Where Is The Rust Belt?

[Failte]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

US Steel's South Works on Chicagoss southside once employed 20,000 steel workers with solid middle class jobs, today it employs zero people and the 600 acres of prime lakefront land it sat upon have been cleared and remain fallow 3 decades after the plant closed.

That story was repeated dozens of times at various industrial plants all up and down the Calumet River on Chicago's south side, from the 70s through today. Plants closed, hundreds of thousands of good middle class union jobs gone forever.

Chicago only came out on the other side so much better than Youngstown because it also has an enormous base of corporate, finance, and transportation jobs that allowed it to weather the storm better.

So while Chicago might not be the very buckle of the rust belt like NE Ohio, it's definitely still part of the belt.

Yep, all true and people think the Loop and trendy north side 'hoods are Chicago. Or that neighborhoods were abandoned by whites because of ''crime''. As I stated above, it was job flight.

Again, you nailed it succinctly with this take on the south side. And yes, there were tons of steel, auto, and various other manufacturing centers all over the south side. All gone. Folks always post pics of Chicago's booming Loop with no idea of what even downtown Chicago was like into, at a minimum, the mid-'90s.

And US Steel's huge swath of land still sits fallow on the south side despite a couple announced plans pre-2007 Depression. When all those factories were humming, everyone was working and these plants needed workers; see also the black migration to Chicago before the mid-60s for sure. The city population alone was 3.6 million. Post '50s manufacturing collapse and the city is down under 2.7 million; who knows what it will be in this year's census.