To Rebuild, the Midwest Must Face Its Real and Severe Problems



Yet with limited exceptions, these have been around for a while, but haven’t produced much growth across the region. Instead, outside of an archipelago of successful outliers (mostly select parts of major metros or college towns), the region has seen its population, job, and income growth badly trail the nation.  During the 2000s US population grew by 9.7%, the Midwest* 3.8%. For jobs, the US lost 1.5% but the Midwest 7.8%.

Reversing this requires not just leveraging strengths and building on assets, but facing the very real and severe structural challenges that plague the region. However, most of the strategies out there remain outside the region’s essential DNA:

  • Economic clusters like high tech startups or water industries are in effect attempts to build new success enclaves outside the system.
  • Rebuilding downtowns into urban playgrounds for the upscale often takes place against a backdrop of vacant lots, abandoned structures, and depopulation – in other words, empty space.
  • The Rust Belt Chic movement suggests that many of the problems are actually the solution.  But while there are intriguing and important elements to this, it bypasses core issues.

These are all good as far as they go, but they require little broad-based reform (as opposed to district or enclave based solutions) to structural problems and thus are limited in what they can achieve.

What are these structural problems? Among the key ones are:

1. Racism. The modern history of Midwest cities is enmeshed in the history of race relations, particularly between black and white. Places like Chicago and Milwaukee remain among the absolutely most segregated in America. Race riots have been defining feature of cities ranging from Detroit to Cincinnati (which had a race-influenced riot as recently as 2001). In all of these places, a large population of black residents live in segregated neighborhoods plagued with problems ranging from poor schools to low quality housing to a lack of jobs.  Significant social distress has resulted. 

There are signs the Great Migration that brought blacks north in search of factory work is reversing, with black residents actually seeing more welcoming environments and better economic opportunities in Southern metro areas like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte. As well, historically it’s been the more ambitious who leave, not such a good thing for the people and places left behind.

2. Corruption.  Midwest cities ranging from Chicago to Detroit to Cleveland are famous as cesspools of corruption and cronyism. Systems like Chicago’s “aldermanic privilege” tradition that gives city council members almost dictatorial control over their districts produce environments of almost required tacit corruption even if no laws are violated. In other cities, it’s well known that your approvals will go much faster if you hire the right wired-up subcontractors, lawyers, or lobbyists. While this type of environment exists at some level everywhere, it’s very bad in many Midwest cities and badly degrades an already challenged business climate.

3. Closed Societies. Contrary to the assertions of Robert Putnam and Bowling Alone, a lot of Midwest places suffer from an excess of social capital. As Sean Safford noted in Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, excessively dense social networks can create a hermetically sealed environment into which new ideas can’t penetrate or get a hearing.  There are many reports of newcomers to Midwest cities saying that they have difficult making friends and penetrating the social networks in places as diverse as Minneapolis and Cleveland. In Cincinnati and St. Louis expect that the first question you’ll be asked is “Where did you go to high school?” which tells you everything you need to know about those cities.  Immigration has ticked up in recent years, but overall the Midwest has done a poor job of attracting outsiders.

4. Two-Tier Environment and Resulting Paralysis.  Despite the plethora of high end companies, educated workers, and top quality universities, the Midwest economy was traditionally based on moderately skilled labor in agriculture and industry. This forged a work force that places too low value on education and which can even be suspicious of people with too much of it. Today’s agriculture and manufacturing concerns, at least the ones with jobs that pay more than subsistence wages, require much higher levels of skills and education than in the past. What’s more, with the global macro-economy favorable to larger cities and talent based industries, larger metros have comparatively done well while most smaller towns have struggled. As a result, their quality of life and services have so badly degraded they are no longer attractive to “discretionary residents” (those with the means and opportunity to leave), which perpetuates a downward spiral as the educated flock to bigger cities. That’s why manufacturers complain they can’t find workers with skills, even if those skills are just passing and drug test and showing up to work everyday. This produces massive inequities, resentment, and policy confusion. What’s more, realistically many very poorly performing communities may never recover.

Beyond these core issues, many places have aging infrastructure, massive blight issues, a regulatory environment not suited to the 21st century, and severe fiscal problems. All of these are extremely difficult problems to resolve, but that does not mean they don’t need to be faced, and overcome.

Unsurprisingly, the Midwest has not been a particularly competitive region.  There will continue to be bright spots ranging Des Moines to Madison to the greater Chicago Loop to the fracking fields of western Pennsylvania, but until the region faces up to its problems don’t expect a major turnaround anytime soon.


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I have a few issues with this article

I have a few issues with this article:
1) The article is contradictory to other articles posted on New Geography and to itself. The author states, "...the region has seen its population, job, and income growth badly trail the nation." However, when New Geography analyzed the top 10 metros for income growth, 5 out of the top 10 metros for income growth from 2000 to 2009 are midwestern cities (see: Atlanta, which was specifically cited by the author saw negative income growth (-8.3%) during this time period!

Furthermore, the author states, "What’s more, with the global macro-economy favorable to larger cities and talent based industries, larger metros have comparatively done well..." Yet, the author goes on to cite Des Moines and Madison as bright spots. Both of these are comparatively small metropolitan regions.

2) The article offers little in the way of groundbreaking insights, and even fewer suggestions for how to fix the issues plaguing the region. Those of us that live in the Midwest are well aware our large metros still have a long way to go on racial integration. We're well aware of the corruption found in some city governments.

What policy measures do you suggest Midwestern cities implement to correct these issues?

If the midwest is doomed to lag behind the rest of the US in growth, where do you suggest the "more ambitious" leave to?

Ranking Racism as Number One Midwest "Rebuilding" Problem

"Places like Chicago and Milwaukee remain among the absolutely most segregated in America."

"Segregated"? I went to my handy-dandy Bing dictionary and found this useful set of definitions:

"1.enforced separation of groups: the practice of keeping ethnic, racial, religious, or gender groups separate, especially by enforcing the use of separate schools, transportation, housing, and other facilities, and usually discriminating against a minority group
"2.segregated state: the state or position of somebody or something kept separate from others
"3.act of segregating: the separating of one person, group, or thing from others, or the dividing of people or things into separate groups kept apart from each other"

Note that each of these definitions has a predicate of explicit action: "enforced separation"; "kept separate"; and "the separating of", "the dividing of" and "kept apart".

Fifty years after landmark civil rights legislation, where in the Midwest is there "enforced separation" of races?

But more to the point of the instant article, if racism is such a barrier to economic growth, how did the Midwest flourish in the first place? When and why did the Midwest (implicitly, the white power structure) end the racial comity that surely prevailed in those halcyon days of the 1950s?

An indestructible straw man has once again been set up to externalize the blame for the endemic economic failure of racial subgroups.

Rebuilding Midwest

I agree overall on the assessment but I do wish to make note of some of the Midwestern problems have not occurred in the new West, at least yet. Having lived in both Chicago and Boise and working in Salt Lake City often, I would warn that while racism and neighborhood segregation is not as apparent in the intermountain west this is mostly due to the lack of minorities but as minorities are moving in you can clearly see separation. I would note in Boise the suburb of Caldwell and parts are Nampa are heavily segregated into Hispanic and non-Hispanic neighbors. While African-Americans are still a relatively rare sight in town they are mainly living in one neighborhood unless they work at Micron. Likewise, Salt Lake City's West Valley is certainly emerging as the place where new coming non-whites move to. And to think that some of the established suburbs and neighborhoods welcome newcomers with open arms in SLC is naive. While it may not be where did you go to high school it certainly is UofU or BYU?
Likewise, being LDS in both town certainly helps grease the skids on development and political influence as does an old ranching family connection.

While this is anecdotal and certainly only two fast growing cities it is merely a caution to the belief that the intermountain west and the new cities have somehow overcome the issues that the Midwest and honestly many old eastern cities like Buffalo, Syracuse, etc face. Instead I would argue that theses cities simply have not yet reached a threshold of minority population to truly see how segregation unfolds.