Us rust belt full#

John said he didn’t like the Clintons, even though he had voted for Bill twice. He voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and he would have voted for Jim Webb, a Democratic Virginian senator who flirted with running for president in 2016, but dropped out before the primaries. The man – who asked to be identified only as John – was an Italian-American and a lifelong Democrat, until now. It didn’t seem like a good sign that the UK’s political news had become a talking point in a place like Youngstown. He had heard my accent, he said, and wanted to know about Brexit. The pictures of Detroit never show the glories of its half-empty central business district.Īs I finished my breakfast at an Italian café on the highway back to the interstate, a man at the next table waved me over.

Us rust belt full#

The Rust Belt is full of places like this: mining or manufacturing towns that were once industrial powerhouses but now feel too big and too grand for the shrunken populations that remain. In 2007, a CNN report ranked it as the poorest substantial city in the US. Over the past 80 years, the population of the city has fallen by two-thirds.

Youngstown is an extreme example of a phenomenon that can be seen all over the American Midwest. Some of these businesses had moved out to suburban strip malls. But shops and restaurants and cafés, the sort of bustling street life that suggests a thriving community? Nothing. Or rather: there was a state university, a few high-rise office blocks left over from the gilded age and a neat grid of huge and beautiful old houses of the sort James Thurber was writing stories about eighty years ago. When I arrived in downtown Youngstown, there was nothing there. Youngstown, the first place you reach heading west on Interstate 80, is the heart of a conurbation of nearly half a million people: it seemed as likely a spot as any for a meal. I was due in Cleveland by lunchtime, so crossed the border into Ohio before stopping. It was a week before election day in the United States and there had been no breakfast on offer at the motel I’d stayed at the previous night in Pennsylvania. Views expressed within the report do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center, or of the Upjohn Institute.It took an hour to find somewhere to eat in Youngstown. The report was commissioned by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Full Employment Project.

Read the full technical paper | Read the report With the right leadership and investments, Bartik concludes, manufacturing-intensive communities can promote more and better-quality jobs, both for their communities and for the overall U.S. Yet he argues that the national interest is better served by strategies that invest in business productivity, not in tax incentives to relocate businesses. But if national policy at least stabilizes overall manufacturing jobs, manufacturing-intensive communities that make smart investments can show above-average job growth.Īctions such as developing workers’ skills, providing advice to smaller manufacturing firms, and preparing industrial sites don’t draw the public interest-and short-term political payoff-the way business tax incentives do, Bartik concedes. These communities still suffered when national manufacturing dramatically declined, as it did from 2000 to the depths of the Great Recession in 2009. The communities that invested instead in customized services for local businesses and workers performed better. He found no evidence linking a community’s job growth to business tax cuts or business tax incentives. In his analysis, Bartik examined 22 manufacturing-heavy local labor markets that saw strong job growth in recent years, in order to see what helped them succeed, compared to similar communities that were not able to succeed. Increase public spending that improves local workers’ job skills, for example by investing in community college workforce training.Invest in infrastructure and services that make the community’s land better for business development, for example investing in brownfield cleanup in older neighborhoods.Expand customized services to small and medium-sized manufacturers, for example providing business advice via manufacturing extension services.Bartik concludes, based on both prior research and new research done for this project, that manufacturing-intensive communities can succeed with three cost-effective strategies: In a new paper and report, the Upjohn Institute’s Timothy J. Can anything be done to help these communities?

With the decline of American manufacturing since 2000, communities with above-average shares of manufacturing have fared worse than most other communities.