a canoe factory and all sorts of things. Up until the 1970s the city lived off manufacturing.
Now GE has a few hundred employees and may be closing. All the others I mentioned, including most of the railways, are gone, except for Quaker Oats (now part of Pepsico). There is some light manufacturing, plastics and aerospace, plus three call centres, but nothing to replace the number of jobs that are gone. The city is doing its best to encourage new things to start, a research park out by the university, a tech incubator downtown, but there are still a lot of empty storefronts.
Oshawa, built around GM, has also suffered the same kind of hollowing out, but it is much closer to Toronto and has become more integrated into the megalopolis.
The number of manufacturing jobs in the US has actually increased over the past eight or so years, although the percent out of total nonfarm payrolls has been decreasing since it dipped below 30% in the 50s (it’s 8.5% now). Most of that is due to growth elsewhere (+95M total nonfarm payroll since the 50s, or +58M since the 1979 manu jobs peak) rather than losses in manufacturing (-3.5M since the 50s, or -7M since the 1979 peak).
What you just explained can be said for any state capital in the US. And just about every major city in the US, has a university, and cities don’t automatically gain success off a university. By just looking at the Sun Belt cities they’ve managed to be very successful without depending on a university. Just look at Las Vegas, which owes most of it’s success to the casino industry and not a university.
And I’d also like to point out that Columbus is largely to blame for the decline of other Ohio cities such as Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, Youngstown, Lima, and even Cincinnati, to some extent. And yes Cincinnati is a still a struggling city. And population decline surely explains it, and not just for the city proper but even it’s inner ring suburbs as well such as Norwood, St. Bernard, Reading, and even Covington, KY.
By just looking at Norwood, it used to have a General Motors plant, which gave Norwood’s economy a huge boost, but when it closed up shop, Norwood’s economy feel apart like nothing before. If Norwood still had its GM plant it would be doing a whole lot better.
And closing a facility which boosted a community’s economy is never a good idea. So now you can see why the Rust Belt has declined. It’s because valuable employers closed up shop.
Predicting is always risky and difficult, especially about the future.
Economists can predict the next 5 years reasonably well; 10, pretty good; 20, not so much. 50 years ahead? Forget it.
Too many things could happen in 50 or 100 years. Maybe global warming accelerates and Florida loses 2/3 of its above-water land mass. Then Kentucky mountaintops will be the new Palm Beach.
Maybe some new resource will be discovered that will replace coal or steel. Maybe ocean waterfront becomes too dangerous to live near.
Many of the comments here assume that current trends will continue indefinitely. I predict they won’t, and so we will be terribly wrong. Are you preparing for warming and sea level rise? What if the planet enters a severe cold spell (it’s happened many times before) and the sea level drops, causing a mile-thick layer of ice over Milwaukee (it’s happened before, and not long ago)? Probably not in our lifetime, but it’s 99% sure that it will happen.
I understand if manufacturing in the US has increased, however the increased manufacturing has been popping up outside of the Rust Belt. If they can introduce it back to the Rust Belt then maybe just maybe the Rust Belt could experience some optimal recovery.