![]() “What really strikes me about the use of the Rust Belt metaphor is it’s so focused on aesthetics,” he said. Rust Belt or no, Ness said people who look at the region’s economy from afar often take on a simplistic view. Today, the city of 86,000 residents is at about 80 percent of its peak population of 107,000 in 1960. Buffalo has shrunk from 580,000 people in 1950 to about 260,000 today.ĭuluth has seen some loss of residents, but nowhere near as much. Detroit had 1.8 million people in 1950, 1 million by 1990 and has only about 675,000 today. Iron ore dock, Duluth, 1987Another hallmark of Rust Belt cities in the second half of the 20th century was big-time population decline.Ĭleveland’s population went from 915,000 in 1950 to less than 400,000 today. ![]() Others say Duluth doesn’t fit the definition of a Rust Belt city because it’s never been quite as reliant on manufacturing as some of the most canonical Rust Belt burgs: places like Gary, Indiana Detroit, Michigan Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio Erie, Pennsylvania and Buffalo and Rochester, New York. “As our economy changed and corporations started moving jobs south and overseas, it was communities like Duluth that were hit especially hard.” … or no? Duluth and a lot of smaller industrial cities in the Upper Midwest were hit really hard by a brutal economic reality and massive forces, well beyond what was in our control, were making these economic shifts,” he said. And when the manufacturing economy took a hit, so did Duluth. It wasn’t just the shipping of raw materials that connected Duluth to the rest of the Great Lake Region, it was heavy manufacturing along the St. ![]() “The Rust Belt is typically considered to be states with heavy manufacturing and/or heavy extractive industries, such as taconite, in Minnesota, or coal in West Virginia,” he said.įormer Duluth Mayor Don Ness told MinnPost he’s never shied away from the Rust Belt terminology. Lee Ohanian, a professor of economics at the University of California-Los Angeles and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, says both Duluth, and Minnesota on a state level, qualify as part of the Rust Belt, because of the way their economies are set up. Is the Rust Belt defined only by manufacturing - or should the definition also include the extraction industries that fueled the manufacturing? Where the boundaries are drawn depends on what factors are considered. Just as defining the Midwest, has proven contentious (heck, people can’t even agree on a definition of Uptown Minneapolis), so is drawing boundaries around the Rust Belt. So where is the region “Rust Belt” refers to? Again, turning to Belt magazine, there is no one answer. As such, it’s sometimes seen as derogatory. states whose economies were booming as their populations grew.īy the time the term “Rust Belt” came into the country’s vocabulary, the region it refers to was experiencing decline: globalization created competition for American steel and finished products, driving down prices. In a speech to steelworkers in Cleveland during his 1984 presidential bid, Mondale accused opponent Ronald Reagan of promoting trade policies that would turn the Midwest into a “rust bowl,” likely a play on the dust bowl of the Great Depression.Īccording to Cleveland-based Belt Magazine, which specializes in all things Rust Belt, the press tweaked the phrase, turning it from “rust bowl” to “rust belt,” to better contrast with the term “sun belt.” Coined in 1969, the “sun belt” referred to southern and western U.S. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical SocietyIt might surprise many Minnesotans to learn that the phrase is widely attributed to Minnesotan former Vice President Walter Mondale. ![]()
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