Sunday, December 2, 2007

DISPATCH LAUNCHES CITY ARTICLE SERIES

A great eight part series about the state of Ohio's major cities launched today. Check it out.

On the brink
Can Ohio's big cities be saved?

Sunday, December 2, 2007 3:47 AM
By Mark Niquette, Alan Johnson and Joe Hallett
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

The pictures are old, faded, black and white.

But the vibrancy of Ohio's once-thriving big cities remains crystal clear. You see it in faces in the crush of people outside W.T. Grant's in downtown Youngstown in 1952, the frenetic shift change at B.F. Goodrich Co. in Akron in the 1940s, a bustling street market in Dayton in 1910.

Most of the stores, factories and people in those photos are long gone, reminders of an era when Ohio's large cities were powerhouses. Their workers helped build America with the steel, cars and tires they made. Their entrepreneurs gave the world powered flight, the automobile self-starter and other inventions.

Today, however, most of Ohio's seven largest cities are teetering.

With the exception of Columbus, they have shed more than one-third of their population and watched as income, home values and other economic indicators dropped below national averages while poverty, job losses, crime and foreclosures skyrocketed.

For the rest visit....http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2007/12/02/CITYFATE.ART_ART_12-02-07_A1_UF8K98V.html?sid=101

1 comment:

Walker Evans said...

Ugh. While I appreciate their acknowledgment of the fact that we've got to make some changes if we don't want the cores of all of our cities to rot any further, the negativity embedded into the wording of the article is annoying.

When they say things like the good ol days being gone "forever" it makes me wonder if the reporter realized how long "forever" actually is.