Youngstown scored a feature story in Entrepreneur Magazine, which is raking among the top ten towns to start a small business including Atlanta, Las Vegas and Portland.
Youngstown’s highly successful business incubator for software start-ups plays center stage in the upbeat story about a down-and-out down that’s rallying for a new direction.
Check out the lede:
“Sure, Youngstown may not have the economic firepower of other cities on this list, but it has one important commodity in spades: hope.”
This is exactly the kind of coverage Youngstown has been hoping for every time some …

Detroit Public Radio is praising the Cleveland nonprofit community for pulling together in the name of rehab, demolition and prevention.
First, there’s Neighborhood Progress Inc., drawing on $6 million budget to rehabilitate homes, two-thirds of which is private money.
Then, there’s Case Western Reserve University’s Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, which has compiled a database of homes in the city which shows which are vacant and which have high-cost loans.
Finally, ESOP (East Side Organizing Project) goes door to door offering troubled homeowners assistance. Their success rate: 80%.
Apparently, the foreclosure crisis …

Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood has gotten a lot of good attention lately. It has a new hospital, a burgeoning retail district, and is generally considered to be one of the city’s more up-and-coming, trendy areas. Some might even say it is gentrifying.
I know I’ve seen a lot of new shops springing up there, but I’m not familiar enough with the area so say if it is really gentrifying or not – are long-time residents being forced out by rising rent costs? Have community groups opposed some of the changes? Can a …

That’s my best guess after features on Cleveland and Pittsburgh and now this one on The Queen City, not that Cincinnati doesn’t deserve this upbeat feature in the paper’s travel section.

No story of Cincinnati could be complete without mention of Over-The-Rhine and the race roits of 2001, could it?

But the Times gives the city credit for downtown redevelopment projects as well as “cool music venues, funky shopping outlets and smart culinary options.”

This time it’s from the New York Post, gushing about the city’s great, authentic neighborhoods, restaurants, bars, clubs and more.
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Remember Steve Rattner? The guy who was going to save us all?
Well he has quit his job as Car Czar, helping oversee the bailout/bankruptcy of The Big Three, after only five months.
“With GM’s restructuring complete, Steven Rattner, whose leadership and vision were invaluable to the auto task force’s efforts, has decided to transition back to private life and his family in New York City,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said (via Detroit News).
The former Wall Street financier worth $188 million will be succeeded by Ron Bloom, a former adviser for the …

This article from St. Louis’ alt-weekly paper takes a look at some of the clean-up underway in the city for Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, which is Tuesday.
“Nearly 2,000 journalists have been issued credentials for the game and its peripheral events,” the article states, adding the game is set to be broadcast to 226 countries in twelve languages and more than 100 million households.
“City leaders are banking that the game will have a lasting impact on the local economy. If all goes well, they say, the thousands of tourists and …

The good people at Great Lakes Urban Exchange convened more than 200 people in Buffalo last month to form a consensus about the best way to direct stimulus money in Great Lakes cities.
The result is summarizied in a letter to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan on the GLUE web site.
Here’s a snippet:
“A specific concern of conferees is that the Obama Administration understand both the scale and the urgency of Great Lakes metros’ challenges.
Brownfields in our older, mainly small- and mid-sized metros are probably never going to become …

Filmmaker Billy Erhard has filmed the insides and outsides of dozens of abandoned homes in Buffalo, New York, as they are being torn apart by workers. This six-minute video is an attempt to preserve the images of the mostly 1920s-era bungalows after they are demolished.

The city of Buffalo has more than 20,000 abandoned homes. Mayor Byron Brown has been leading an aggressive demolition campaign there.
Preservation Nation magazine, who tipped us off to the project, has posted a great story about the film here.
Erhard produced the video for the “Story about …

GM is emerging from bankruptcy today, free of debt, under modified contracts and with the president’s approval.
It was in Chapter 11 for 40 days.
The federal government controls a 61% share of the new, leaner company.

Meanwhile, some jerks are organizing a boycott of the company, as if it didn’t have enough problems.
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