Youngstown in America’s Route to Recovery

Youngstown’s story is America’s story. So agrees Reuters reporter Nick Carey in his article “America’s Route to Recovery.”

Today, the city immortalized by Bruce Springsteen’s 1995 Rust-Belt anthem “Youngstown” is moving on. Among other things, it has created an incubator to attract the types of small businesses that are expected to drive future growth. Despite the thousands of vacant homes that serve as reminders of a traumatic past and turbulent present, some business and civic leaders think this heartland city has a chance to lead the U.S. into its next era of prosperity.

Getting to there from here, however, won’t be easy — for Youngstown, for Ohio, for the nation.

Youngstown is an extreme but by no means unique case in America. On a basic level, it represents some of the challenges facing the country today in the wake of the longest and deepest downturn since the 1930s.

We had a chance to sit down with Nick and his crew as they came through Youngstown. (See our inexplicably unpublished post.) His interest in the stories here–including the positives and negatives–is apparent in his report. Here is a segment on the decline of manufacturing.

Manufacturers must also continue moving up the value chain, switching to niche production that cannot be easily transferred to China or Mexico. In the future, the sector will involve fewer but more-educated workers.

Now civic and business leaders are looking closely at another part of the economic equation. After seeing the impact that the departure of large corporations can have, there is a renewed focus on fostering small businesses instead.

The reasons are simple: They create more jobs and can be more easily replaced if they leave.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, companies with fewer than 500 employees accounted for 64 percent of new jobs from 1993 to the third quarter of 2008.

Small firms also tend to be more involved in their local communities than major corporations.

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