What exactly are you trying to romanticize then. I’ll tell you one thing. We are now living days, where single mothers are either unemployed or underemployed, and living off of some type of government support such as food stamps and Section 8, and if they’re underemployed they are working the minimum wage, say at a fast food place or convenience store, and after work they come home bitching on the phone with either their ex-husband or ex-boyfriend about paying child support. The single mother has as few as one or as many as four kids, and she struggles every single day to support her kinds. And to solidify the argument the decline of the working class has lead to the rise of the underclass.
Why would they ‘introduce it back to the Rust Belt’? What would be the benefit?
I suggest you answer the questions.
Kind of hard for me to answer for you, so I guess I’ll pass with the assumption you have no real idea why it would be a good idea or even what it would mean.
Well if they introduce it back to the Rust Belt, then perhaps we could see some economic boost for the region. But it is under my suspicion that you are saying it shouldn’t be reintroduced to the Rust Belt.
Well, appreciate the answer instead of evasion…or whatever that was. No, I don’t think it needs to be ‘reintroduced to the Rust Belt’ actively. If it organically emerges from that region, that’s all great, but there no benefit that I see to trying to force it. Manufacturing isn’t what it was when the Rust Belt was in it’s prime, and it never will be again what it was back then. Today’s manufacturing in the US is high tech automation with a smaller, highly technical and skilled workforce supporting the machines.
If you can give some reasons as to why you think it would be a good idea beside artificially boosting a local economy I’m all ears. Maybe there is a good logistical reason why you’d want to build the infrastructure to put in high tech manufacturing in the Rust Belt, or some other reason I’m missing. Simply doing it to give some ‘economic boost for the region’ is going to cost a lot of up front capital and I’m not seeing a point.
ETA: The US is, today, manufacturing more goods and services than at any time in it’s history, so you’d be talking of moving from where we are doing that today back to where we did it 20 or 30 years ago. That’s the issue I’m having with this.
If you’re talking about Pittsburgh, I can tell you that many of us don’t really want or need the steel industry to come back. For several reasons:
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Our economy has evolved, and is still changing, it’s mostly devoted to medicine, technology and education. A lot of people come here to GET jobs. We were voted “Most Liveable City” at one point. That’s why Obama became so popular here – for acknowledging what we’ve accomplished. Is it perfect? No. But we survived and fought back.
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We’re still dealing with the environmental impact, even after cleaning things up in the 1960s, and with Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement, people worry about things going back to what they were like prior to that. THAT’S why people here were so pissed off about the “Pittsburgh, not Paris” comment. It’s been a good fifty-some years since we started improving the environment, and we still deal with a lot of pollution. The last thing we want is to turn back the clock!
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It would probably cost more to bring back steel than it would bring in. There are no mills here anymore – they’ve all been torn down, or converted to other purposes. Any steel workers who lost their jobs are all retirement age now. You’d have to start over from scratch.
People who think Pittsburgh can bring back steel know jackshit about this place.
I’ll just tell you right now that today’s Pittsburgh is inferior to 1940s and 50s Pittsburgh. Becoming a hub for the high tech industry has clearly failed to make a big impression on me. You see it’s the steel industry that built Pittsburgh. And in case you haven’t noticed Pittsburgh still suffers from population erosion. The revitalization towards Pittsburgh has been geared mainly towards affluent Millennials and not at all towards any working class folks of the older generations. I’m sure that all the working class Yinzers have flocked out to rural Pennsylvania because they no longer can afford to live in their native Pittsburgh. All the high tech affectionados should just pack their bags and move to Silicon Valley.
Can I see a cite for that? Because all the ones I provided proved just the opposite. Did steel make us who were are? Yes. Is steel our future? No.
It may not “make a big impression on you”, but it saved our city from ruin, and we’re proud of it. Ask the people in Donora how they’d feel about going back.
(BTW, the cost of living in Pittsburgh is actually fairly low. Yes, we’ve seen a population decline as of lately, but I’d like to see a cite stating that’s because of new industries vs. the old? :dubious: It’s a hell of a lot more complex than that.
Just curious – are you from Pittsburgh?
I like my cities polluted and segregated. Who doesn’t?
My dad and his family are from Export, PA. As a youngster in my early grade school years I’d go back to spend summers with my grandmother and occasionally in my roaming I’d scout out Turtle Creek, that runs through the center of town. It was a brilliant orange color. I never found a single living thing there.
Looks like they are still struggling with the issue. I like modern Pittsburgh as a city. Steel and coal-era Pittsburgh, not so much.
I don’t think anyone in Pittsburgh is really concerned with whether they’ve “made a big impression” on Nadnerb.
Oh, you don’t know the half of it. I lived in Bethlehem for years, and went to the Hazelton, PA mentioned in that article. I also lived on the other side of the state in Greensburg, near Latrobe. Too bad producing bitter old racist white people isn’t an industry; Pennsylvania would have that locked up.
This hostility towards a positive modernization trend is pretty puzzling. Pittsburgh clearly appears to be re-inventing itself, something the rest of the Rust Belt could emulate. Blue collar jobs like the ones offered by the mills aren’t coming back and we can make this a good thing if we’re smart and forward-thinking.
Never mind we’re I am from. And just to set the record straight, until I see some population rebound, I refuse to validate any bogus optimism about Pittsburgh. The Rust Belt, in general, is far from recovery and there’s no way it will recover will an eroding population. It’s either a population rebound or no recovery.
Try listening to simple logic, for a change.
I’ll listen to “simple logic” when you start using some. And you’re not.
You obviously know shit about my city. We don’t WANT to go back to the past. The steel industry isn’t coming back. We accepted that and managed to make a change. We’re surviving and then some.
We’re not going back, just because some outsider thinks otherwise. (Who actually thinks we were better off back in the days when the place was known as “Hell With the Lid Off”.)
Do some research, provide some cites, and then get back to me. :dubious: (And you might want to read the ones I provided, because they showed why we have a slight population drop – it has nothing to do with the lack of steel mills. Most of those leaving were kids when that happened)
Go to Silicon Valley? Yeah, consider the cost of living there, which is absolutely insane, vs Pittsburgh, which is really quite nice, and a person’s got to be crazy to choose the former. Have you ever even BEEN here?
Rust belt cities could be rebranded as retirement communities. To paraphrase Yogi, “Florida is getting so popular, nobody goes there anymore.”
You know, that’s not a bad idea. Cities, with public transportation and their concentration of services and amenities in a relatively small area, can be convenient for suburbanites who no longer can (or want to) drive. Plus the advantages of apartment/condo living for those who no longer want to deal with the hassles of lawn care, snow shoveling, and the like.
On the other side, the elderly consume a lot of health care, and personal assistance type services. We’d need to tweak things, especially raising the pay rate for those types of jobs, but it could work.
I would agree in some angle. But only one problem I don’t if retirees would be attracted to the Rust Belt.
What, you have a problem with retirees too?