[URBAN NOTE] "Rust Belt revival: Lessons for southwest Ontario from America’s industrial heartland"

[rfmcdonald]

I've been meaning for some time to link to Adam Radwanski's extended article at The Globe and Mail, originally published on Friday the 16th of January, about the revival of American Rust Belt cities. There's much that the Ontarian portion of the North American Midwest can learn from its neighbours.

[A]s young Americans recoil from the 20th century’s suburban sprawl and are priced out of New York City and San Francisco and Washington, the Rust Belt offers an alternative within the bones of once-great cities. Past glories have bequeathed a legacy of well-respected universities, cultural entities, attractive neighbourhoods and gritty industrial spaces. Courtesy of past exoduses, the cost of living is often jaw-droppingly low. And for those who seek a sense of community, there is a chance to be leaders in (re)building. “There’s this psychogeographic pull, this humanness,” is how Mr. Piiparinen puts it. “We all have this longing to be part of something.”

There has been less longing, in recent years, to be part of our own country’s version of a rust belt – the one that comprises such Southwestern Ontario cities as Windsor, London and St. Catharines, and patches of Eastern Ontario. Young people have fled in droves as the region’s employment numbers have tanked, seeing the loss of more than a quarter of manufacturing jobs in the last decade.

[. . .]

With oil’s current slide, Canada really can’t afford for it to remain a drag – and in fact there is some expectation that Ontario will instead reclaim its old role as the leader of Canada’s economic growth. Its premier, Kathleen Wynne, recently expressed optimism that plummeting oil prices and a sinking dollar will prove a boon to manufacturing. “I don’t wish for low oil prices and a low dollar for Alberta,” she said earlier this month. “But at the same time, we want our manufacturing sector to rebound. So if that [low oil price] helps, then that’s a good thing.”

While they could indeed help in the short term, it’s difficult to imagine those volatile factors leading to the lasting revival of traditional sectors competing with consistently low-cost jurisdictions such as Mexico, China and even the American South.

For sustainable renewal, Ontario’s old industrial towns will have to work harder at reinvention – and they should be looking to some of their counterparts in the U.S. A two-week road trip through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan revealed in often surprising ways how our neighbours are much further along in reinventing their most hard-hit cities, and how much we have to learn.

“The wind is at the back of these cities in a way that it wasn’t before,” says Jennifer Vey, a fellow at the Brookings Institute who studies the revitalization of old industrial centres. And although many of them will remain smaller than in their industrial heyday, the numbers bear that sentiment out. When the Manhattan Institute ranked America’s 100 biggest U.S. metropolitan areas for their economic performance in the wake of the Great Recession, mid-size Northeastern and Midwestern cities accounted for nine of the top 20.