Most Americans take it as an article of faith that there’s a strong connection and relationship between the major cities of the East and West coasts. Indeed, there may be 3,000 miles separating New York from Los Angeles, or San Francisco from Washington, but psychologically the cities each seem to be more connected to each other than, say, Dallas to New York or Atlanta to San Francisco. Of course, in the minds of the coastal crowd, the rest of the nation has become “flyover” country. That wasn’t always the case. How exactly did that happen?

This post originally appeared in The News Outlet.

It’s a Saturday morning and I’m picking up trash in downtown Youngstown.

Lo and behold, what blows down W. Federal Street, landing at my picker? A newspaper called ‘Shale Play’ which covers Northeast Ohio shale activity exclusively.

Wondering where this came from – and assuming it was somewhere downtown – I walked to the post office where most of the local and regional newspapers bins are located.

This is part of a series on being a white person in the African-American Hough neighborhood of Cleveland. You can see the intro, why it’s like a small town, Mansfield Frazier’s response, history of the neighborhood, @#!& black people say to white people, and “A Place Worth Living”: defending a deeply stigmatized neighborhood.

To continue the conversation about cross-cultural experiences in the inner city, I interviewed a friend living in the Glenville neighborhood, Doc Harrill. We have kids the same age and he and his wife are amazing indie artists …

Once again, it appears that “build it and celebrate it” no matter the past sins (or future consequences) reigns supreme among economic developers. While hyping an announcement of more jobs and new construction in Greater Lansing, the fact that the insurance company in question challenged its property taxes using the “functionally obsolete building” scheme in 2010 was conveniently overlooked (see article in City Pulse).

Source: freep.com

If you are not familiar with the “functionally obsolete” tax game that is being employed most often by big box retailers, the claim that is made is …

The growth of car-share has helped people forgo the expense of car ownership in major cities like Washington and Seattle, where it’s been widely adopted. But not every city has the market to sustain car-share services from companies like Zipcar or Hertz. In his book Walkable City, Jeff Speck writes that your city might not be “ready” for car-share if, when you stick out your hand downtown, a cab doesn’t stop.

Now an organization in Buffalo, New York, is working to open up car-share to new markets and new demographics. The non-profit Buffalo CarShare has grown to serve 500 members since it launched four years ago in one of the poorest cities in the country.

The title of this post may be a bit controversial, but can also be sadly true. Far too often, it seems a blind eye is turned toward the sins of the past just to generate new economic investment. A perfect example is portrayed in the past week’s (April 17th edition) of City Pulse by an article entitled “A Tax Break Won’t Change This.” While tax breaks are being offered to GM for additional investment in Greater Lansing, a ginormous vacant parking lot blights the near south side of the city, not to mention additional deteriorated sites along Saginaw Highway on the west side of town.

Writers of all different stripes been winding up to give creative class guru Richard Florida a verbal spanking, after one study questioned whether his theories, put into practice, offer much by the way of help the poor.

Florida himself brought it up in a column for Atlantic Cities, how one study had shown that “talent agglomeration” in cities did lift income levels broadly. However the study showed that the income gains in these trendy metros were eaten up by increased housing prices.

It’s an important finding, and to give credit where credit is due, Mr. Creative Class himself was the first one to bring it to anyone’s attention. Since then, a parade of writers have basically been calling him a fraud who’s ruining America.

Friends and family looked at me dumbfounded and slack-jawed when I told them I was moving to Detroit. “No one moves to Detroit, people move away from Detroit.” But not too long ago people were arriving to the Motor City in droves. What happened, what went wrong, where are the jobs? My guess is that it wasn’t just one thing.

Detroit isn’t the first city I have called home that most people would consider ‘depressed’. In the last 15 years I have called Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus, and now Detroit home. Each city is unique and deserves to be visited, enjoyed, and respected. And each city has taught me that you cannot judge them based on first impressions, it takes time to find the gems or a guide. And maybe after a weekend you won’t think it is that crazy to move to Detroit.

By: Jeff La Noue of Comeback City

Baltimore–Charm City, Mobtown, Monument City, Birdland, Crabalot, Land of Pleasant Living–is a town:

whose people repelled a British invasion by land and sea just days after these royal forces left our nation’s capital smoldering in glowing embers

whose rise came from the trade made possible by the US National Road and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad that linked its port with rustbelt partners in the Midwest

“Let us dare to make a new beginning. Let us shutter the walls of the ghetto for all time. Let us build a new city and a new man to inhabit it.” –Richard G. Hatcher

Richard Hatcher’s call to create a new man and a new city, taken from his 1968 inaugural address as Gary’s first black mayor, carried special meaning in the annals of the city’s history. Since the first buildings went up on the shifting sands of Lake County, reformers, sociologists, and commentators …