标题: Do former industrial cities in the America's Midwest have a future? [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 7-11-2015 09:47 标题: Do former industrial cities in the America's Midwest have a future? America’s industrial heartland | Reinvention in the Rust Belt; Do former industrial cities in the Midwest have a future? Economist, July 11, 2015. http://www.economist.com/news/un ... invention-rust-belt
Quote:
(a) "Gary[, Indiana], which is ['24 miles'] south-east of Chicago on Lake Michigan, has some 5,000 boarded-up houses, around a quarter of the city’s buildings. * * * Gary is a miniature version of Detroit, an industrial city hit brutally by the decline of the heavy industry that had sustained it for decades. It [Gary] struggles with poverty, high crime rates, unemployment, poor schools and a general sense of hopelessness. The population, which is 85% black, has shrunk from 180,000 in the 1960s to fewer than 79,000 today. Its poverty rate is 38%; both the per-capita murder rate and the high-school dropout rate are among the highest in the country. The official unemployment rate is 6.5%, but real unemployment is 30$
Gary "was founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation [founded in 1901 through a merger] for Gary Works, its new plant, and named after Elbert Henry Gary, co-founder of US Steel. * * * Today Gary Works employs around 5,000 people compared with 30,000 in the 1970s.
"In 1970 employment in manufacturing in America, much of it in the Midwest, accounted for about a third of the labour force [in US, not just Midwest]. Since then its share has dropped continuously until, in 2010, it accounted for around a tenth of workers.
(b) "about 60 miles east of Gary[is] South Bend, Indiana. South Bend, too, started to decline long ago. It used to be a company town: the headquarters of Studebaker, one of the big four American carmakers in the first half of the 20th century. Yet Studebaker struggled with the modern era * * * thanks to * * * fierce competition from carmakers in Detroit. Yet South Bend has 'anchor' institutions in [University of] Notre Dame [established 1842]
my comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) Studebaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studebaker
(1852-1967; an American [horse] wagon and automobile manufacturer based in South Bend; founded by Studebaker brothers[, who descended from Dutch immigrants whose surname was Studebecker]; The South Bend plant ceased production in 1963 and the last Studebaker automobile rolled off the Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, assembly line in 1966)