This site is intended to consolidate and develop news and information about post-industrial Great Lakes cities. It was developed by two former newspaper reporters with ties to Cleveland, Toledo and Youngstown, Ohio and Erie and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We’ve noted that there is a lot of good information about Rust Belt issues coming from blogs and the mainstream media. We hope to sort out the good stuff and summarize it for problem solvers and concerned citizens from Buffalo to St. Louis.
We also intend to develop some original stories and photography. Any …

Famed urban scholar Richard Florida writes in The Atlantic that the economic crisis will drastically reshape America, dividing cities into winners and losers. Not surprisingly Florida writes, Rust Belt cities, those with economies traditionally based on manufacturing, will be among the hardest hit.
Detroit, he postulates, could reach a tipping point and become a “ghost town.” Although, he says, the exodus could attract some of the “creative class,” (which he extols the virtues of in his book “Who’s Your City?”) seeking to take advantage of low real estate prices. Sun Belt …