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

The Associated Press has conducted an inventory of the 128 auto plants closed by the Big Three since 1980 and the results are discouraging.
Only about three in five has been repurposed for a new use. Those that have been reopened are employing far few workers at lower wages.

“The cost is going to be borne by the next generation,” said James Rubenstein, a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who has studied U.S. auto plant closings and openings. “It’s the children and grandchildren of the laid-off workers. They won’t have …

Interesting article about the state of General Motors from Scripps Howard.

Despite the car maker’s highly publicized reorganization this year, GM still leads the nation in market share with about 20 percent of the total, down from 22 percent in 2008.

Consumers seem to have shrugged off the auto maker’s reorganization, according to tis article. This is particularly true of Chinese consumers who have revived the popularity of the Buick.

Meeting Chinese demand will be critical because the country surpassed the US as the biggest consumer of automobiles this year.

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 …

The Economist Magazine is running a cautiously optimistic story about the future of Youngstown, paying tribute to recent downtown developments and the success of the Youngstown Business Incubator.
“Youngstown’s problems have been manifold,” The magazine writes. “But now there are a few signs that things are starting to improve.”

“One example is the Youngstown Business Incubator, which provides cheap office space and other assistance to start-ups that specialize in business software.
“Founded using government seed money 14 years ago in a part of downtown where few dared to venture, let alone start a …

For the last two days, Cleveland State University has been hosting Lessons from Europe: Regional Governance and Economic Transformation in Older Industrial Cities.

The workshop is being put on by The German Marshall Fund of the United States with support from the Ford Foundation. On Friday, the group will be traveling to Detroit’s NextEnergy to do the whole thing again.

I had the opportunity to sit in on a speech from Professor Dr. Valentino Castellani, the former mayor of Torino, Italy, a city that has been called the Detroit of Europe.

The city was once the industrial capital of Italy, a one-company town where the economy centered around Fiat, the Italian car-maker which is headquartered there.

President Obama will speak just outside Youngstown today at GM’s Lordstown plant, kicking off the a presidential tour of the Midwest on jobs and the economy, according to The Detroit News.

The plant  has been through a series of ups and downs in the past year.
From The Detroit News: Thirteen months ago, then-CEO Rick Wagoner and dignitaries attended a splashy event in the plant to announce a third shift and $350 million investment in the plant to build the new Chevrolet Cruze sedan, which is expected to launch next year and …

The Daily Beast is carrying an article today celebrating the 16th anniversary of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, The Virgin Suicides, a dark, whimsical, coming-of-age story set in suburban Detroit.
Eugenides, a Detroit native, later went on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling Middlesex, which also features the Motor City prominently, from the early days of immigrant tenements to red-lining, the race riots, and suburbanization.
The Virgin Suicides offers an exceptional descriptions of Detroit in its heyday; Middlesex an account of the tumultuous series of events that have made it the city it is today.
In …

Rust Wire is excited to share our recent interview with author John Hoerr.
Hoerr spent decades working as a labor journalist, covering labor in the era when unions were much larger and organized labor often made big news. His most well-known work is And the Wolf Finally Came, which is an in-depth, yet easy to read chronicle of the decline of the American steel industry in the 1980s, focusing on the Monongahela Valley. (For all you non-Pittsburgh readers, the Mon Valley is where the Monongahela River flows, through Pittsburgh, and …

Today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an article describing a bad outlook for manufacturing.
“The decline in the numbers of manufacturing jobs lost in April may be a sign of even worse news: The country is running out of manufacturing jobs to lose,” the article states.