Check out the new Metro Matters podcast, from the folks at Next American City magazine and the Brookings Institution.
If you listen to this inaugural edition, you can hear about everything from the stimulus, to US exports, Richard Florida and manufacturing. There’s a good bit of Rust-Belt related discussion as well.
-KG

President Obama will visit this Ohio community on Friday.
Hear more about what Lorain is -and was- on this in-depth radio piece from WKSU news.
When Obama visited during the 2008 campaign, he spoke quite a bit about jobs and trade.
I imagine jobs and the economy will be on everyone’s mind there now as well.
-KG

Take a look at this column from the Gary Post-Tribune.

This Indiana city has had casinos since the 1990s, and yet they haven’t really brought the economic development that was promised, this writer believes.

“The Gary casinos haven’t been a complete flop. They have provided jobs and tax revenue of up to $25 million a year to the city,” he writes. “But, the economic development hasn’t followed.”

And keep in mind…Gary is just a short drive from the metropolis of Chicago. And one of those casinos had the Trump name on it, according to the story.

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 …

We at Rust Wire don’t like to toot our own horn that much.
But I just couldn’t help it after seeing this recent story in The New York Times about Buffalo’s lower west side neighborhood.
The story notes that this historically blue-collar Italian section of the city has recently become home to a number of different immigrant groups, such as people from Puerto Rico, Myamar and Somalia.
In a post about Buffalo back in March 2009, Rust Wire made this observation about the area:
“Our next stop was Niagara Street, on the city’s West …

Though we often hear that manufacturing in this country is “dead” or “dying,” this article from the Harrisburg (Pa) Patriot-News shows the lengths some states and counties still go to — offering millions in tax incentives — to land manufacturing jobs.
The author spoke to folks who said these kinds of incentives are needed to woo businesses, and others who said their time has past, that pitting one region against another means everybody loses.
What do you think?
Is this a game states, counties and cities have to play? Or should they opt …

As strange as it sounds, it can happen, according to this recent story in the Pittsburgh City Paper.
“Even today, Cranberry retains some rugged rural terrain amidst the strip malls and drive-throughs. Cranberry may be a synonym for “suburban sprawl” for many, but local officials are trying to preserve those places — and environmentalists give them high marks for the effort.
Still, finding a connection with nature is a lot like my coyote encounter: If you blink, you may miss it,” the author writes.
What did the Pittsburgh-area suburb of Cranberry do? …

I took off on a road trip across the Rust Belt this summer both because I saw it as a potential for some good stories (which you can find here) and because it seemed like a great opportunity to visit a part of the country that I knew solely through reading and conversation. I also veered a bit out of the Rust Belt’s traditional boundaries to do a story for NPR’s Latino USA (scroll down and then listen here) on immigrant urban farmers in Cincinnati.

And it turns out I wasn’t the only person with such ideas. One group of planning students from Department of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois made a similar trip, calling it “Rust Belt Road Trip.” Another group did the same thing as well. It has to be more than the catchy alliteration–there must be something in the air.

We at Rust Wire have certainly done our share of beating up on Forbes Magazine on this blog.
But here’s an interesting editorial by Aaron Renn on the “mayor as CEO” idea, and the importance of a city’s strategy and “brand.”
And before you tell me, “We’ve heard a million times already how cities should be run more efficiently and business-like,” just read the piece. This isn’t the usual “lessons cities can learn from the private sector” story.
-KG

Reading the Digging Pitt blog recently, I want to second their call to have Pittsburgh (or any other Rust Belt city, for that matter) host a Jane’s Walk - a neighborhood walk in the spirit of urban thinker Jane Jacobs.
A number of other cities have done this and Pittsburgh - or Cleveland, Toledo, Buffalo, etc. - should all jump on the bandwagon.
Volunteer guides lead tours of various neighborhoods. From Digging Pitt, “Some tours focus on heritage sites, while others explore the nooks and crannies of the city. From great hangouts …