The New York Times is carrying an interesting article about the city of Memphis and the shrinking ranks of the local black middle-class.
As a result of predatory lending and job loss, residents the majority-black city have seen decades of economic progress reversed, The Times reports. The article focuses on the role played by Wells Fargo, and outlines the mortgage lender’s targeted efforts to sell high-interest loans in black neighborhoods. The results are hallowed out neighborhoods and declining wealth for blacks and latinos in metro Memphis.
According to the article, the weath …

Residents of St. Louis County showed their support for the local public transit system this week, voting 63-37 percent in favor of a 1/2-cent sales tax increase.

The increased revenues were needed to ward off major cuts for Metro, the local transit authority. County residents had rejected a similar initiative in 2008, according to the St. Louis American.
A broad coalition came out in support of this measure, including corporate leaders, university chancellors and black clergy.
-AS

Take a look at this column, published in Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice.
It reviews a book, Hope and Despair in the American City by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press 2009), which examines school desegregation through metropolitan-wide school reorganization.
The premise? This work “compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, New York with the glad success of Raleigh, North Carolina. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools, and has been growing by leaps and bounds,” writes reviewer Bruce Fisher. (Fisher is …

Rust Wire was able to spend a few minutes recently chatting with Brian O’Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist and, author of the new book “The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century.”
I liked that the book details all of what O’Neill loves about Pittsburgh, but has a very realistic assessment of the city’s problems.
For a more detailed review, read what the Pittsburgh City Paper had to say here.
Rust Wire: “What’s right and what’s wrong about Pittsburgh?”

Brian O’Neill: “I would say that’s what right about it is - as I …

Are African American males our greatest untapped resource?

The answer is yes, according to a study by Policy Bridge, Cleveland-based, minority-focused think tank.

“No single resource in Northeast Ohio is as underutilized as African-American males,” reports the agency in its study, Untapped Potential, African-American Males in Northeast Ohio.

• In Cleveland, roughly 65 percent of all males living in poverty are
African-American.

• Roughly a third of African-American men in

Portland. Seattle. Minneapolis. Besides being magnets for well-educated young people, what do these cities have in common?

According to Aaron Renn, creator of the Urbanophile blog, they all have a relatively low proportion of black people.

In an article published on New Geography, Renn asks, is the trend towards cities like Portland a form of nationwide suburban sprawl?

Is it only a coincidence that cities with a high proportion of black residents are so often the most maligned, like Detroit, Cleveland and Youngstown?

We’ve written before on this blog that we were encouraged by Time Magazine’s declaration that it intended to devote resources to covering what is happening in Detroit.
Writes Time publisher John Huey,
“we believe that Detroit right now is a great American story. No city has had more influence on the country’s economic and social evolution. Detroit was the birthplace of both the industrial age and the nation’s middle class, and the city’s rise and fall — and struggle to rise again — are a window into the challenges facing all of …

I saw an interesting ad recently, previewing the Sundance Channel documentary Brick City.
The show will focus on Newark, New Jersey (a city that while not in the Rust Belt, has certainly had its share of problems), Mayor Cory Booker, and other city officials and residents, such as the chief of police, a gang member, and a youth counselor.
You can watch a number of clips from the show and read a bit about it on the web site.
We’ve written about Mayor Booker and his efforts to turn the city around on …

David Frum of the conservative American Enterprise Institute has written an interesting (albeit pessimistic) account of what went wrong in Detroit (everyone’s favorite topic).

In his National Post article “What Killed Detroit,” Frum argues that poisonous race relations and an insufficient commitment to arts and culture sealed the city’s fate long before the auto giants crumbled.

“The collapse of the automobile industry seems the obvious answer. But is it a sufficient answer?,” he wonders. “The departure of meatpacking did not kill Chicago. Pittsburgh has staggered forward from the demise of steelmaking. New York has lost one industry after another: shipping, garment-manufacture, printing, and how many more?”

The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural, sharecropping South to big city factory work in the North was a huge transformation in our country’s history.
It is something people often forget about or aren’t very familiar with now, but its effects are still felt today in how we live and in how people view cities.
This story from Sunday’s Toledo Blade tells one 96-year-old woman’s story: from Greenville, Mississippi to Toledo, Ohio.
-KG