New Geography

Author: John Russo

  • The Pittsburgh Conundrum

    Forty years after the decline of the steel industry, Pittsburgh has emerged from the ashes of deindustrialization to become the new Emerald City. Its formidable skyline gleams with homegrown names—PPG, UPMC, and PNC. Touted as the “most livable city” by the likes of The Economist and Forbes, its highly literate and educated workforce has contributed to a robust and diverse local economy known as a center for technology, health care, and bio-science. It is a leader in startup businesses. Uber and Ford’s announcement in 2016 that they would base development of their self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, rather than in Silicon Valley, is a telling example of the power of high-tech image and low costs.

    Pittsburgh also ranks high in housing affordability. Residents can easily walk or bike to public libraries, museums, and arts and entertainment venues. Some see Pittsburgh as a model for economic development and a new urbanism that could revitalize the Rust Belt and other former industrial regions.

    In short, Pittsburgh seems to have responded more effectively to the challenges of deindustrialization than many other cities. Hunter Morrison, winner of the American Planning Association’s 2015 Burnham Award for his work on regional planning in northeastern Ohio, notes that Pittsburgh has done better than Cleveland in several areas. It has retained more of its residents, largely minority households; stabilized its working-class neighborhoods without relying on gentrification; and steadily attracted educated millennials. Morrison also says that Pittsburgh has held on to its historic working-class culture and civic identity more than have other legacy communities. “The concept of the ‘Steelers Nation,’” he says, “goes well beyond a marketing campaign and appears to be embedded as a deeply felt personal identity by people of all classes. The retention of dialect, food, symbols, team colors, and attitude is remarkable and, I would argue, increasingly unique.”

    But is there really such a thing as Pittsburgh exceptionalism? Or, as with other successful cities, do we need to ask: A renaissance for whom? Residents like Kathleen Newman, a working-class studies scholar and professor at Carnegie Mellon, see gentrification expanding with Pittsburgh’s drive to attract high-tech industries. This threatens the city’s remaining working-class neighborhoods and its already small African American middle class. Some resistance to gentrification has emerged—protests over the construction of high-income housing and a Whole Foods Market in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood, for instance. Residents are also proposing their own alternatives for affordable housing.

    And there are more fundamental questions: Can—does—Pittsburgh’s success extend beyond city limits? Can it resurrect its broader Rust Belt region? What can Pittsburgh do—what can we do—for the broader regions that it has left behind?

    Pittsburgh was always more than its city limits. The seven counties composing the metropolitan region include surrounding towns that contributed to Pittsburgh’s industrial might in the 20th century, such as Braddock, Homestead, Aliquippa, and McKees Rocks. But the area beyond Pittsburgh, extending from these towns through western Pennsylvania, has not experienced the revitalization that has transformed the city. From Weirton, West Virginia, to the west, Uniontown to the south, Johnstown to the east, and Sharon to the north, economic recovery has been, at best, uneven across the region. Apart from a few newer suburbs like Cranberry and some older revitalization projects, such as the Waterfront complex in Homestead, the region continues to be plagued by the long-term effects of deindustrialization and disinvestment. Along with underperforming schools, violence, and pollution—including, according to a recent report, lead contamination—the region still struggles with employment and population declines. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows wide swings in employment over the last decade, but non-farm employment in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area declined by about 15,000 between October 2016 and March 2017. A University of Pittsburgh study reports that 23 percent of Pittsburgh residents live in poverty, and 43 percent earn less than 200 percent of the poverty level. Furthermore, outside its urban core, a larger number of individuals actually live in poverty than in Pittsburgh itself. In the seven-county Pittsburgh metropolitan statistical area, fully 79 percent of the people living in poverty reside outside the city limits.

    Both the city and the surrounding area are also losing population. Census data show that Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County lost almost 4,000 people in 2015 and 2016, while the seven-county region lost nearly 9,000 people on top of the more than 6,700 lost in the previous year.

    The Pittsburgh story, then, involves more than a shining city on many hills. As a case study for thinking about economic development and urban planning, we have to go beyond the city itself. If you drive out of the busy downtown, away from the academic neighborhoods, and past the new suburbs, you cannot help but see the remains of the troublesome legacy of deindustrialization. Deteriorating factories, empty parking lots, dilapidated housing, and vacant lots all bear witness to the continuing material and social costs of economic restructuring. Urbanists, developers, and politicians have much to learn by expanding their view of Pittsburgh.

    IN 2013, CARNEGIE MELLON University organized the 25th anniversary conference of the original Remaking Cities Congress. Pittsburgh was chosen as both site and symbol for its “25-year transformation from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy.” The conference brought together 300 leading national and international urban and city planners, economic development specialists, and architects to consider the state of efforts to revitalize deindustrialized communities. Many conference participants praised Pittsburgh as a prime example of the new urbanism that promotes walkability, diverse housing, quality architecture and design, increased density, mixed-use neighborhoods, smart public transportation, and commitment to sustainability and quality of life.

    The plenary speakers included urbanologist Richard Florida, the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz, the architect David Lewis, and Prince Charles, who had played a pivotal role in organizing the initial conference. Alongside numerous self-congratulatory presentations about how cities were reinventing themselves, however, ran a darker undercurrent of uncertainty. In his plenary presentation, Florida noted how the new urbanism was fostering inequality, outmigration, and racial divisions. His analysis became the foundation of his new book, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do about It.

    Florida had been in a good position to observe changes in Pittsburgh and other cities associated with the knowledge economy. He taught at Carnegie Mellon while researching his book The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, which argued for the power of technological determinism in shaping urban regeneration and economic growth. Initially published in 2002, the book instantly became a touchstone for economic developers and urban planners. Esquire magazine named Florida one of the “Best and Brightest” in 2005, and Businessweek called him a Voice of Innovation in 2006. Within several years, Florida became a beacon for those suggesting that postindustrial cities should concentrate on attracting a “creative class” of writers, painters, musicians, software developers, engineers, and doctors.

    At the Remaking conference, however, Florida focused (as he does in his new book) on the unintended consequences of the growing knowledge economy he had earlier championed. While obliquely addressing Pittsburgh and its region, his analysis of the growing inequality, injustice, and resentment shown toward this and other cities captured, among other things, the growing populist unrest in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio—a pattern that would play out a few years later in the 2016 election.

    Florida’s change of heart did not surprise Chapman University professor Joel Kotkin. As Kotkin argued in The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us and The New Class Conflict, the new urbanism lay at the heart of an emerging class conflict. Unlike industrial conflicts between owners and laborers, this class conflict pitted a postindustrial elite made up of high-tech oligarchs and policy, media, and academic experts against the middle and working classes. According to Kotkin, the rise of the knowledge economy and new urbanist planning strategies had erased the idea that the city could be a place of hope for advancement for those in poverty. Instead, the poor, many of them people of color, were displaced by rising housing costs as white residents returned to the city and developers created a “Disneyland” of “restaurants, shops, and festivals.” For Kotkin, the American dream could now be found in the suburbs, where it was cheaper to live and survive in uncertain economic times. He argued that suburbs have become more racially diverse, and people with lower incomes had more opportunities to own property and build community.

    But Kotkin’s suburbanist dream has also come under scrutiny. Urbanists have claimed that suburban sprawl increases demand for land usage and water, police, and fire services, as well as car dependency. The opioid epidemic has also reached the suburbs. Long commutes disconnect suburban residents from community life. Online shopping causes suburban malls to close, shattering local retail economies. Shoddy construction and poor materials long associated with suburban tract housing have become increasingly apparent.

    Most crucially, studies make clear that poverty has grown most rapidly in suburban areas. Florida has countered Kotkin’s optimism. “The suburbs,” he has written, “are no longer the apotheosis of the American Dream and the engine of economic growth.” Citing David Lewis, he wrote that “the future project of suburban renewal would likely make our vast 20th-century urban renewal efforts look like a walk in the park.”

    Debates between urbanists and suburbanists have consequences for planning and policy—just as the rift between metropolitan residents and other Americans has political consequences. In the 2016 presidential election, voting patterns in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania reflect this divide. While many commentators focused on racial, educational, gender, and generational gaps, The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein argued that none of these divides “proved more powerful than the distance between the Democrats’ continued dominance of the largest metropolitan areas, and the stampede toward the GOP almost everywhere else.” Nationally, Democrats won an average of 72 percent of the vote in counties with an urban core. But they lost in suburbs, midsize cities, and small and very small cities, and the farther these places were from cities, the bigger the loss for Democrats.

    The voting in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania followed the national trend. Real Clear Politics reported that Hillary Clinton won culturally cosmopolitan areas “most commonly seen as centers of economic growth, political power, or cultural production,” but Trump made gains in the popular vote in traditional Democratic areas like Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and other smaller cities in the middle of the country, when their decaying suburbs and exurbs were lumped into the tallies.

    Pittsburgh and Allegheny County voted Democratic at 56 percent. This was only slightly lower than the levels of 2008 and 2012. But in surrounding counties in western Pennsylvania, support for Democratic candidates dropped. With larger turnouts in areas with greater Republican support, like Butler and Westmoreland Counties, western Pennsylvania could not deliver the votes necessary for the Democrats to win Pennsylvania. In addressing the decline in support for Democrats even in the city, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said it best: “What we saw [on Election Day] was Democrats voting Republican.”

    Clearly, the Republicans and Trump were successful in reducing support in what had been traditional Democratic areas by mining the divide between urban and suburban/rural areas, benefiting from the politics of resentment toward urbanism and economic elites.

    FOLLOWING THE ELECTION, deliberations over new urbanism, urban-suburban identities, and the urban crisis have intensified as part of the debate over our future economic policy. The competing narratives have been shaped by such think tanks as Brookings and New America, representing a range of liberal and conservative political viewpoints.

    For example, New America co-founder Michael Lind joined with Kotkin to produce a new report arguing that the solution to America’s economic problems lies in the revitalization of the heartland. In “The New American Heartland: Renewing the Middle Class by Revitalizing Middle America,” Lind and Kotkin reject the view that the coasts, epitomized by Silicon Valley in California and the finance industry in New York, should be the drivers of the American economy. They claim that what they call the “Gulf of Mexico watershed”—an admittedly imprecise geographic area—better reflects an ongoing population and economic shift away from the coasts toward middle America. This New American Heartland includes the older manufacturing rust belt, broad agricultural regions, and resource-extracting areas along the Gulf Coast. In other articles, Kotkin suggests this was the very region responsible for the election of Donald Trump.

    Lind and Kotkin reject both Democrats’ and Republicans’ belief that America’s economic future is tied to knowledge, media, and finance industries that require the higher-skilled and better-educated employees located in coastal areas, and they also point out that even knowledge workers are leaving the coasts. While they do not deny that automation and offshoring have reduced employment in manufacturing and goods-producing industries, they believe that “the tradable sector” is far more essential to American prosperity than its share of current employment suggests. This sector includes manufacturing, industrial agriculture, energy, and minerals, fields that are dominated by large firms and complex supply chains. Once again indirectly criticizing the failures of urbanists’ visions of technology as the source of economic growth, they argue that every city and county cannot be Silicon Valley, and that the lower housing and energy costs and weaker regulatory environment in the “New Heartland” will drive future economic growth and development.

    Lind and Kotkin’s political colors become more apparent in their discussion of the role of government in revitalizing the New American Heartland. They call for the government to supplement efforts of the private sector, but they also warn that “misguided regulations” could “thwart economic development.” For example, they note that regulatory attempts to mitigate the “possible” harms of climate change only increase the costs of fossil fuels. They are more concerned about possible dangers to energy industries, American jobs, and productivity growth. Instead, they suggest, the federal government should largely limit its support to basic science research and development, infrastructure, and tax support for state and local government and public-private partnerships.

    Brookings scholar Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute, offer a similar but decidedly smaller geographic analysis, minus the anti-coastal attacks and criticism of technology industries. In The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy, they argue that metro areas, like Greater Pittsburgh, will drive economic growth because they are home to clusters of universities, local businesses, hospitals, museums, and advanced technology and manufacturing industries, what Katz and Bradley call “innovation districts.” They encourage planners and government officials to develop new strategies based on “Emergent Metros.”

    Like Lind and Kotkin, Katz and Bradley raise doubts about the role of the federal government. They believe that the metropolitan revolution is “exploding this tired construct” about federal solutions. Instead, they argue, cities and metro areas “are becoming the leaders in the nation: experimenting, taking risk, making hard choices and asking for forgiveness, not permission.” This, they suggest, will lead to “only one logical conclusion: the inversion of the hierarchy of power in the U.S.”

    That inversion, however, would put business elites and their closely affiliated local foundations in power. The examples that Katz and Bradley highlight all involved a shift in power from elected government officials to unelected business and economic leaders and nongovernmental organizations, leaving local electorates, community groups, and neighborhoods with little power to do anything other than rubber-stamp the decisions made by local elites. They minimize the involvement of popular movements in urban issues. They contrast both the Occupy and Tea Party movements with their metropolitan revolution, which they describe as “reasoned rather than emotional, leader driven rather than leaderless, born of pragmatism and optimism rather than despair and anger.”

    In contrast, Richard Florida envisions a more critical and stronger role for government in supporting urban transformational changes. In The Urban Crisis, he argues that a “disconnect between the vital economic role of cities and our policymakers’ neglect of them” has led to a crisis. Florida still believes, as he wrote in The Rise of the Creative Class, that cities are most economically successful when they bring together the three “Ts”—technology, talent, and tolerance. Cities remain platforms for innovation, wealth creation, social and progressive values, and political freedom, and these, in turn, contribute to the health of suburbs and outlying areas. However, he now argues that cities must resist the “winner-take-all urbanism” that fosters economic inequality and segregation. He offers seven keys for more equitable development: reforms in building, zoning codes, and tax policies; infrastructure investment to spur density and clustering and to limit sprawl; affordable rental housing in central locations; turning low-wage service jobs into family-supporting work; addressing poverty through greater investment in people and places; helping build stronger and more prosperous international urban cities; and empowering local communities and local leaders to strengthen their own economies. No doubt many of these reforms would make cities more affordable and attractive to the middle and working classes, but they would also require massive government subsidies. For Florida, then, the federal government has a central role to play in alleviating the urban crisis.

    The real problem for Florida is not the coastal elites and tech hubs and oligarchs so vilified by Lind and Kotkin. Rather, the problem lies with “urbanized knowledge capitalism” itself, which has clear winners and losers, as evidenced by the economic segregation, wage and income inequality, and home unaffordability that plague the urban centers of knowledge capitalism. This urban crisis is not limited to coastal areas. It affects cities and metros of all sizes across the country. To address the underlying crisis of this “secular stagnation,” Florida believes, the federal government must move beyond the usual but vague debates over infrastructure spending and make “strategic investments in the kinds of infrastructure that can underpin more clustered and concentrated urban development.”

    WHAT IS MISSING FROM the larger discussions of urban and regional development are any fully formed progressive solutions. Even the most progressive of recent political campaigns offered little. While Bernie Sanders championed “New Deal Reforms” and a “new Bill of Rights” that, he claimed, would create “an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy,” other than making housing affordable and increasing wages and benefits, he put forth no concrete plans for dealing with the broader crisis of urban and regional economies. Some of Richard Florida’s more progressive pillars found their way into Martin O’Malley’s campaign, but that never got off the ground.

    More recently, the Center for American Progress has put forward a progressive solution, a report entitled “Toward a Marshall Plan for America: Rebuilding our Towns, Cities, and the Middle Class.” It argues for developing a commission to design a “domestic Marshall Plan for jobs and community investment.” The Marshall Plan Commission would be “under the direction of national, regional, and local leaders.” They would “seek input from urban and rural leaders who represent labor, business, education, health, faith, community, economic development, and racial justice to help understand the problem; lift up promising practices; develop bold ideas; particularly for people who did not attend college.” The plan encourages the building of “community institutions that support incomes, employment, and mobility” through greater infrastructure spending, investment in education, public employment, improvements in access to child care and health care, tax reform, and increased wages and social security, among other strategies. Overall, the plan can be read as a provisional “New Deal Lite,” a thinly disguised re-do of the center’s contributions to Hillary Clinton’s economic platform, with belated attention to the working class and nonmetropolitan America.

    There is a good reason why no one has offered clearer strategies, though. As Pittsburgh shows, there are no easy answers to challenges facing metro regions. When we look beyond that city’s core, we clearly see that even the place most often praised for having gotten economic renewal right still battles uneven development and inequities just beyond the city limits. None of the strategists offer much hope for the many former mill towns and rural communities in western Pennsylvania. Without a new and enduring infusion of economic vitality, smaller towns and rural areas outside the upscale metropolitan hubs will show persistent signs of economic struggle. Some may be beyond repair.

    It isn’t that the Pittsburgh story is wrong. It is simply incomplete. The narratives about this city, like the broader debates among new urbanists and economic and urban planners, do not fully consider the continuing costs of deindustrialization, disinvestment, globalization, and neoliberal austerity programs on individuals and communities. These personal, community, and national costs rival the displacements caused by natural disasters and armed conflicts. The devastation of economic change has left far too many with limited options and little power to improve their lives or communities.

    Even if someone could offer clear solutions, however, their proposals would still have to surmount political gridlock. Neither party seems poised to take on this crisis in any effective way, which only contributes to the disillusionment of many voters and to a growing divide that, as Brownstein argues, splits urban residents from those living in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas.

    Even with the best of intentions, urban planners and economic developers are complicit in sustaining the broken socioeconomic system that Florida suggests is central to the urban crisis. They need to recognize that the problem goes beyond even secular stagnation, segregation, gentrification, inclusion, regional integration, and the business and government efforts so prominent in their narratives. The problem is with capitalism as it currently exists—its reliance on inequality and racism, and its externalization of its social costs. This is not to say that economic and social improvements cannot be made through some of the reforms suggested previously. But they won’t solve the underlying problems that come from capitalism’s subordination of social needs to its economic necessities.

    Urbanists need to consider long-term strategies based on values, and not just spatial considerations, that address the concrete needs of people. What makes our urban and regional crisis seem so intractable, ultimately, is this very tension between market forces and ethical and moral solutions.

    This piece originally appeared in The American Prospect.

    John Russo is the former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University and currently a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

    Photo by Dllu (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Is Anybody Really Listening: Pizza with Perez in Youngstown

    Ohio has long been seen as a battleground state, up for grabs in most Presidential elections. The state supported winning candidates of both parties for decades. But as the state shifted back and forth, the Mahoning Valley (Mahoning and Trumbull Counties) in Northeastern Ohio remained a Democratic stronghold. If Democratic candidates could garner more than 62% of the vote in this region – as they often did — they would win the state. In years when Republicans won, the Mahoning Valley still voted for the Democrats, but with less enthusiasm.

    Not this time. In the 2016 primaries, a number of Mahoning Valley Democrats changed their party affiliation to vote for Donald J. Trump. Last year’s big shift came from people who had sat out the past few elections but showed up to vote this year. In November, Hillary Clinton won Mahoning County but received less than 50% of the vote. She actually lost in neighboring Trumbull County. She lost Ohio by more than 8 points, the biggest loss of any candidate in the state since Michael Dukakis gave up the state to George H.W. Bush in 1988.

    That’s why political operatives and journalists are now paying even more attention to the Youngstown area. Even the Ohio Democratic Party (ODP), which has long counted on the Mahoning Valley, is taking notice of a region they didn’t think they needed to worry about.

    In what has become a familiar practice following a series of defeats in recent state-wide elections, the ODP sponsored a “Listening Tour.” On June 12, 2017, the tour came to Youngstown with National Democratic Party Chairperson Tom Perez, who reiterated that Youngstown was a political “bellwether.”

    The event was held at a local pizzeria, Wedgewood Pizza, and billed as “Pizza with Perez.” Approximately 75 attendees, mostly loyal Democratic Party supporters, including a number of local and state politicians, paid $25 to attend the midday event. I paid my $25 to find out whether Party leaders were seriously listening to the concerns of voters and to see how they would react.

    What I saw was a typical campaign event, with the audience doing the listening while Democratic operatives touted their positions. After brief introductions by state and local Party chairs David Peppers and David Betras, Perez explained his commitment to Democratic politics by recalling his father’s experience of moving to Buffalo from the Dominican Republic. Perez talked about how the community and especially the labor movement helped his family make a home there. He promised that Democrats could be counted on to speak to hopes and fears of the working class and to fight for working people.

    When someone asked about why Democrats had lost the election, Perez criticized Republican social and economic policy, but he also acknowledged several mistakes that the Democratic Party had made during the last campaign. “We could have done a better job of speaking more directly to the pocketbook issues that bring people to the ballot,” he said. Among other things, the Party should have recognized that NAFTA hurt working people and acknowledged its role in that trade bill.

    Perez noted that the Party’s “message got muddled,” but he quickly turned to typical campaign trail rhetoric: “I’m here to say very clearly that the Democratic Party is the party that’s fighting for the labor movement. The Democratic Party is the party fighting for quality public education and access to health care and the issues that matter most to the people in the Valley.” But there were very few questions and much of the time devoted to meet and greet. Clearly, no one identified themselves as crossover voters or first time Republican registrants. So much for this being a listening tour.

    The ODP’s misstep of charging admission for a fake listening tour was not lost on local Mahoning County Republican Party Chairman, Mark Munroe, who called it a “strange” event and organized a parallel gathering where he invited crossover voters to explain their positions. As Munroe commented, “If they want to find out why Democrats have become Republicans they need to talk to Republicans because the Dems who have crossed over are not going to be inclined to pay $25 contribution to a Democrat party event.” One of the speakers, Geno DiFabio, explained his party switch: “Every 2 years, every 4 years, locally they’d come around and say, ‘oh, we’ll fight for you and take care of you,’ and then they’d disappear. It was like an abusive relationship.”

    Despite what the invitation promised, the ODP’s tour didn’t involve listening to local voters or even to their leaders, but that’s a familiar pattern for Mahoning Valley Democrats. Voters here remember how the national Party leaders dismissed former Congressman James Traficant when he bitterly criticized the Democratic Party for contributing to deindustrialization, making false promises, and prophetically warned that NAFTA would harm working people. But nobody listened.

    In 2015, Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan told a reporter that “a lot of bad things happened” in 2010 and 2014, and the Party needed “a new approach—a more grounded approach—to turning out voters.” Nobody listened.

    A year ago, after the Ohio primaries, local Party leaders wrote a widely publicized letter to the Clinton campaign and the ODP warning that they should pay more attention to working-class issues. Once again, nobody listened.

    A tone-deaf, let-us-tell-you-how-much-we-care faux listening tour won’t accomplish anything, But the ODP and the DNC should pay more attention to Northeastern Ohio Democrats. They might start by heeding Ryan’s recent critique that the Democratic Party brand has become “toxic.” He has called for a wholesale change, starting with the Party’s leadership in the House of Representatives.

    The Democrats should also pay attention to Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who is the only statewide Democratic office holder and one of very few national Party leaders with a consistent pro-worker economic vision.

    If they don’t start actually listening to voters in places like Youngstown, the Democratic Party may well end out talking to itself.

    John Russo is the former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University and currently a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

    Photo by Lonnie Tague for the United States Department of Justice [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Universal Basic Income: A “Social Vaccine” for Technological Displacement?

    John Kenneth Galbraith once said that the beginnings of wisdom were to never trust an economist. Those of us that spent most of our adult lives in deindustrialized communities understood his point.

    As the mills and factories closed in working-class communities like Youngstown, an array of business and academic economists suggested that economic devastation was part of the natural economic order known as “creative destruction.” Disinvestment, technological displacement, downsizing, and outsourcing were all necessary for corporate efficiency and dynamism, regardless of the “temporary” harm to individuals and communities. Capital, they explained, was simply being shifted from old to new investments, and new jobs would magically appear. Of course, workers would have to move or gain new skills in order to claim those jobs. Unfortunately, those predictions were wildly overstated. Capital was not reinvested in productive ways or moved offshore, many workers never found comparable employment, communities deteriorated. Over time, appeals to “creative destruction” were recognized not only as erroneous, but as a cover for capital getaway.

    We should remember this story as we enter a fourth industrial revolution that will merge technologies and blur the lines between digital and biological spheres. In the process, these digital transformations will spread unemployment and increase precarity. As in the past, the digital revolution has been sold as part of modernity and progress, but increasingly technological change is proving more destructive than positive. The New York Times reports that some top researchers have already acknowledged that automation and robotics in manufacturing have resulted in a large net of loss of employment, declining wages, and disruption of working-class communities. The Times concludes that given unemployment levels, “there is no clear path forward, — especially for blue-collar men without college degrees.”

    But it is not just working-class men in industrial jobs who are suffering. Automation also affects jobs in other economic sectors. In fact, 38% of all US jobs are at risk due to automation, including service sector work in fields such as finance, transportation, education, and food services. Nor is technological displacement limited to the working class. Middle-class workers also stand to lose jobs and wages.

    Many corporate executives embrace this change, viewing automation solely in terms of profitability and suitability and ignoring the human costs. As Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of CKE Restaurants and Donald Trump’s original choice for Secretary of Labor, summed up this attitude in explaining why he would prefer robots over human workers: “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case.” To paraphrase, Harry Braverman, technology is not neutral. Rather, it enters the workplace as “the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.”

    Technology leaders understand that their work contributes to displacement and inequality. In “The Disruptors: Silicon Valley Elites’ Vision of the Future,” Greg Ferenstein reports on a survey of tech leaders. He found that most agreed with Paul Graham, the highly influential web leader, that it is the “job of tech to create inequality…You can’t prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can’t do that without preventing them from starting startups.” This view reflects the self-interests of the industry, of course, but it also suggests deep-seated beliefs in technological determinism and the benefits of creative destruction.

    At the same time, working people have become increasingly resistant to the uncritical acceptance of workplace technology, and this contributes to the populist backlash we’re seeing in the U.S. and across Europe. The Brexit vote, the rise of right wing parties in Europe, and Trump’s election all reflects people’s doubts about older economic paradigms and technological determinism, especially in older working-class communities. Alongside racism and xenophobia, these movements also reflect the anxieties of those who are being left behind by economic development.

    Technological and political elites have good reason to worry about the potential for class rebellion, and some have started to rethink their faith in technology or, at least, to ask about how to mitigate the outcomes of technological change. For example, a group of science and technology leaders have established Singularity University (SU), which touts itself as a global community whose mission is “to educate, inspire, and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges.” It holds ‘summits” around the world, underwritten by large international firms, such as Deloitte, that bring together researchers, entrepreneurs, institutions, and governments – most of whom believe deeply in the power of robotics, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and powerful computing to transform work and improve lives. Yet SU’s approach is remarkable because it emphasizes the impact of technology on people’s lives. While SU takes a positivist and entrepreneurial approach, arguing that the world’s biggest problems are world’s biggest business opportunities, it clearly understands that any technological advance must take into account its impact on communities.

    Silicon Valley firms also see themselves as potential leaders in developing strategies for a future where many workers will be displaced by technology. Some envision a more direct approach: the universal basic income, which Scott Santens describes as a social “vaccine” for the 21st century. Y-Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator firm, has begun experimenting with this idea by providing a basic fixed income to 100 families in Oakland, California. Give Directly, a Silicon Valley non-profit, is testing the idea as a way of eliminating poverty by giving each individual in a small village in Kenya $22 a month for 12 years. The New York Times describes the project “as first true test of a universal basic income. Not just given to individuals but to a whole community for an extended period.” Of course, these approaches are not considered socialism; they are defined as providing an “income floor.”

    The potential of these experiments has not been not lost on developed nations, where some see a universal basic income as strategy for ameliorating the impact of automation. The European Parliament, Korea, France, Canada, Finland, Netherlands, and Scotland are all considering a basic income as a strategy for managing a future without work. In the US, growing economic inequality, the rise of contingent work, and the defeat of the Republicans’ alternative to Obamacare had the unexpected consequence of restarting the discussions of expanding the social safety net. For example, the National Academy of Social Insurance is discussing the expansion of Social Security and Medicare and extending unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and unemployment and disability insurance as tools to balance the volatility of jobs and income as long-term, full-time, traditional jobs become ever more scarce due to corporate restructuring and technological change. Importantly, these initiatives are gaining public and political support, especially single payer health care.

    The economic displacement of the era of deindustrialization caused great harm to working-class people and their communities. Decades later, as technological displacement threatens not only the working class but many in the middle class as well, business and political leaders alike recognize that it is in their interest to pay attention to the consequences of economic change. Private and legislative initiatives around the universal basic income may not succeed, and some are meeting clear resistance. The European Parliament rejected a report urging them to “seriously consider” basic income as a response to “the economic consequences of automation and artificial intelligence.” Nonetheless, as political unrest grows as a result of technological change such discussions lay the foundation for the new social policies we will need for a future without good jobs.

    John Russo is a visiting fellow at Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University and at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. He is the co-author with Sherry Linkon of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown (8th printing).

    Photo: elycefeliz, CC License

  • Why Clinton Could Lose the Working Class in Ohio

    In the latest Quinnipiac poll, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are tied in battleground Ohio. This suggests a very close race in Ohio in the fall. Economic issues, especially trade, led many former Democrats to cross party lines to support Trump in the Republican primaries. Many who hadn’t voted in recent elections joined them. We’re likely to see a repeat of this in November unless Democrats change their trade policies. None of this should surprise Democrats, especially those in Ohio.

    As a professor of labor studies and co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University for more than 30 years, I had many opportunities to talk politics with workers there. In 2000, many told me that, after voting for Democrats all their lives, they were choosing guns, gays and God over Al Gore, who had been a primary spokesman for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) seven years earlier. In 2002, Northeast Ohio Democrats threw out eight-term congressman Tom Sawyer on the basis of his support for NAFTA, despite Sawyer having a 90 percent voting record on labor issues.

    Since the passage of NAFTA, Ohio Republicans have controlled state government save for a brief interlude caused by Republican corruption in 2006. At the same time, two Democrats — Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Tim Ryan, who replaced Sawyer — have been elected and re-elected in no small part due to their opposition to NAFTA and the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Clearly, trade policy poses a problem for Democrats and their presumptive candidate. Clinton has been tied to former President Bill Clinton’s NAFTA legislation and its Wall Street proponents. While she has stated that she is against TPP at this time, many Ohioans hear that as weasel words that only contribute to their distrust of Clinton.

    It is widely speculated that the Obama administration will push for TPP acceptance in the lame-duck session following the 2016 general election. According to a tweet from CNN’s Dan Merica, Clinton says she will not lobby Congress on the issue. But this will only undermine her credibility and provide Trump with an incentive to continue to demagogue the issue.

    In Ohio, about 60 percent of voters in 2012 did not have a college degree, one of the most commonly used (though problematic) proxies for identifying working-class voters. Slightly more than half of them voted for Obama, according to CNN exit polls. But while Obama won a majority of working-class votes in Ohio, he lost among whites, winning only 41 percent of their votes. This suggests that a significant portion of Obama’s working-class support in 2012 came from Ohio voters of color, not white voters. Four years later, the combination of white working-class support for Trump, as we saw in the primary, and expected lower African-American turnout — Clinton is unlikely to inspire the enthusiasm that Obama generated — may swing Ohio’s prized electoral votes to the presumptive Republican nominee.

    Clinton needs the support of working-class Ohioans – the very people who have been hurt the most by trade policy. To do that, she needs to stop insisting that trade is good. Her current stance is similar to wooing West Virginia coal miners by touting the benefits of non-carbon fuels. Similarly, she should stop talking about retraining and promising high-tech jobs, which only reminds voters of how hollow such programs have been in the past.

    Instead, Clinton should acknowledge that we have lost the trade war and pledge to use every legal means at her disposal to protect American workers and industries from the continued onslaught of imports. This would include initiating trade cases against countries that target American industries by subsidizing their exports, exploiting workers, manipulating their currencies, and polluting the environment.

    She should threaten to impose tariffs on every imported product from countries that refuse to implement the same U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations and federal, state and local tax requirements that are imposed on American businesses.

    At the very least, Clinton should do more than promise to build a strong infrastructure program. Such a program would put the skills, materials and physical strength of working-class Ohioans to work and improve Ohio’s competitive economic environment. Clinton has identified specific programs but she needs to do more to explain how she will pay for them. Otherwise, her campaign platform will sound too much like an echo of past hollow campaign promises.

    Clinton should also stress making college affordable for the working class and those living in poverty. Not everyone wants a desk job in front of a computer, and older workers may not be interested in retraining for high-tech jobs. But they do want more education and training for their kids.

    Finally, working people worry about how they will fare economically after retirement. They know that Wall Street oversold 401(k) plans and that traditional pensions are disappearing. Clinton needs to reject Wall Street’s calls for changes in Social Security and offer a specific program to maintain private pension plans without cutting benefits.

    If Clinton does not develop a strong and believable working-class agenda, I predict that the Democrats will lose Ohio in November, and that would open the door to a Trump victory nationally.

    This piece first appeared in the Plain Dealer on June 26,2016, and was re-posted at Working Class Studies blog.

    John Russo is a visiting fellow at Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University and at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. He is the co-author with Sherry Linkon of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown (8th printing).

    Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Hillary Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0

  • Now They Get It: Health, Class, and Economic Restructuring

    In the past few months, many commentators have responded to a recent study that shows increasing death rates among middle-aged white Americans. Some have suggested that the increase is the consequence of material poverty resulting from economic restructuring and the neoliberal agenda over the last several decades.

    Globalization, trade liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and reductions in the welfare state have not only led to downsizing in many industries, they have also reduced wages and benefits, contributing to growing economic inequality. The nature of many jobs has also changed. Work has been intensified, hours have become increasingly irregular, and workers face anxieties about the loss of their jobs and electronic monitoring of their work. These changes leave workers feeling vulnerable and stressed, and that together with anti-union laws and poorly enforced labor laws limit their ability to fight back. As someone who taught courses in Occupational Safety and Health for many years, I am all too aware that these workplace stresses and the limits of workers’ agency are associated with increases in cardiovascular disease, physical and mental disorders, and acute injuries. In other words, while research has focused on increasing mortality rates, changes in work also contribute to increased health problems, which may, in turn, explain the increases in alcoholism and drug abuse that Anne Case and Angus Deaton see as key factors in the rising death rates.

    Workplace stress and insecurity are among the “hidden injuries of class” that compound material poverty. As people adapt to changes in and the loss of work, they become more isolated, and, too often, lose their sense of community and self worth. Worse, they internalize insecurity, blaming themselves for problems at work or for not being able to find a decent job or support their families. That people blame themselves should not surprise us, given the persistent ideal of the American Dream, which promises that individual effort will pay off in upward mobility. No wonder people who have lost jobs or who are working hard but still struggling economically see their challenges as a moral failure or character flaw.

    For anyone who has studied the social costs of deindustrialization, none of this is news. In the 1980s, Harvey Brenner determined that for every one percent increase in unemployment there were 650 homicides, 3300 admissions to state mental hospitals, 500 deaths by cirrhosis of the liver, 20,000 deaths by suicide. Other studies focused on displaced workers in the late twentieth century showed increases in incarceration, insomnia, headaches, smoking, child and spousal abuse and stomach disorders, not to mention suicide and drug and alcohol abuse. In many ways, the current research shows not a new trend but rather the long-term impact of economic restructuring and neoliberalism on workers’ lives.

    What is new is that these patterns no longer seem to apply primarily to the working class. While Case and Deaton note that poorer and less-educated white people had even higher mortality rates, their study suggests that the pattern also applies to the middle class. This may be what most surprised commentators, for whom the report offered dramatic evidence of an important change in American culture. As Paul Krugman suggested, “We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it is a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.” Krugman and others asked how this could happen. In an interview with Vox, Deaton commented that the middle-aged white people in his study had “lost the narrative of their lives.” While this certainly applies for many in the working class, as Sherry Linkon noted in November, it is also true for growing numbers of middle-class Americans who may have been even more invested in the American Dream.

    Also new is the racial pattern. In the 1970s and 80s, death rates for African Americans rose, but in recent decades, they have fallen as the rates for whites have risen. Andrew Cherlin suggests that the difference could be explained by people’s perceptions of how they are doing compared with others like them. As Cherlin writes, “It’s likely that many non-college-educated whites are comparing themselves to a generation that had more opportunities than they have, whereas many blacks and Hispanics are comparing themselves to a generation that had fewer opportunities.” Put simply, if white working-class people see themselves as losing ground, they may be more likely to consider suicide or engage in self-destructive behaviors.

    The impact of economic restructuring on material poverty and health has a long history. In the last 40 years, increases in poverty and the declines in the health of the working class were rationalized as “acceptable” losses associated with major economic change. But what has changed is the demographic landscape. No longer are mortality and morbidity issues associated primarily with the working-class and African Americans. Now, job loss and economic insecurity are impacting the middle class and whites.

    I’m reminded of an old adage: when poverty comes in the door, love goes out the window. As middle-class whites increasingly experience the kind of economic insecurity that became normal for so many working-class people years ago, some are losing not just love but also their health and even their lives.

    This essay was first published by the Working-Class Perspectives blog, which offers weekly commentaries on current issues related to working-class people and communities.

    John Russo is a visiting fellow at Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University and at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. He is the co-author with Sherry Linkon of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown (8th printing).

  • Trump, Sanders, and the Precariat

    While the white working class is shrinking in the US, it remains the largest voting block in the country. That may be why leaders of both parties are concerned that white working-class voters, especially in the Midwest and South, are supporting populist candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They don’t understand that many of these voters blame Wall Street, corporate leaders, and politicians – the East Coast establishment –for destroying their jobs and communities over the past few decades.

    Recent polls suggest that almost 60% of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, “don’t identify with what America has become.” According to Cliff Young and Chris Jackson, these “nativist” Americans are older, whiter, and less educated than the rest of the population – more working-class, in other words. For some middle-class professionals, this “nativism,” exemplified in support for Donald Trump’s racial comments, simply reinforces the assumption that the white working class is inherently racist and foolish. They conveniently ignore the way racism is resurfacing among the middle class as they, too, feel resentment over their economic displacement. As Barbara Ehrenreich warns, “Whole professions have fallen on hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hating on those — of any color or ethnicity — who are falling even faster.”

    The focus on racism and xenophobia ignores an essential reality: precarity is bringing working-class and middle-class voters together politically. As Guy Standing has argued, the emerging precariat is a political class in the making. We see this in the “Fight for $15.” The struggle to increase the minimum wage seeks economic improvement for both the non-college and college educated.

    This growing political block not only shares economic resentment but also the underlying racism that has been baked into American culture. No doubt, many college-educated whites looking for work have blamed multiculturalism and affirmative action for their current economic position, and they are just as likely as working-class people to respond to Trump’s racist rhetoric.

    As Dan Bolz has suggested, “Trump’s appeal . . . underscores the resistance to the changes the country’s transition have brought forward.” Paul Krugman has suggested that “moderate Republicans and Third Way Democrats” who had tried to explain inequality in terms of skill-biased technological change are now lamenting the rise of Democratic populism. At the same time, progressive Democrats have complained that Sanders has ignored racial inequality while pandering to those facing economic inequality.

    Leading Republican pundits like David Brooks and George Will have tried to dismiss Trump, a sure sign of conservative establishment fear. This has led to a squabble with Will calling Trump a “bloviating ignoramus” and Trump responding that Will is the “dumbest and most overrated political columnist of all time.” Some would say that Trump’s attack on political correctness and emphasis on “hot button” issues offer just type of mud fight the white working-class base wants. But more thoughtful moderate Republican pundits understand that such battles will not secure that base. For example, writers like Ross Douthat and Michael Gerson have been ignored and marginalized by the Republican establishment. A decade ago, Douthat and Rahein Salem tried to solidify working-class support by developing sound policy proposals that would appeal to what they called “Sam’s Club” Republicans. The Republican establishment trashed their ideas, and these writers have been reduced to rehashing the social values debate of an earlier era. E.J. Dionne has said Republicans are having trouble taking on Trump not only because “they have delivered next to nothing to their loyal white, working-class supporters.”

    The Democratic Party establishment has its own set of fears — about Bernie Sanders. With significant contributions from Elizabeth Warren, Sanders has tried to move the party to embrace policies that are consistent with its New Deal roots. In a speech at Georgetown University, Sanders stressed the disappearance of the middle class, noting that productivity gains and income have been going to 1% of Americans. According to Sanders, a handful of oligarchs now control economic and political life in the U.S. He reminded the audience of the fight over New Deal reforms and types of security it brought to working Americans. Sanders’s takeaway was that “True freedom does not occur without economic security.”

    Hillary Clinton has much less appeal for many working-class and minority Democratic voters. While she has sidestepped her past support for her husband’s policies on crime, drugs, welfare, and trade, these voters have not forgotten his legacy. In commenting on these issues, Clinton tends to pander to voters, as when she says that she opposes the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP “at this time.” No wonder polls consistently show that the American public doesn’t trust her (though polls suggest they do trust Hillary more than the current crop of Republican candidates on some issues).

    The Democratic establishment doesn’t worry about Clinton’s occasional forays in populism, which they see as political maneuvering. As Politico has reported, “None of them think she really means her populism.” But Sanders’s populist talk makes them cringe, because he connects with working-class resentment. His speeches appeal to the deep sense of injustice, unfairness, and inequality that many in the new precariat, especially millennials and African Americans, feel toward the East Coast establishment that took away their jobs, houses, and community and now even threatens their Social Security.

    Clinton’s wealthy donor base recognizes Sanders’s appeal as a threat to their interests. Democratic Party leaders and their Wall Street backers hope that the Sanders fever will pass quickly and their adherents will then fall in line and embrace Clinton as the only viable option.

    If Clinton and her advisors can’t connect with the new populism, voters may well heed the implication from Republicans that nothing will change no matter who is elected. They’re wrong, of course. With a fragile and deeply unequal economy and an aging Supreme Court, the stakes are too high.   But if Democrats are to win this year, they must understand that the populism that drives support for Trump is also central to Sanders’s appeal. Winning the 2016 election will require the kind of grassroots support that helped elect President Obama twice, but to build that support Democrats will have to address the disaffection and resentment of the new precariat.

    This piece first appeared at Working Class Perspectives.

    John Russo is a visiting fellow at Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University and at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. He is the co-author with Sherry Linkon of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown (8th printing).

    Photo by Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Deindustrialization, Depopulation, and the Refugee Crisis

    The refugee crisis facing Western nations has begun to peak both demographically and politically.  The United Nations has reported that more than 6.5 million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries and Europe, and even nations that until recently welcomed refugees are frantically trying to change immigration policy or protect borders. In contrast, as migration has swelled the population in some places, in others, like the Rust Belt of the United States, depopulation undermines future economic development.  Some have begun to ask whether population trends can or should determine policy. The answer is yes.

    To understand the significance of depopulation in the Rust Belt, imagine that a plague hit the Midwest and four million people had vanished. What would be the economic consequences for the region, its institutions and for individuals?  Deindustrialization has operated much like a plague, and just as with a plague, the long term social and economic costs are substantial. The region can’t “just get over it.”  Deindustrialization, and the depopulation associated with it, continues to be a drag on the region both economically and socially.

    For example, in Youngstown, Ohio, steel mills began closing almost 40 years ago.  The city’s population is now around 62,000, a decline of more than 50 percent since the 1970s.  A community once known at the “City of Homes” now has more than 4000 vacant properties. Youngstown’s economic redevelopment program has largely failed. Attempts at economic redevelopment around prisons, fracking, 3-D printing and casinos have had only limited success, at best. They seem more like examples of the economics of desperation than serious efforts to revitalize the local economy. Appeals by business and government leaders to redefine this as a  “shrinking city” and exhortations for the community to exhibit “adaptive resilience” have proven shallow.  With little economic growth, such approaches feel too much like cruel optimism.

    Youngstown mayor John McNally has said that his most important task is to stop the depopulation.  A city like Youngstown needs to stop the hemorrhaging and get an infusion of energy.  Would the city gain by encouraging refugees to move to Youngstown? Other communities have tried this approach, encouraging immigrants to move to depopulated areas and gaining new economic activity in the process. Weather-challenged Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, has taken advantage of the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program, which “selects applicants who demonstrate they have the potential and the desire to immigrate and settle themselves and their families in the Canadian province of Manitoba.” Immigrants may apply through different categories such as General, Family Support, International Student, Employer, Strategic Initiative, or Business Immigration. An Economic Development study reports that Winnipeg’s metropolitan population has grown to 780,000, 100,000 higher than earlier projections. The population increase includes about 85,000 immigrants. Between 2009-2014, the local economy stabilized with unemployment below the national average and higher labor force participation and wage growth. In 2014, the city was touted by KPMG as the No. 1 low cost manufacturing location in aerospace, chemical, electronics assembly, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications equipment in North America.

    On a smaller scale, some locations have also stemmed depopulation through the employment of existing ethnic enclaves as portal communities. Even in places like deindustrialized metro Detroit, depopulation was offset by an influx of Mexican and Middle Eastern immigrants into existing enclaves, transforming areas that were thought of as ghost towns. While traditional immigrant/refugee communities, like those in the Detroit Metro region were quite large, much of the new resettlement has been more geographically diverse and dispersed than it once was. For example, over 70,000 Bosnian refugees have resettled in St. Louis within the region over the last 20 years.

    The New York Times reported in 2014 that new immigrants are more often to be found in midsize cities, like Dayton, Ohio than in New York, Chicago, and other large cities.   Like Youngstown, Dayton had lost over 40% of its population.  But city officials embraced immigration by establishing a “Welcoming Dayton” plan in 2011. The plan encouraged new immigrants and refugees to relocate in this Southwestern Ohio community and developed support groups to help newcomers adjust to their new community.  Most of the new growth in Dayton has been the result of the relocations and the city is in the process of accelerating the plan.

    Another example is Utica, New York. In 2002, this deindustrialized city established the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees (MVRCR). Over 10,000 immigrants, largely from Bosnia and Vietnam, relocated to the Utica Area.  The 2012 U.S. census reports that 17.6 percent of Utica’s population was foreign born and 26.6 could speak a language other than English. NPR reported that the resettlement succeeded in part because Utica had low housing costs and many low-skilled jobs that were unfilled as result of depopulation. Refugees found jobs as meat cutters, greenhouse workers, and nursing home attendants. Some saved enough money to go into business themselves. They bought low-priced homes and rehabbed them, began to pay taxes, and purchased goods and services. No doubt, the refugees initially generated costs to taxpayers in terms of housing subsidies, Medicaid, Welfare, and education, but over time, repopulation stemmed depopulation and provided a glimmer of hope for economic revitalization.

    Winnipeg, Dayton, and Utica are examples of small-scale attempts at repopulation using relatively small-scale government initiatives and ethnic portal communities. But the scale of today’s refugee crisis suggests the need for larger scale efforts, including, perhaps, a national program.  For example, the German government has developed an administrative formula that distributes refugees and asylum seekers among the 16 German states.  According to Thomas Greven, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin, the distribution plan is based primarily on population and economic data, with the most refugees assigned to the depopulated parts of East Germany. The hope is that these new arrivals will develop their own micro-economies that will contribute to the revitalization of the region.

    No doubt, the surge in refugees in Germany has caused resentment toward the policy and government in the short term.  Yet the German government has announced its willingness to accept 800,000 new refugees largely from the Syrian war, promised greater economic aid to state and local communities, and enlisted German companies to cope with the influx of refugees. While the German efforts reflect ethical and moral commitment, there is more to the story. The German population has been dropping for some time. Its population has become older and new birth rates are among the lowest in the world.  The German government and business leaders understand that “demographics are destiny,” and if it is to be a leader in economic growth it needs not only more people but also younger people – like the refugees.

    Will any large immigration/refugee repopulation policy be considered in the US? It does not appear so given some recent attempts – by localities, states, and even the U.S. Congress — to discourage immigration and refugees. But the Federal government has final authority over immigration policy matters. If the US were to follow Germany’s approach and offer relocation incentives, Rust Belt communities have the infrastructure and housing to accommodate many refugees. In turn, the new immigrants could establish microeconomic communities, compliment established markets, invest earnings and consume in the local economy and become a source for new tax revenue.

    No doubt, this will be a political challenge given the current zeitgeist. But such a policy would be moral and ethical and in the best traditions of America. It could also help boost the economies of cities that are still struggling to recover from deindustrialization.  One thing that is for certain, if St. Louis can resettle 70,000 Bosnians in a15 year period, the US can certainly accommodate more than the 10,000 Syrian refugees currently slated for resettlement, especially in the deindustrialized and depopulated in the Rust Belt.

    John Russo is a visiting fellow at Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University and at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. He is the co-author with Sherry Linkon of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown (8th printing).

  • Fracking, Youngstown and The Right to the City

    What happens when the Chamber of Commerce, labor leaders, and government officials, most of whom live outside the city, are pitted against a small yet influential group of community and university activists? That’s what’s going on right now in a debate over a ballot initiative that would prevent gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing — fracking — in Youngstown, Ohio. The proposed ordinance, Community Bill of Rights (CBR), is modeled on similar anti-drilling legislation in other Ohio communities that would largely block drilling, as well as shale gas extraction and injection wells, especially in urban areas.

    This is the third attempt during the last two years to pass such legislation in Youngstown, and the vote has become closer each time. In the most recent try, 45 per cent supported the ordinance and 55 per cent opposed it. Supporters hope to shift the balance this time.

    The underlying legal issue is whether local community restrictions can preempt Ohio’s legal framework for gas and oil drilling. Ohio is a home rule state where municipalities have authority “to exercise all powers of local self-government and to adopt and enforce within their limits such local police, sanitary and other similar regulations, as are not in conflict with general laws”. As proponents of the Youngstown ordinance point out, there is no exception in the Constitution for the oil and gas industry.

    The Constitution would seem to give Youngstown the right to regulate fracking on the local level, but in 2004, the Ohio legislature passed a bill HB 278 explicitly denying that right. The bill was largely written by the oil and gas industry, which recruited support for it by flooding both Republicans and Democrats with campaign contributions, according to former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann. This happened before the industry expanded drilling in the Marcellus and Utica Shale regions of Eastern Ohio, suggesting that the industry knew it would encounter local resistance.

    Resistance to fracking reflects concerns about the well-documented relationship between fracking and earthquakes, both nationally and in Youngstown, and related health concerns. But what makes the Youngstown fight so remarkable is the setting: a community with a long history of economic struggle.

    Youngstown has been the poster child for deindustrialization and disinvestment since 1977. The city has lost over 30 per cent of its population in the last quarter century, and it has demolished over 3000 properties in the last five years. The average sale price for a home is $21,327. Other challenges include a median household income of $24,880 and a 36 per cent poverty rate. It’s also home to several prisons; one of every 20 residents is a prisoner. Alan Mallach, an urbanist and senior fellow of the National Housing Institute, notes that economic development efforts have not sufficiently addressed these problems, pointing out that “… factories or warehouses that the city has attracted usually move to the nearby suburbs, and four out of five jobs in the city are filled by people who commute from out of town.”

    Those opposing the Community Bill of Rights capitalize on these difficulties. They have spent large sums to set up phone banks in black urban churches, promoting the idea that fracking will create jobs. Yet there is very little evidence that African Americans have benefited from the fracking industry, except as precarious laborers.

    Many of those who are pushing for fracking don’t live in the city, and won’t have to live with its problems. These include Chamber members, labor unionists (especially the skilled trades), and city government employees who are exempted from local city residency requirements – a policy that contributed to the flight of middle-class white residents and the hollowing out of the city.

    The difference between the influence of these non-residents and the less well-financed voices of those who live in the city has not been lost on Community Bill of Rights supporters. CBR leaders Ray and Susie Beiersdorfer, city residents and Youngstown State University geologists, recognize that the blitz of advertising by the oil and natural gas industry, promising future jobs, appeals to the largely working-class, mostly black residents who are most affected by the city’s high levels of poverty and unemployment. But as a group of YSU academics noted in a letter to a Youngstown newspaper, “The same can be said for the manufacturing of cigarettes, alcohol, drones, high-range missiles, and nuclear warheads.”

    Youngstown, of course, is especially susceptible to the promise of jobs, even at the expense of the environment and health, and that has led some on the political left to either stay out of the fight or to oppose the CBR. Younger, environmentally-conscious city residents, including proponents of urban farming and sustainability, support the CBR. Other community groups think that the ban is too localized, and want to work on statewide fights. They argue that, because of the 2004 legislation, the local CBR is unenforceable and largely symbolic. Many local Democratic Party leaders also are visibly and vocally opposing the CBR. Democratic voters see their local leadership standing arm and arm with the many of same people who have attempted to undermine unionism and voting rights in Ohio.

    The proponents of the ban have been particularly troubled by the role of the city’s largest institution, Youngstown State University, and the resources it has accepted from the oil and gas industry. The impact of the university’s support of fracking has been powerful. YSU has downsized or abolished Humanities and Arts programs, while expanding its STEM (science, tech, engineering and math) college and trumpeting its training programs for promised oil and gas industry jobs that have yet to materialize in any significant degree. Some educators, like Deborah Mower, have argued that this should not be the role of the University: “Instead of merely responding to the industry need and ignoring the problems of fracking that have plagued the industry for decades, the university could create an epicenter for redressing their problems…. Perhaps lost in this discussion is the nature of education.”

    CBR proponents agree with that sentiment, but they might also point out that what is really at stake is, as the organizers of an upcoming international conference phrase it, the “right to the city” versus the influence of non-residents (disclosure: I’ll be speaking in May on so-called “smart shrinkage” at The Right to the City in an Era of Austerity (1973-2014) .

    The oil and gas industry has spent over $100,000 to defeat the CBR, and proponents have been sued to keep it off the ballot. Meanwhile, the Beiersdofers and other CBR organizers increasingly believe that public health, science and the ballot box are being overpowered by money. But they won’t let that happen in Youngstown without a fight.

    John Russo is a visiting research fellow at the Metropolitan Institute of Virginia Tech, and former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies / professor (emeritus) in the Williamson College of Business Administration at Youngstown State University. He is a board member of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative (MVOC) (Youngstown-Warren), and the co-author, with Sherry Linkon, of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown.

    Flickr photo by Don O’Brien, Red, White and Blue: In Ohio, 100-barrel tanks used to contain crude oil from gas wells.

  • Fighting the Vacant Property Plague

    The term ‘walking away from the property’ usually refers to owners who leave a home when they can’t make the mortgage payments. In Youngstown, Ohio, it may gain a new meaning: to describe banks that abandon a vacant property in foreclosure, and leave neighbors to cope with the blight. Now banks that walk away from their properties are being reigned in by a local community organization. This year, thanks to the efforts of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative (MVOC), Youngstown, Ohio became the first city in the nation to require banks to pay a $10,000 cash bond to the city when a house is both vacant and foreclosed.

    As a result of the code’s passage in January, the city now has a bond fund of over $870,000. Youngstown can use the funds for upkeep of the vacant properties.

    MVOC organizer Gary Davenport has said of the code, “It’s preventative and not punitive…the goal is to make banks recognize that it’s their responsibility to maintain vacant properties in foreclosure.” More strongly, Claudia Sturtz, a member of the Rocky Ridge Neighborhood Association commented, “I spent over 20 hours a month fighting an imminent foreclosure that boiled down to Chase being irresponsible, losing paperwork, and being inflexible. Big banks abuse foreclosure and destroy lives and communities. We need accountability and education for foreclosure.”

    The innovative move by a shrinking city to help keep neighborhoods livable may end up serving as a model for industrial cities across the nation that are faced with smaller populations and high foreclosure and vacancy rates. In Ohio, nearby Warren is now following a similar path.

    Because of the increased number of abandoned properties across the country, many cities are now seeing widespread demolitions. One result has been a vacant property movement by community organizations to build political pressure and stabilize neighborhoods, especially in shrinking cities.

    In the deindustrialized Youngstown-Warren area, vacant and foreclosed housing is now an MVOC priority. For MVOC Executive Director Heather McMahon, this was a no-brainer. “It’s almost anti-American to say our city is shrinking. But with 62,000 residents living in a city built for 250,000, a declining tax base, and approximately 5,000 blighted vacant structures in need of demolition, we were in desperate need of serious, proactive remediation that addresses vacancy before it begins. If Youngstown is going to survive as a city and not go bankrupt like Detroit, we’re going to have to figure something out.”

    The MVOC developed a “listening campaign,” and started walking the neighborhoods to identify vacant properties. MVOC also began working with the Youngstown State University Center for Urban and Regional Studies to develop surveys and analyze and map results. The new data and new public involvement made visible how bad the situation had become. Since 2004, 5,186 properties have been foreclosed on in Youngstown.

    The community group also pressured Youngstown to hire a city official to oversee the largely independent and dysfunctional municipal departments concerned with vacant properties. It pushed the city to set up plans, timelines, and commitments for implementation of new legislation through a series of “public engagements” with a new mayor.

    To assure city accountability, it created a “Demolition Team” composed of local residents that demanded demolition contractors post start and stop dates at job sites. The transparency helped residents to understand demolition workflow and code enforcement more clearly. Because of these efforts, thousands of rental and vacant properties have been inspected and registered, a property maintenance appeals board has been created, and the city prosecutor has held appeal hearings.

    On a state level, vacant property campaigns have pressured the Ohio Attorney General Michael DeWine to develop Moving Ohio Forward, which established a demolition grant program to remove blighted residential structures. DeWine became the only Attorney General in the country to set aside funding ($75 million) from the banks’ robo-signing settlement for needed demolition in disinvested communities.

    Most recently, the MVOC is now trying to introduce statewide legislation that would protect neighbors who seek access to vacant properties without fear of trespass. It is also working with local legislators to introduce a new statewide homeowner’s Bill of Rights. Although neither of these initiatives will easily pass in the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature, they may end up providing a model for communities elsewhere.

    As Joseph Schilling, Director of the Metropolitan Institute and founder of the Vacant Properties Research Network at Virginia Tech says, “Recent case study research by the VPRN shows that community based organizations, such as MVOC in Youngstown, NPI in Cleveland or PACDC in Philadelphia, are often the major catalysts in making vacant property reclamation a top policy priority for local communities.”

    John Russo is a visiting research fellow at the Metropolitan Institute of Virginia Tech, a former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies, and professor (emeritus) in the Williamson College of Business Administration at Youngstown State University. He is a board member of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative (MVOC) (Youngstown-Warren), and the co-author, with Sherry Linkon, of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown.

    Flickr photo by Jinjian Liang of a vacant house near Columbus, Ohio.

  • You Say You Want A (Metropolitan) Revolution?

    [Book Review] The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy, by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley. 2013, Brookings Focus Book

    It’s now decades after deindustrialization, and several years since the Great Recession supposedly ended. Yet too many American cities are still struggling to recover from the losses of jobs, population, taxes, and identities. Detroit’s declaration of bankruptcy in July drew new attention to the problem, and it helped fuel the extensive marketing campaign for The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institution, published just a few weeks earlier. The book quickly became a cause célèbre garnering high praise from various media outlets.

    Katz and Bradley highlight the emergence of “trading metros” with “innovation districts,” clusters of universities and local businesses, hospitals, museums, and advanced technology and manufacturing industries held together regionally with housing, retail and transit networks that seem to promise a better economic future. The book’s strength lies in its attention to metros, rather than cities, as the unit of urban settlement and economics. The authors encourage planners and government officials to develop new strategies based on “Emergent Metros” rather than “Legacy Cities.”

    This attention to metropolitan areas is welcome, but the book’s outline of the future is overly optimistic. Describing deindustrialization and disinvestment as part of an evolutionary process and a “revolution unleashed” is hyperbole reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged. More critically, The Metropolitan Revolution can be read as a neoliberal sales pitch. In fact, Katz and Bradley have “doubled down” on an approach that has not only dominated economic thought since the 1980s, but that has actually contributed to the urban crisis today.

    Neoliberal theory hypothesizes that small government, deregulation, global production networks, free trade agreements, labor market flexibility, abandonment of full employment policy, cost shifting, and capital mobility improve corporate competitiveness and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit, and increase productivity. These ideas have been applied to corporate restructuring over the last 30 years, informing changes like downsizing, outsourcing, and rightsizing. In another example, neoliberals argued that the housing bubble and the subsequent Great Recession resulted from federal government intervention in the housing market, which encouraged home ownership for the unqualified, and from a national liberal monetary policy. Even when neoliberal economic policies have failed, proponents have continued their unwavering critique of “big government” and regulations.

    Using the language of neoliberalism and corporate restructuring, Katz and Bradley write that the metropolitan revolution is “exploding the tired construct” about the role of the federal government. Now, they say, it is the cities and metro areas that “are becoming the leaders in the nation: experimenting, taking risks, making hard choices and asking for forgiveness not permission.” Their metropolitan revolution sees power relations being restructured, as metros and cities take greater responsibility for their economic growth, and as federal government power devolves: “The metropolitan revolution has only one logical conclusion: the inversion of the hierarchy of power in the US.” But, we should ask, inversion for whom? Their examples all seem to suggest shifts from elected government officials to unelected business and economic leaders and non-governmental organizations.

    Katz and Bradley borrow heavily from neoliberal architects who claimed that, in the corporate world, restructuring would result in greater local and regional cooperation and in independence for the new businesses on which future growth would be based. But corporate restructuring promised more than it delivered, as corporations were downsized, outsourced, and resource starved. Instead of cooperation, restructuring often led to an increase in internal predatory activity and greater control by corporate headquarters, under the rubric of the ‘survival of the fittest’.

    Much like the early supporters of corporate restructuring, Katz and Bradley make an overly optimistic case, citing cherry-picked metros that seem to have accepted current conditions and neoliberal strategies as part of the natural economic order. But, constrained by state and federal neoliberal defunding policy, cities that lie within metros, especially in the Rust Belt, are hoarding or fighting for resources in a zero sum game of economic and regional development. Just as in the corporate sector, local and regional collaborations are largely ineffective. As Harvard economist Stephan Marlin has suggested, it may be that thinking like an economist can undermine a real sense of community.

    Rather than Katz and Bradley’s view of metro areas as collaborative communities on which future growth could be based, we might better see them as urban archipelagos, autonomous islands of self-interest, and rational calculators in a neoliberal sea.

    Northeast Ohio, for example, is an area optimistically viewed by Katz and Bradley. It’s a place where community officials have historically ignored regional economic plans unless they were directly impacted by them. Instead, they pursued localized development efforts, often competing rather than cooperating within a metropolitan region. Greg LeRoy, director of the public policy group Good Jobs First, found that between 1996 and 2005 many small and medium sized firms received lucrative tax breaks to move to new locations… all within the Cleveland metro area. The average distance moved in this metro cannibalization was five miles. A new regional sustainability plan for Northeast Ohio has now been funded by a $4.25 million grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and a consortium of regional foundations. But the plan has garnered only limited support among the 375 cities, townships, and regional agencies in the metro area. Most observers see little chance of the plan being adopted on any meaningful scale.

    Katz and Bradley’s book may end up being more of a distraction than a revolution for many metros. It dilutes the distinctly urban crisis. Racial and class polarization, and growing inequities in education, housing, health care, and infrastructure mark this urban crisis. The book essentially offers platitudes about economic growth for cities and first rings suburbs that have suffered from the neoliberal crisis, rather than offering suggestions for how to rebuild and reclaim urban neighborhoods and schools and prevent further decline. While praising sympathetic NGOs, Katz and Bradley fail to acknowledge the populist revolt in many metros, cities, and neighborhoods. In fact, they are contemptuous of grass-roots efforts such as the Occupy Movement. Their census-defined metropolitan revolution is “reasoned rather than emotional, leader driven rather than leaderless, born of pragmatism and optimism rather than despair or anger.” Despite claims to the contrary, the book is another indicator the economic divergence between Main Street and Wall Street.

    John Russo is a visiting research fellow at the Metropolitan Institute of Virginia Tech, a former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies, and professor (emeritus) in the Williamson College of Business Administration at Youngstown State University. He is a board member of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative (Youngstown-Warren), and the co-author, with Sherry Linkon, of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown.