Quote:
Originally Posted by Via Chicago
thats not just illinois, its the midwest in general. take an amtrak train west and take a look out the window at the towns youre passing through. the heart of this country has been pretty much decimated.
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what i have seen of wisconsin, iowa, western michigan, minnesota just doesnt seem as bad as central illinois and parts of indiana. the heart of the cornbelt (excepting some of iowa) seems to have taken the hardest blow as far as smaller towns/cities, it seems. missouri is less populated outstate, however the northern-half of missouri is pretty bombed out, like a halfway developed version of central illinois.
when i say "bombed out," i mean lots of abandoned factories, decimated once sizable downtowns, vacant small town houses, in LOTS of towns of say 15,000, or so. even a small city like kewanee, il down I-80 had electric streetcar service down to galesburg, and was once fairly prosperous, and has lost like 50% of it's population as basically every factory in town has shuttered. it's not like southern style rural grit.
when you start getting into southern missouri, or parts of kentucky/tennessee, some of the towns get by on tourism, or were extremely poor/small to begin with and have new, non-union manufacturing out on the outskirts that have sort of brought things up a bit. lots of military bases. things just dont look as bad, in a way...maybe it's just all the forests hiding things...
in central illinois it's just all laid bare, i suppose, as there aren't areas of hidden super-rural poverty due to the mega-scale industrial agriculture dominating everything.
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