It seems everyone who’s interested in cities has an opinion about Richard Florida.

I’ve always had it in for him, since he wrote, “Who’s Your City?,” a book which instructed readers which city they should live in based on personal characteristics, as if that was a rational way to choose a place to live.

When I was working at a newspaper in Toledo a coworker of mine began researching “Who’s Your City” for an article because Toledo was listed as the 12th (13th, 14th?) best mid-sized city to be a committed gay couple. The story had to be killed midway through, however, because the margin of error on the statistic was approximately 50 percent.

Well, Florida is gearing to go to the presses again in April with, “The Great Reset,” in which he argues that the recession has fundamentally reshaped the economic landscape. This tome may be more controversial because of its premise that the new economy will divide the country into geographic winners and losers.

It also happens that many of these “losers” paid Florida a hefty fee to explain how their cities could be made Meccas for the hip, highly-educated population that is so essential to prosperity, according to Florida’s teachings.

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.

This article in the Las Vegas Sun seems to think that city’s era of unbridled growth has definitely ended.
The article cites U.S. Census Bureau data showing:
-its slowest rate of population growth since 1967,
-for the first time in a long time, the state experience out-migration (more people left the state than came there).
“The new numbers contrast strikingly with the rest of this decade when an average of 45,000 people moved here every year from other states,” according to the story. “Analysts both here and nationally cited the weak economy of Nevada …

Check out this recent column by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill.

He interviews ‘burgh native Don Carter, who recently retired president of Urban Design Associates and was named director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

For years, Carter tells O’Neill, he has hated the term “Rust Belt.” And he’s trying to get folks to start calling …the “Water Belt.”

In place of “Sun Belt?” Try “Drought Belt.” Cities here, Carter writes, “are low-density, auto-dependent, and survive on ever diminishing supplies of

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.

Angie and Kate have posted about the Great Lakes Urban Exchange’s “I Will Stay If …” campaign a few times here; and as I was leafing through some of their photos recently, I noticed a number of references to bicycle unfriendliness of some of the Rust Belt cities.

With the Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey data now available, I took a look at what the numbers look like throughout the Rust Belt. I should note that I used only core-city geography data, so the comparisons are not completely fair, given the arbitrary nature of political boundaries, but I think they are reasonable enough for this sake of this comparison.

What can Las Vegas learn from the Rust Belt? Quite a bit, according to this article in the Las Vegas Sun.
Not to toot our own horn, but this story references Rust Wire, and our own Angie Schmitt!
I thought this story was well-written, and made an interesting comparison: though many wouldn’t think of it this way, Las Vegas and Detroit are both one-industry towns - Vegas’ industry of course, being tourism.
The author definitely did his homework- and talked to a number of knowledgeable folks in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Boston and elsewhere.
I …

The Director of Cleveland’s City Planning Commission and a private developer tackled zoning issues in artists housing today at the second annual Rust Belt to Artist Belt conference being held in Cleveland through Friday.

The city of Cleveland updated its comprehensive plan a few years ago to include special live-work space overlays that allow artists to make their homes in areas zoned for light commercial activity. Arts promotion of this type is considered to be important to the local economy because Cleveland has a surplus of industrial space that is well-suited to conversion for artists. Furthermore, the arts have played an important role in revitalizing a number of Cleveland neighborhoods.

Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture is hosting its second From Rust Belt to Artist Belt Conference this weekend in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood.

The conference will convene the region’s top community development and arts advocacy officials to discuss the process of harnessing the creative talent of artists to revitalize distressed neighborhoods.

On the speakers list will be Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams,Terry Schwartz, from Kent State’s Urban Design Collaborative, and Matthew Galluzzo, Arts District Manager of the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative.

Those of you who know me in person know I just about a house in the city of Cleveland’s Detroit Shoreway neighborhood.

I know other young people who are buying or considering buying houses in Rust Belt cities, so I wanted to share my story. There’s a lot of second guessing that goes along with this; questions about crime and schools. But I just really felt compelled to buy in the city and in this neighborhood.

For those of you that are familiar with Cleveland, the Detroit Shoreway is just west of Ohio City near 65th and Detroit Avenue, just a few blocks from Lake Erie. In recent years, it has seen a relatively good deal of new investment, fueled by two independent local theater companies, a new condominium …