No one can deny the awe-inspiring scenic beauty of Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, or Salt Lake City. But, often overlooked are the splendid topographic and geographic settings where a number of Rust Belt cities are situated. Beautiful city settings of the Rust Belt may not get the national notoriety and ink of their western competitors, but some are equally endowed with great scenery. Here’s a list of 15 Rust Belt cities that I feel are a visual delight:

Greater Lansing has an amazing music scene, but it is seldom heard about it outside a 100 mile or so radius from the State Capital. Probably the best known band to hail from this area is The Verve Pipe, with its memorable #1 hit single “The Freshman.” Frontier Ruckus, The Hard Lessons, and Autumn Lull (among others) have also made a decent amount of buzz outside of their Greater Lansing roots.

Recently, a new album entitled Ghost Town Lullabies was released by a Greater Lansing area alternative rock band called Elliot Street Lunatic. Ghost Town Lullabies is simply superb! I cannot give it a high enough rating – it is literally off the charts for those of us who like alternative rock or indie music.

The answer is: ‘Yes.’ That’s according to MinnPost writer Steve Berg in a column about a proposed Minneapolis gaming venture.
He writes:
“aside from Las Vegas, a fantasy island built on gambling and tourism, I’m unaware of any U.S. city that has built a casino for any reason other than desperation. Failing Rust Belt cities build casinos. Detroit and Pittsburgh have them. Cleveland and Cincinnati are joining the list. Saginaw and Lansing, Mich., and Rockford, Ill., want to build them.”
I’d also add Milwaukee; Gary, Indiana and Erie, Pennsylvania to that list. I’m sure there’s …

Stephan Whitaker, a research economist at the Cleveland Fed, has noticed two salubrious trends in RustBelt demographics:

1) between 2000 and 2008, college graduates rose sharply as a share of the work-force in several urban areas

2) in the future, the graduate share will keep rising as older, less-educated workers retire

This news is good taken at face value, because research by Ed Glaeser and other urban economists suggests cities thrive as idea-generating centers. When educated people interact face-to-face, they breed businesses and insights.

Ok, I know, we’ve written about this before (see here and here) so my apologies if you are sick of hearing about it.
But frankly, I think it’s important to remember that whatever challenges our part of the country faces, it’s no bed of roses in the Sun Belt, either.  And now there’s a book to explain more on this topic.
USA Today says the “sunburnt” cities of Florida, California and the Southwest must rethink themselves.
The paper writes, “Boomtowns that have been scorched by the housing crisis could learn from struggling Rust Belt …

Everyone should read this book, because it challenges conventional wisdom within the urbanist community. He argues powerfully that many activists’ attempts keep out evil developers just push development elsewhere or make cities more expensive. He’s critical of revitalization programs like light rail and convention centers. He’s critical of historic preservation.

One of the most novel cases made is that northern California should allow vastly more sprawl, because Californians emit very little carbon into their perpetually temperate atmosphere.

Pittsburgh’s population has shrunk over the last decade, falling by 24,000 persons between 2000 and 2008. In the 2009 Democratic primary race for mayor, Councilman Patrick Dowd even made reversing population decline a signature issue of his campaign, (as you can see in this video).

We can get by without steel mills, but new residents are sorely needed to support the legacy costs of public servants employed when Pittsburgh had double the public to serve.

While Pittsburgh’s population dips, the U.S. Hispanic demographic drives American population growth and is projected to triple by 2050. Immigration accounts for recent trends, but projections also depend on higher Hispanic birth rates.

Frequent Rust Wire readers know we’ve written before about the housing crisis creating Rust Belt-like conditions in some Sun Belt cities, such as Las Vegas (See here and here).
Now there appears to be actual data to back that up, according to a study from the Research Institute for Housing America, a division of the Mortgage Bankers Association.
The Los Angeles Times explains:
“A traditional city in decline is one that has suffered a sustained population drop, leaving behind empty houses, apartment buildings, offices and storefronts. Cleveland and Detroit, for instance, …

Editor’s note: We at Rust Wire love cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Detroit. But how welcoming are these places to everyone? This piece was contributed by New Yorker Frank Dix, a native of my hometown of Erie, PA. What do you think after reading his essay? Can someone who is gay ever feel truly at home in a place like Erie? This piece seems especially relevant in light of several recent high-profile suicides by gay teens.-KG

People who have made a life in New York usually remember their hurry to …

The disappearance of jobs, the decline of schools, social isolation, and the rise of the drug trade took a frightful toll on inner city areas. Youngstown fared among the worst. Youngstown’s murder rate—which remained unexceptional for decades—skyrocketed during the 1990s. In 1991, the homicide rate for Youngstown was 60 per 100,000, whereas the country as a whole averaged only 10 per 100,000. In 1995, Youngstown had more homicides than the city of Pittsburgh. Though the crime has widely fluctuated, the city remains known for its high crime and murder rate.

Sociologist William Julius Wilson’s work has outlined the importance of historical data when examining inner city violence: “Unlike the present period, inner city communities prior to 1960 exhibited features of social organization