Cleveland’s Eaton Corporation is asking the Cuyahoga County Port Authority to loan it $170 million so it can move its corporate headquarters from downtown Cleveland to move to suburban Chagrin Highlands, The Plain Dealer is reporting.
   The industrial manufacturing giant received $71 million in tax breaks from the state of Ohio in October for the move, which the company says is necessary to provide room for growth. The state provided the funds after Eaton threatened to move to another state.
   The port authority is expected to approve the loan …

Boy, this is so depressing, I can hardly bring myself to write it. Dayton’s sole remaining Fortune 500 company, which has been headquartered in the city for 125 years, is moving operations to Atlanta.
NCR, a manufacturer of ATM machines and cash registers, will bring some 2,000 jobs to Atlanta. The company was offered $60 million in tax breaks by the state of Georgia, The Dayton Daily News reports. Ohio attempted a counter offer of $31 million, to which CEO Bill Nuti responded “It pales in comparison to what Georgia is …

What does it take to retrain middle-aged factory workers?
 
NPR takes a look at the process in this story about a Toledo-area couple, both in their 50s, who are back in high school learning algebra and training for their first white-collar jobs.
The effort paid off for Jim Buford, who recently got a job installing solar panels.

 
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Cleveland resident Trevor Clatterbuck has a new model for the food industry: one that connects a local mother and her a grocery list with a farmer located a few miles away, all via home computer.
Clatterbuck, the 23-year-old founder of Fresh Fork Market, is using the power of the internet and social networking to revolutionize the way people buy produce in the Cleveland area.
 
 
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A favorite Erie-focused blog of mine, Global Erie, had a post last week about the importance of encouraging innovation.
Blogger Peter Panepento isn’t the first person to make this observation about our region. Several years ago, The (Toledo) Blade wrote a three-part series, Business As Usual, that built on the work of two Cleveland-based Federal Reserve economists that linked a state’s economy to patents per-capita. In other words- the more creativity and innovation, the better off a state will be.

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The city of Detroit has unveiled a local currency, according to Model D media.
We’ve written about Toledo’s buy local movement. Printing a local currency takes the buy-local economic development notion to its highest level.

The exchange of local currency requires a commitment from buyers to spend their money at local merchants.
Many communities from Ithaca, New York to Pittsboro, N.C., have resorted to this Depression-era concept to stimulate the local economy, USA Today reports.
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Many Rust Belt communities have tried to use art galleries, theaters,  cheap studio space for artists, and more to revitalize downtowns and drive growth.
It looks like Wheeling, West Virginia is the lastest, as this New York Times article explains.
“So can an old factory city find the key to revitalizing its downtown?
I think so,” said Luis Rico-Gutierrez, director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. ‘But it is more a matter of attitudes than a matter of scales or money. They need to understand that culture is …

By Angie Schmitt
Part of the impetus for Toledo Choose Local came from a University of Toledo study on the economic impact of locally owned bookstore verses a national chain.
Researchers found that money spent at the mom-and-pop bookseller would snowball as it traveled through the local economy, generating an overall economic return of about $5 million for the city. Meanwhile, the chain —with its distant headquarters and suppliers – would add only about $1 million to Toledo’s economic pie.
Twenty-three-year-old Stacy Jurich, a recent graduate of Ohio State University and a native of …

No joke. NPR reporter Dan Bobkoff visited Youngstown to do a story about its thriving business incubator, which now employs about 300 in downtown. Here’s what he had to say:
“Youngstown has been down so long it’s become shorthand for the Rust Belt,” he said. “When I heard that a block of Youngstown is starting to look like a tiny Silicon Valley, I drove down there to check it out.”
Software start-ups at this “managed business cluster” get free rent and utilities courtesy of the state — and the investment appears to …

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 …