May 5, 2009 City Council packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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further, the city's struggle to provide services and prevent blight across an ever -emptier landscape will only intensify. That's the challenge that many Rust Belt cities share: managing population decline without becoming blighted. The task is doubly difficult because as the manufacturing industry has shrunk, the local high -end services —finance, law, consulting —that it once supported have diminished as well, absorbed bybigger regional hubs and globally connected cities. In Chicago, for instance, the country's 5o biggest law firms grew by 2,130lawyers from 1984 to 2006, according to William Henderson andArthur Alderson of Indiana University. Throughout the rest of the Midwest, these firms added a total of just 169 attorneys. Jones Day, founded in 1893 and today one of the country's largest law firms, no longer considers its Cleveland office "headquarters" —that's in Washington, D.C.—but rather its "founding office.' Many second -tier midwestern cities have tried to reinvent themselves in different ways, with varying degrees of success. Pittsburgh, for instance, has sought to reimagine itself as a high- tech center, and has met with more success than just about anywhere else. Still, its population has declined from a high of almost 700,000 in the mid -loth century- to roughly 300,000 today. There will be fewer manufacturing jobs on the other side of the crisis, and the U.S. economic landscape will be more uneven —"spikier" —as a result. Many of the old industrial centers will be further diminished, perhaps permanently so. THAT'S NOT TO SAY that every- factory town is locked into decline. You need only look at the geographic pattern of December's Senate vote on the auto bailout to realize that some places, mostly in the South, would benefit directly from the bankruptcy of GM or Chrysler and the closure of auto plants in the Rust Belt. Georgetown, Kentucky; Smyrna, Tennessee; Canton, Mississippi: these are a few of the many small cities, stretching from South Carolina and Georgia all the way to Texas, that have benefited from the establishment, over the years, of plants that manufacture foreign cars. Those benefits could grow if the Big Three were to become, say, the Big Two. This phenomenon, a sort of lottery whereby some places win merely by outlasting others, will not be limited to towns built around automobiles, or even around manufacturing. As the recession continues and large companies in a variety of industries fail, their remaining competitors may grow stronger, along with the places where those competitors are situated. 11