A Dispatch from the Poorest City in America

Back in November, the Brookings Institution reported that Youngstown has the highest rates of concentrated poverty of any city in the U.S. The report shocked some city officials and local boosters who had been promoting an exaggerated story of Youngstown’s “renaissance” over the last seven years.

They had long bragged about the Youngstown 2010 Plan, which argued that Youngstown could thrive as a smaller city.  The plan called for rezoning, neighborhood stabilization, making the city more attractive to business, and downtown redevelopment.  It drew positive national attention to a community that has been an icon of urban decay ever since the steel mills began closing in the late 70s.  In 2005, the Ohio chapter of the American Planning Association awarded Youngstown its outstanding community planning award. In December 2006, the New York Times Magazine listed the 2010 Plan as one of the 74 best ideas in America in the 6^th Annual Year in Ideas awards, and the American Planning Association gave it an Excellence Award for Public Outreach in 2007.

Youngstown has succeeded in revitalizing its downtown and becoming more attractive to business – so much so that it has been named one of the best cities in the country to start a business. The city has been profiled in Inc., Entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal. The Youngstown Business Incubator has generated a modest number of high-tech jobs downtown, new restaurants and shops have opened, and several developers are renovating old office buildings into apartments.

But despite these signs of progress and growth, we were troubled by the response of city leaders to the Brookings report.  The director of Youngstown’s Community Development Agency said he was “stunned” by the report and found it “hard to believe we’d be classified as the poorest in the nation.”

Perhaps he needs to get out of downtown.  As the Brookings Institution’s report makes clear, the situation in Youngstown’s neighborhoods looks nothing like what’s happening downtown.  According to Brookings, 49.7% of Youngstown residents live in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of at least 40%.  The Ohio Department of Development reports that 32.1% of Youngstown residents live in poverty, and between 1999 and 2009, the poverty rate for the broader metro area increased from 12.5% to 16.7%.

Given the effects of the Great Recession, the rate of poverty here is almost certainly even higher today.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the area lost 20,000 jobs between 2007 and 2010.  In other words, the Mahoning Valley lost as many jobs in that period as in any three years during the late 70s and early 80s as the mills were closing.  Worse, 20,000 jobs today represent a larger proportion of the area’s workforce, which has shrunk over the past three decades.

The Brookings Institution report came as no surprise to most Youngstown residents, who see every day how little has been done to alleviate unemployment and ongoing social problems, evident in high rates of crime, poverty, housing vacancy, and blight.  While the city, with aid from the Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber of Commerce and state economic development funds, has attracted new businesses to downtown and cut a deal with a French corporation to expand one of the remaining local steel mills, it has done little to address the problems in the city’s neighborhoods.  Demolition of abandoned property has increased, although at a rate that struggles to keep up with new vacancies resulting from the recession and foreclosure crisis. The city also working on a new zoning plan, but the bulk of the work of neighborhood development has fallen to volunteers and community organizations.  They have been increasingly vocal in their frustrations with what many see as the city’s inertia when it comes to developing neighborhoods other than downtown.

A major local foundation helped establish two thriving non-profit groups, one focused on community organizing and political activism and another on economic development in the city’s neighborhoods.  Energetic, committed organizers from the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative have helped develop more than a dozen new neighborhood associations, and those groups have funneled their energies into issues such as access to healthy food, the quality of housing, human trafficking, voter registration, and other political issues that resonate both locally and nationally.  The MVOC played a key role in founding a statewide group, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which is starting to leverage neighborhood-level work across the state into effective political action.

The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation takes a different approach, focusing its attention on economic issues in targeted neighborhoods.  Working with the neighborhood association in one of the city’s struggling areas, the YNDC developed an urban farm, invested in improving housing stock, mobilized an array of residents and volunteers in a range of community projects, and rehabilitated homes that are then marketed to low-income residents through an affordable housing program.

These efforts are inspiring, but while they are improving the quality of life in Youngstown’s neighborhoods and empowering residents to take action on their own behalf, they do not address the root problem: the lack of good jobs in the city.  That presents a challenge to city government and the regional chamber.  They need to focus their energies on creating jobs in the city, jobs that suit a population with relatively low levels of education, are accessible via public transportation, and pay a living wage. Most of the new jobs in the Valley are being created on the edge of the metropolitan area, in places that city residents can’t get to without reliable private transportation – one of the resources many lack.

Of course, job creation never comes easy. Industries that promise hundreds of new jobs too often either don’t deliver or bring new problems.  Both seem to be playing out in the latest economic development “opportunity” in the Mahoning Valley: hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of the  Marcellus shale.  While the shale industry has already brought some jobs to the area, it also seems to have brought real problems.  On New Year’s Eve, Youngstown experienced a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that seems to be related to a wastewater injection well, and experts are divided on whether fracking threatens the safety of local water.  15 years ago, Youngstown leaders claimed that private prisons would be the answer to the city’s economic woes, but the Corrections Corporation of America created relatively few jobs and a number of local problems, including deepening the city’s image as a crime center.  We hope that local and state officials will be more cautious about fracking.

The Mahoning Valley needs a broad, diversified approach to economic development and serious efforts to strengthen the city’s neighborhoods. Without secure, well-paid jobs, without stable neighborhoods, and in the absence of any political vision to address these issues, urban redevelopment can never truly succeed.

John Russo,  Center for Working-Class Studies

James Rhodes, University of Manchester

Debating Economic Development: Downtown versus the Neighborhood

Last week, the Center for Working-Class Studies distributed a commentary on how proponents of economic development and local government leaders were ignoring the continuing struggles of Youngstown’s neighborhoods.  “A Renaissance for Whom? Youngstown and Its Neighborhoods” attempted to capture community discontent over the idea that developing downtown would, in and of itself, solve the city’s problems.

What’s happening in Youngstown will, we expect, sound familiar to readers from around the country. Widespread job loss affects not just individuals but also communities, and for deindustrialized areas, the latest economic wounds exacerbate old injuries.  The same can be said for the tension between promoting economic development and addressing the needs of working-class people in urban neighborhoods.

Between us, we have been studying Youngstown for well over a decade.  In preparing our analysis of the current situation, we attended dozens of community meetings and interviewed over 50 local residents and community organizers. We found that long term unemployment (see the CWCS’s discussion of the de facto unemployment rate), the loss of unemployment benefits and savings, the housing crisis, and the reductions in social services were devastating to the area’s already struggling neighborhoods. The Youngstown area has lost over 9000 jobs since the beginning of the ”Great Recession” and has 22,000 vacant parcels of land and another 4000 homes in delinquency or foreclosure.  Yet local leaders have largely ignored problems of unemployment and housing in working-class neighborhoods, choosing to accentuate the so-called “Youngstown Renaissance” that has brought new high-tech jobs and several new restaurants and clubs to downtown.  Yet many economic development staffers and most of those who have moved to the area to work in new downtown businesses live outside of the city.  No wonder they prefer to tout the transformation their work brings to downtown rather than the conditions of neighborhoods they prefer to avoid.

Over the past decade, Youngstown’s media image has changed, as reporters have praised Youngstown’s 2010 plan to adapt to its shrinking population and identified the city as a good place to start a new business.  New business and more efficient local government do contribute to the overall strength of the local economy.  We applaud efforts to bring new businesses to town or support new restaurants and activities downtown.  But in order to thrive, deindustrialized communities need good working-class jobs and neighborhoods, not just professional jobs and nice suburbs.

Unfortunately, Youngstown’s efforts to shrink wisely have been uneven, and city government has too often failed to address local problems effectively.  In response, local neighborhood associations are growing, taking on the roles usually played by city governments.  These neighborhood associations, many formed with assistance from the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, have become the de facto community planning agency.  No doubt, similar moves are happening in communities around the country, especially as the recession decimates state, county, and local budgets.

Organizing around the goals of stabilization and sustainability, neighborhood groups are tackling everything from forming block watches to studying home ownership, the amount and quality of rental property, and vacant housing.  Yet, they have limited economic power.

In our commentary, we made a point of suggesting some strategies for addressing the community’s problems.  For example, small businesses can help stabilize neighborhoods, but community banking and support has been minimal. Local banks and governments could do much more to foster local microeconomies.

The area might also benefit from more efficient, consolidated local governance.  The county’s population has dropped to the point that it is now smaller than many urban centers that have a single local government.  But it is also highly balkanized, and racial and class divides have made even discussion of consolidation impossible.    A few Joint Economic Development Districts (JEDDs) have been negotiated, but those efforts have been hard-fought, and most suburban communities in the Mahoning Valley reject that option, even though it’s been shown to work well in similar areas, such as nearby Akron.

What could happen in Youngstown and cities like it if not just city governments but also the creative, educated, technically sophisticated, and energetic young professionals who advocate for downtown development made neighborhood revitalization a priority?  What role do non-governmental institutions, like local universities, the media, and community groups, have to play?   Urban universities, like Youngstown State, should not just support research that could generate new businesses but must also pursue local community research involving urban blight, crime, and breaking down long-standing barriers of race and class. Local media should investigate neighborhood issues and serve as a watchdog for local development efforts.  Community groups must move beyond blockwatches and research to engage in community actions that hold economic and political leaders accountable.

The response to the article was somewhat predictable. Many called or sent us notes saying how much they appreciated the piece.  A few who generally agreed with the points expressed frustration that their own efforts were not acknowledged.  Some in local government and economic development organizations dismissed the piece.  Youngstown’s Mayor brushed it aside as the work of know-nothing “academics,” for example. This reluctance to engage with the broad arguments about neighborhood deterioration, racism, organizational inefficiency, crime, unemployment, vacancy, and high rates of concentrated poverty is disturbing. It suggests a refusal to recognize, never mind to address, the problems that continue to exist in Youngstown and America. Too many leaders are ignoring the decreasing access of most Americans to prosperity and the “American Dream.”

We see this most dramatically when critics dismiss policies aimed at ensuring equal opportunity and access to resources. The pattern played out in the health care debate and again as Congress delayed extending unemployment benefits.  It isn’t just that critics don’t seem to care what happens to poor and working-class people.  They define any effort to provide support for the have-nots as “socialism.”  So we shouldn’t have been surprised when a member of the Youngstown Office for Economic Development suggested that the idea that the city should force corner stores to carry fresh produce – something we did not advocate — was “Stalinist.”

The working class, and indeed much of the middle class, is erased and ignored every time someone claims that America is “recovering” from the current recession. Companies may be earning record profits, but millions remain unemployed, and the data consistently shows that the poor and working class have suffered most during the recession.

A healthy city demands that wealth, opportunity, and resources are shared as equitably as possible. While any “renaissance” of Youngstown is welcomed, such a rebirth must benefit the majority of people. Until we see declines in crime, poverty, and unemployment and increases in home ownership, education levels, and economic prosperity, then any talk of a renaissance is premature.  The same is true for the nation: until our leaders pay more attention to ordinary families than to the wealthy and privileged, until our economy creates not just profits for investors but also good jobs, until our neighborhoods thrive again, we haven’t recovered from the Great Recession.

John Russo is a professor of Labor Studies at Williamson College of Business Administration and codirector of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University.

James Rhodes is the Simon Research Fellow at Manchester University (UK) and visiting scholar at the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University.

Jobs, Ideology, and Policy: Putting Workers First

During the 1980s recession, as steel mills closed and auto plants began downsizing around the country, neoconservative economists insisted that the jobs lost to deindustrialization would soon be replaced by new jobs.  In Youngstown then, we knew better.  And as we wrote seven years ago in Steeltown U.S.A., Youngstown’s story in the late 70s and early 80s has not only persisted here, where unemployment is among the highest in the state and the poverty rate hovers around 30%, but has become America’s story today.

Youngstown learned then how real economic shifts could be exacerbated by ideology: the idea that businesses and investments matter more than ordinary human beings and the notion that we should just get used to economic patterns that create long-term hardship for those with the least power and resources.  Youngstown learned more than 30 years ago how damaging such ideas can be.  Once again, the rest of America is learning that lesson today.

The gap between the Wall Street recovery and the continuing jobs recession was highlighted by Friday’s jobs summit.  Communities around the country understand that we are in another jobless recovery that leaves hundreds of thousands of American families vulnerable.  While markets have stabilized for the moment and investors are feeling more confident, the economy isn’t improving for most Americans.

So is the current situation just like the earlier recession? No. It is worse. As Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich note in Sunday’s Washington Post, the current economic crisis reveals the glaring problems left behind by the welfare reform of the 1990s, a policy change that reflected the long-standing assumption that poverty is a “voluntary condition” and that every able-bodied adult should simply find a job – “even when there are obviously no jobs available.”  When we removed the safety net because of conservative and neoliberal worries about “fostering dependency,” we created the economic conditions that left 17.1 million Americans living in extreme poverty in 2008 – and no doubt even more today. As we learned last year, we’re willing to bail out corporations but not working people.

The current recession is also worse because it isn’t just a matter of jobs.  It’s a matter of ideology.  Blaming the victim and normalizing long-term economic struggle were part of the discourse at the jobs summit, during which Jan Hatzius, chief domestic economist at Goldman Sachs, acknowledged that unemployment will likely remain high for a long time.  She suggested that we may just have to get used to it.  Why?  Because those who have been unemployed for a long time are losing their skills and their work habits.  No doubt, long-term unemployment affects people, but the idea that unemployment will last a long time because workers won’t be prepared to return to work represents the most absurd, cruel version of blaming the victim.

On the other hand, Hatzius is not wrong that we’re in for long-term unemployment and underemployment– problems which are far worse than the official unemployment rate suggests. No doubt, business takes the cautious path during economic downturns, often by adding hours to workers’ schedules rather than by hiring additional workers. But as we learned in Youngstown, the reality is that those jobs may never come back as businesses, especially manufacturers, continue to disinvest in the United States.

At the same time, as we have argued before, we’re also witnessing long-term shifts in the nature of the jobs available.  Promises about a new “creative worker” economy or green jobs that will someday provide some former steelworkers and autoworkers with new versions of manufacturing jobs fall short when we remember the latest predictions of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:  that the job categories predicted to grow most over the next few decades involve primarily low-wage, low-education service positions.  Many of these jobs pay less than $21,000 a year.  That means that poverty is going to be a long-term problem for American workers.

What we need, in other words, is not a single jobs summit. We need long-range policy planning aimed at creating a better system of supports for the working poor and unemployed.  We need to recognize that as much as education matters, it won’t necessarily overcome long-term employment trends and growing income inequality.  We need economic policies that focus on the poor and working class and that treat them with respect, rather than blame.

Too often, economic theory has provided a distraction from the real struggles of real people.  Jan Hatzuis and her colleagues might do well to stop worrying about the work habits of the unemployed and start learning about what it’s like to lose a job after you spent years doing everything right, about the indignities associated with applying for government aid as you struggle to survive job loss, about how limitations of K-12 education, urban transportation, limited access to fair banking, overcrowded housing, persistent hunger, and lack of health care make finding a steady job that pays enough to support a family incredibly difficult.   A little moral education might help as well.

We need to stop thinking about the current crisis as a temporary recession, and we certainly have to stop talking about the economic crisis as part of an inevitable shift we can’t do anything about.  We have to recognize and act on the situation as what it is: a moral crisis.

The Obama administration must take the problem as a moral imperative, acknowledge that the private sector simply won’t solve the problem on its own, and like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, create a jobs-centered stimulus that is environmentally sound, improves the national infrastructure, and provides an economic foundation for working Americans and rebuilding the American economy.

The economy isn’t a game, with winners and losers who deserve what they get, because the players don’t occupy a fair playing field and the rules are biased.  Inequality has long been and is becoming more deeply engrained in the American system.  We cannot continue to view long-term high unemployment rates, minimal public supports for the poor, and a permanent and increasing gap between rich and poor as normal much less acceptable.  We can do better.  “Yes, we can.”  And we must.

John Russo and Sherry Linkon

Politics is Personal: How Our Taxes Subsidize Walmart and Hurt Local Workers

We talk a lot about workers in this space— at the Center for Working-Class Studies and in our  Working-Class Perspectives blog—but for the most part we do it on the macro level: massive job losses precipitated by NAFTA and other foreign trade agreements; the collapse of domestic manufacturing; the Walmartization of  America; a stimulus package that pours too much money into the financial institutions that caused the economic meltdown and far too little into job producing infrastructure projects; weak unions; falling wages; vanishing pensions; disappearing health care; fading opportunity.

Sometimes, we’re too focused on the big picture to see how these macro issues affect people in our community.  We have a sense that government’s coddling of business is problematic, but do we really understand why?  We feel in our gut that a neutered union movement leaves working families vulnerable, but can we truly identify with the moms and dads who lie awake at 3:00 A.M. worried that their jobs may evaporate in a week, a month, a year?

Probably not, and that’s too bad, because if we can personalize the devastation caused when the economy stops working for the working class we may actually be able to solve some of the problems that are steadily eroding the American Dream.

For example, I firmly believe that health care reform would have been easier to achieve if, instead of talking about the 47 million people who don’t have health insurance, we gave the problem a face by talking about the 60 year-old woman living down the street who nearly died of colon cancer because she had no health insurance and could not afford to get the follow-up colonoscopies she needed after her first bout with the disease.

That woman, by the way, is my now 75 year-old mother.  She’s a walking, talking advertisement for reform: she had insurance when she first contracted cancer, had it cancelled shortly thereafter, was repeatedly denied coverage because of her pre-existing condition, could not afford the $3,000 per month premium for the only policy she could get, and finally made it to age 65—the point at which she qualified for the government-run health care system that has saved her life repeatedly: Medicare.

If we put my mother and the millions like her who live in every community in the nation out front in the health care debate, would Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck really be able to call reform advocates commies?  Would the health insurance industry have any credibility at all after callously attempting to kill my mother and thousands like her every year?  The answer to both questions is no.

It’s also way past time to personalize the discussion about the many ways in which working-class taxpayers are subsidizing gargantuan multi-national corporations like Walmart. We’re all familiar with the storyline: state and local governments roll out tax abatements and other incentives to attract the chain.  The Bentonville, Arkansas behemoth comes to town and builds a store that devastates the competition.  Shortly thereafter the store owners and employees who paid the taxes that funded the abatements are out on the street.  Meanwhile, many of the giant retailer’s employees are eligible for food stamps and qualify for Medicaid.  Walmart may save us money at the check-out, but we pay for it in taxes and lost jobs. Even though we all know the story, it is for some inexplicable reason, repeated year after year in community after community.  Why?  Perhaps because the government officials who work so hard to entice Walmart and the residents who breathlessly anticipate its arrival don’t know or have any connection to the people whose lives will be changed forever once the store opens its doors.

So let’s personalize the situation and talk about the new Walmart in Liberty Township, one small business owner who operates in its shadow, and the response of the union that represents his workers.

I’ve known Sandy Zander for a long time. He was my boss when I worked for the grocery chain he helped run. He was a fair-minded and able negotiator when we sat on opposite sides of the table during contract talks, and he’s been a successful small businessman since 1988 when he bought a few stores from the company that employed us until it went of business in the wake of a strike neither of us wanted but couldn’t avoid.  He’s genuinely a good guy.

Today, he and his family own two stores: a Giant Eagle in an upscale township east of Youngstown and Union Square Sparkle, one of the few full-service markets still operating in the distressed city.  Sandy’s stores are unionized, so his workers earn a decent wage and have health care and pension benefits.  For two decades he’s managed to survive despite the fact that he’s competing with non-union operators whose wage cost is much lower than his.

In Poland his main competitor is Henry Nemenz.  Henry’s been in the grocery business a long time.  He’s always been a non-union, low-wage, no benefits operator who profits by exploiting his employees.  His owns only a handful of stores, and the Zanders clean his clock every week.  When you drive by the two markets, which are located across the street from each other, you notice two things.  First, there are ten times more cars in the Giant Eagle lot and, second, the UFCW is conducting informational picketing at Nemenz.  The union is spending a lot of money to let people know that Henry’s non-union.  Good for them.

In Youngstown, Sandy’s main competitor is the new Walmart that Liberty Township officials begged for on bended knee.  When you drive by the two stores, which are located less than a half mile apart, you’ll notice two things: first, there are a lot of cars at Walmart and far fewer at Sandy’s than there used to be and, second, there is no UFCW picket line even though Walmart is every bit as bad an employer as Nemenz.

Picket line or no picket line, Sandy will continue to dominate the market in Poland.  But in Youngstown the prospects are not quite as bright.  If people continue to flock to Walmart, Sandy, his store, his workers, and the neighborhood he’s served for two decades could be in trouble.  His employees will lose their good jobs, their health care benefits, and their pensions.  Youngstown will lose the income taxes they pay, and 30 or 40 more city residents will be added to the unemployment rolls.  All because Liberty Township went out and bought themselves a Walmart.

Maybe, just maybe, if the UFCW decided to stand in front of the new store and make sure that people knew that every dollar they spent was putting a neighbor or friend in jeopardy they’d think twice about going in.  Maybe, just maybe, if the union decided to air some ads that highlighted the importance of good-paying retail jobs to the community customers would make different decisions about where they shop.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to start fighting back — one township and one worker at a time.

Leo Jennings

Examining Literacy: A Class Approach

In the suburban community of Poland, Ohio, students at one elementary school participated in a “word parade” in observance of “Read Across America Day.”  Dressed in clothing that conveyed the meanings of words, students learned new words through this event. News accounts of the parade suggest that it was a collaborative effort, involving students, parents, school officials, and community residents. Collaborations like this are common in Poland and the community’s demographics help explain this:

• Exceeding state and national averages, 1/3 of Poland’s residents possess a least a Bachelor’s degree, and nearly 2/3 of residents are employed. Average family income in Poland is about $63,000, and the median value of homes is about $145,000.

Because research finds that parental involvement at school is generally higher among middle-income, college-educated parents, one might expect parental involvement at school to be high in Poland. Families in this middle-class community have the resources that facilitate parental involvement at school.

Research also finds that increased parental involvement at school is associated with higher levels of reading proficiency, literacy, and student achievement (Ibid). The most recent “report card” for the Poland local school district seems to reflect this:

• Ninety-nine percent of students in Poland’s local school district graduated from high school in 2007. More than 98% of students in the district scored at or above the proficient level in reading, mathematics, and writing.  Satisfying all but one performance measure in 2007-2008, the Poland school district was rated “excellent” in performance last year.

Unfortunately, not all local school districts in Mahoning County can boast of an “excellent” performance rating. Like elsewhere, high performing schools, high levels of parent-school involvement, high income and high literacy are unevenly distributed in Mahoning County, and vary by social class. The Youngstown local school district was placed on “academic watch” last year.

But one can easily argue that Youngstown faces harsher conditions than surroundings suburbs like Poland face. Chronic job loss, population decline, poverty, high crime, and limited access to reliable transportation characterize many Youngstown neighborhoods. These problems tax family and community resources and operate as barriers to increased reading proficiency, literacy, and student achievement.

• Only 10% of Youngstown residents possess a Bachelor’s degree, and only about half are employed. Average family income in Youngstown is about $27,000, and the median value of homes is about $50,000.
• Mirroring what has sometimes been called a “national crisis in literacy”, an estimated 35% of Youngstown residents are functionally illiterate, which means they struggle with things like completing job applications, and reading medicine bottle, bus schedules, and maps.
• Children whose parents are functionally illiterate are twice as likely to be functionally illiterate themselves.

So, while family and community characteristics in middle-class communities seem to facilitate high literacy and student achievement, family and community characteristics in working-class and poor communities seem to impede such things.  Social inequality is reproduced and, for some groups, illiteracy is passed from one generation to the next.

For the illiterate, illiteracy often means humiliation, poverty, low-wage employment, and an inability to participate fully in society. For American businesses illiteracy has meant lower productivity, more on-the job accidents, and poor product quality, at a reported cost of $30 billion a year.

In an effort to promote increased literacy in Youngstown, the city and county library system recently opened its Newport library branch. The library offers an Early Literacy Center that addresses literacy at “the starting gate”. Complete with books, toys and literacy activities, the Center is designed to help babies learn pre-literacy skills and become successful readers. Located at an intersection that divides Youngstown from surrounding suburbs, the library also has the potential to bring people from Youngstown and surrounding suburbs together.

However, the fight against illiteracy must not end with the development of single early literacy center, or even with the development of two or three centers.  Steps must also be taken to eliminate the poverty, joblessness, crime, neighborhood segregation, the home-school disconnects, and other systemic factors that generate illiteracy in many poor and working-class neighborhoods through our nation.

Denise Narcisse

Reclaiming Youngstown’s Story

Two weeks ago, the Center for Working-Class Studies sponsored a panel discussion on reporting on Youngstown and the working class as part of our annual lecture series. The panel featured journalists from the Wall Street Journal, the Plain Dealer, and National Public Radio who had written on community and its working people. Their message to a local audience wondering why Youngstown is so often portrayed in negative terms:  the community must understand and reclaim its identity and must show journalists, business leaders, and legislators the strengths of the Mahoning Valley. Otherwise, others will continue define who and what we are. Over time, the narratives developed by outsiders have become the conventional wisdom in explaining Youngstown’s culture, history, and economic plight.  Unfortunately, conventional wisdom about Youngstown isn’t always accurate, and it has even contributed to the community’s difficulties.

A culture is the accumulated experiences of people. For most of the 20^th century, the experiences of the Mahoning Valley were powerful and largely positive. The community grew prosperous both economically and culturally, building on working class values of hard work, family, community, and generational advancement through education. But the memory of that economic and cultural history was disrupted by deindustrialization and, over time, replaced by a negative image constructed, to a great extent, by commentators from the outside the community.  These negative visions of Youngstown described us as the poster child for deindustrialization, a place known more for loss and failure than for productivity and hard work.  Over time, this community became known for its economic desperation, high crime rates, and political corruption.  Many in the local area internalized these images and people have forgotten the cultural strengths that made this community great.

In our book, Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown, Sherry Linkon and I argue that the Mahoning Valley has been shaped by conflict, first over work and culture, and more recently over memory itself. As Robert Bellah has suggested, a healthy “community of memory” involves shared understanding of its past, good and bad, is deeply rooted in associations (family, food, religion, place etc), and contributes to the common good, empowers struggle, and is source of enlightenment and understanding.  This community and its working people must remember that a community is not just a conglomeration of buildings and/ or deindustrialized spaces on the landscape.

As Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Plain Dealer, told local residents at the panel, you have to “take back your town.” That is, local residents need to reconstruct the community’s identity.  They can do this by recovering their cultural and civic values, renewing the relationships among the people who live here, and restoring the spaces, public and private, that offer the possibility of coming together.  This doesn’t meaning hiding the negative features of past behind the term “community.” Rather, Youngstown must embrace both the good and bad in order to move forward and build on its history and memories.

John Russo

Reporting from the Ground Up

A few months ago, we wrote about Kelli Cole, a journalism student at Youngstown State University, whose senior project is an investigation of why there is such performance disparity between two public high schools in our area.

East High School’s students are mostly African-Americans from poor families, while Boardman has mostly white students from middle- or upper middle-class families. A few Working-Class Perspectives readers expressed interest in what she found.
Kelli learned that it’s not about the money spent to educate students. Both school districts spend nearly the same. It’s not about the quality of the teachers, either.  It’s about the armed guards who greet students in the hallways at the predominantly African-American school, and it’s about the police cars who routinely circle the parking lots. And at the white school, it’s about the pep assemblies, and the science club, and the band’s reputation as one of the best in the state.

Simply put, what Cole found is that it’s about expectations and perceptions. One student at the African-American school told Cole that officials expect students to perform poorly and so they do.

She wrote:

The students point out that there are other factors that play a part in the school’s lack of success on the annual report card.

Sitting in a corner of the cafeteria after lunch, three East students discussed why their urban school does not do as well as their suburban counterparts.   Curtis Woods, a senior in advanced placement classes, says, “As kids in a Youngstown City school, we get looked at as being unruly.  [Teachers] treat us like we all have parole officers.”

Just as Woods finished speaking, a teacher began yelling.  The faculty member shouted to Woods and two other students who were still sitting in the cafeteria, “Get to class, now!”

Woods and the other two who were talking to a student reporter told the teacher
that the principal had given them permission to stay in the cafeteria for the
interview.  The teacher wasn’t interested in their explanations and continued to yell until the students agreed to leave.

Later, the teacher apologized to the student journalist, saying if she had known who she was, she would not have acted in that manner.

Minutes later, a student was walked to the principal’s office inhandcuffs.  That student was just one of three disciplined between lunch and the end of the school day.

One police officer was heard yelling as a student walked out of the main office. “No, no, no! Right here!” shouted the officer. The next instructions from the police officer were for the student to ‘shut up.’

East High Guidance Counselor M.J. Brown said that approach is often necessary in order to maintain a safe and educational environment.

Cole would have never heard any of this had she just picked up the phone and interviewed the officials.  Instead, she spent numerous hours actually talking to the students and observing what she saw in the hallways.

That type of reporting differs from the standard stories that are often written about school districts and test results. She actually talked to students instead of merely relying on statistics, school administrators, and politicians.  Kelli’s on-the-ground work allowed readers a unique perspective on two different school systems and gave them a way to draw more complete conclusions.

This kind of reporting -referred to with the cliché “shoe-leather” reporting  – is, we believe, the only really effective way of covering those  who are disenfranchised.

Brent Cunningham, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, has been working with us to develop a reporting workshop for students focused on covering working-class people and economically struggling communities.

In explaining his support for this workshop, Cunningham wrote:  “The press has a duty to try (even though it will always fall short of the goal) to represent all the people of this country in all their complexity, not just those with whom journalists share economic and cultural touchstones. In fact, it is even more crucial that the press help the country understand-in a deep and  nuanced way-those segments of the population that lack the ability to consistently  represent themselves in the public sphere.”

We believe Cole’s reporting, based on standing in school hallways, interviewing dozens of students, and listening and observing, demonstrates the effectiveness of this type of a direct approach to journalism.

This approach is crucial for effectively covering working-class people and issues, who are often labeled with stereotypes. Cunningham says that the working class has been “shoehorned by well-meaning reporters and editors into a stereotype-think Archie Bunker-that hasn’t been true in any broad sense for decades.”  These stereotypes stand in the way of developing full stories and, in fact, often allow for inaccurate stories to be produced.

Like Kelli Cole, reporters need to walk the hallways, hear the students, experience the pep rally, and see the guards.  It’s our job as journalism educators to teach the next generation how.

Journalism educators need to do what we used to do: stress the basics. Teach students to leave their desks and their computers. Remind them about the value of face-to-face interviews. Explain how Internet reporting, while helpful, is no substitute for seeing and experiencing.  Stress the importance and value of everyone’s story.

Tim Francisco and Alyssa Lenhoff

The De Facto Unemployment Rate: 25.12%.

Ever since the early 1980s, residents of the Youngstown area have always been skeptical of government’s official unemployment rate. In 1982, the official unemployment rate hit 24.9% but declined to around 12% in early 1984. The Ohio governor and city officials praised the dramatic decline, but local residents knew that rate failed to account for workers who had given up looking for work, were working part-time, or had been forced into early retirement. In a report commission by the State of Ohio, the YSU Urban Studies program found that “real” unemployment rate was over 18 percent or about 1.5 times higher than the official rate.

Given the “shock” over the most recent unemployment numbers, it is worthwhile to take another look at the figures in light of Youngstown’s experience. But first we need some definitions of various categories of unemployed people, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a comparative study done by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.  Attention class!

Officially unemployed- Persons who worked less than one hour during the nationally determined reference period (one week), looked for work during this period, and were available for work during this period.

Marginally attached workers – Persons not in the labor force who want and are available for work and who have looked for a job sometime in prior 12 months (or since the end of their last job if they held one within the past 12 months), but were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

Discouraged workers – Persons not is labor force who are available for a job and who have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months (or since the end of their last job if they held one within the past 12 months)

Underemployed -Persons who would like to work full time but are not able to do so for economic reasons such as unavailability of full-time work or reduced demand for hours by current employer

Excess disability – Persons who are excluded from labor force because of sick leave or early retirement

Government programs – Persons receiving government subsidized or government provided programs. For example, low wage workers receiving Earned Income Tax Credits

Prison and jail populations – Persons not in labor force because of incarceration.

Now using these definitions and information for the current employment reports, we can begin to make estimates of the “de-facto” unemployment rate.

The official unemployment rate in December was 7.2%, an increase of .4% from the preceding month and a 2.4% increase since the National Bureau of Economic Research officially designated start of the recession in December of 2007. (These academic economists could not decide that we were in a recession until last month). To this we can add individuals who are marginally attached to the workforce (1.2%), discouraged (.4%), or who are underemployed (5.2%). The latter figure is of particular concern as some companies reduce workers’ hours in order to avoid layoffs. This was borne out in the current employment report where the average hours worked declined to 33.3 hours.  The next step for struggling employers will be layoffs. Anyway, if you’re keeping track, our de-facto unemployment rate is up to 14%.

From here it gets statistically more difficult. But using the approach taken in the Center for Economic and Policy Research study, we can estimate that 6% of the potential labor force consists of people who have been forced to retire or are on sick leave, and those whose work is being subsidized by the Federal Government is at 4%. Both of these are conservative figures given the high levels of plant and office closings and buyouts in the past year.  Together, they add another 10% to the de-facto unemployment rate

Finally, prison reform advocates have long suggested that incarceration levels are a direct response to economic conditions. This is especially important in a country that has such high rates of incarceration; according to a 2003 British study, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  If we count incarcerated people among the unemployed, that adds another 1.48% to our de-facto unemployment rate for a total of 25.12%

		12/08
Unemployed		11,1087.2%
MarginallyAttached		1.908(1.2%)
Discouraged		642(.04%)
Underemployed		8038(5.2%)
Excess disability*		Est.(6.0%)
Government Programs*		Est.(4.0%)
Subtotal		23.64%
Prison Population		2.300(1.48%)
Total		25.12%

So what does all this mean? It is what “Main Street” not “Wall Street” has been saying for a long time. The economy is bad, real bad, and it’s getting worse for working families. It is particularly difficult for those who have given up looking for work because they have been left behind by economic change and technology, working-class people whose only hope for the future is in jobs with short job ladders and poor pay. Not only have they been forgotten, but they have erased from official unemployment reports.

To make matters worse, over the last 20 years, business and economic reporters and/or commentators have been, at best, Pollyannaish and at worse flaks and con men when comes about talking about the real situation for working- and middle-class Americans. The media has only recently begun to reassess the economic situation as journalists and pundits have tried to make sense of the mortgage crisis, financial failures and scandals, widespread layoffs and the growing economic crisis.

We count on policy makers and the press to provide accurate information to help us understand and address the economic crisis.  The more we know, the better prepared we can be, as individuals and as a society, to respond effectively.  This is especially true in light of the recent debate over whether we are in a recession (mild or severe) or on the brink of regional and/or a national economic depression.

Youngstown’s unemployment rate still among the highest in the nation after 25 years, and now the whole country has begun to know what Youngstown has known for a long time.

John Russo

Youngstown’s Future and the “Tech Belt Megapolitan”

Youngstown 2010, the city’s award winning community plan, is structured around four principles that have provided the framework for all of the work that has followed:

• Accepting that Youngstown is a smaller city
• Defining Youngstown’s role in the new regional economy
• Improving the area’s image and enhancing quality of life
• A call to action.

Most of the favorable attention Youngstown has received for 2010 has resulted from the first principle-focusing on being a smaller sustainable mid-sized city rather than continuing to mourn the past. Less attention has been devoted to the second principle-defining Youngstown’s role in the new regional economy.

Both physically and mentally Youngstown is located at the center of a bi-state region. Despite this fact, Youngstown has long defined itself as being at the edge of two urban centers-Cleveland and Pittsburgh. This perception is beginning to change because our nation and region are changing. As the community understands these new realities, we will be better able to identify new economic opportunities for Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley.

To thrive in this changing world, we must take a long view-looking 30 years ahead to new economic patterns rather than looking back to the industrial world of more than 30 years ago.

Between now and 2040 our nation will absorb another 100 million people. Only India, with a population of 1.1 billion, will add population more quickly than the United States. According to Arthur Nelson and Robert Lang of Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, the majority of this population growth will be accommodated within just 20 “megapolitan areas.”

Megapolitans are, in essence, the Combined Statistical Areas of the 21^st Century. Like CSAs, megapolitans are defined by empirical evidence of overlapping commuting patterns. The country’s 20 megapolitan regions are already home to about 60% of Americans and account for nearly 70% of our Gross National Product. Nelson and Lang project that this economic dominance will only intensify by 2040.

Northeast Ohio and Western Pennsylvania together constitute one of the 20 megapolitans. Nelson and Lang call it the “Steel Corridor,” a name which evokes the region’s proud past but unfortunately does not point to a promising future. Congressman Tim Ryan and his colleague in Western Pennsylvania, Jason Altmire of Aliquippa, have coined a more future-oriented name, the “Tech Belt.”

The Steel Corridor/Tech Belt is home to 7.1 million people. It is larger that Ohio’s other megapolitan, the “Ohio Valley,” anchored by Columbus and Cincinnati (5.3 million) and is the same scale as the “Carolina Piedmont,” anchored by Charlotte and Raleigh (7.0 million), the “Georgia Piedmont,” surrounding Atlanta (6.9 million), the “Florida Corridor” linking Tampa and Orlando (7.8 million), and the “Greater Metroplex” of Dallas-Ft. Worth and Oklahoma City (7.9 million)

Despite its impressive scale, the Steel Corridor/Tech Belt is projected to remain the nation’s slowest growing megapolitan and the least likely to benefit from the nation’s projected population growth.

These projections give rise to several important questions: How can the region compete for its share of the nation’s growth in population and wealth? How can its communities compete against others in the faster growing megapolitans as places to live, work and invest? What role should city governments and universities play in advancing our understanding of the threats and opportunities that lie ahead?

Many across the region are beginning to ask these questions.  On October 1, 2007, Representatives Ryan and Altmire co-convened the first “Tech Belt Summit,” bringing to Youngstown State University 100 business, educational, and philanthropic leaders to discuss organizing a Tech Belt initiative to leverage the strengths of the entire region.  Ryan urged the participants to think of the Tech Belt not as a collection of aging steel centers but as an “economic unit able to compete with Shanghai and Mumbai.”

This summer the regional dialogue continued when Youngstown State University hosted the first “Cleveland+Pittsburgh+Youngstown Regional Learning Network,” a collaboration of community organizers, public officials, and philanthropies dedicated to making the region’s communities attractive, equitable, and sustainable.

The Learning Network has invited Ryan and Altmire to discuss their Tech Belt initiative at its second summit-a day-long session at the Youngstown Club on November 7,^, 2008. I would urge area residents concerned with the future of our region to join the Network and attend this session.

Everyone else should keep an eye on the “Steel Corridor.”  Youngstown’s experience of deindustrialization predicted what would happen around country in the 1970s and 80s; our “Tech Belt” future may well do the same for 2040.

Hunter Morrison

To Race and Class Add Religion

Discussions of race and class often ignore religion, relegating it to the distant margins or explaining it away as a cover for something else.  If we examine American history, as historian Mark Noll does in God and Race in American Politics: A Short History, we see that religion and race have often been interconnected.  Class and religion also intersect; religious people, institutions, and symbolic resources span social classes and have played important roles in working-class movements. In Youngstown, Ohio, religious leaders responded to deindustrialization by organizing social justice projects.  More recently, they have initiated processes of racial reconciliation. If we want to understand how class and race fit together, we must take religion more seriously.  We need to see how race, class, and religion work together.

A number of top-notch scholars have already moved in this direction. For example, the authors of Divided by Faith contend that racial segregation is maintained less by intentional racism than by sins of omission.  People are so absorbed with attaining the good social and spiritual life for their own selves, families, churches, and communities that their “brothers and sisters” on the other side of racial and class boundaries are left to be their own keepers. Religion, which could bring people together across race and class divisions, may in practice reinforce segregation.

Rev. Rob Johnson pastors a church that sits on a dividing boundary of race and class in Youngstown. He sees segregation and its effects daily, including during Sunday morning worship. Below, he invites us to consider visions of heaven, for many a real place and for others a metaphorical one. Anthropologists tell us that views from outside and afar, including visions of heaven, reveal what we cannot see from the perspectives of our own class, race, gender, and so on.  What can our imaginings of heaven reveal about our social places and experiences here on earth? Are our visions of heaven as segregated as our lives?

Rev. Rob Johnson:

While the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s statement that “Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week” is still prophetic and true, what is happening now is not what most concerns me.  It’s what is going to happen in the future.  In the Christian Bible, Matthew 25:32 tells us that all nations will stand before Jesus’s throne.  Revelation 7:9 is even more precise: “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” For Christians, our destiny is bound up in eternal Sunday morning with every tribe, every language, every people, every race.

In his song “Thugz Mansion,” rap artist Tupac Shakur asked, “Where do niggaz go when we die?”

“Nobody cares, seen the politicians ban us
They’d rather see us locked in chains, please explain
why they can’t stand us, is there a way for me to change?
Or am I just a victim of things I did to maintain?.
…Just think of all the people that you knew in the past
that passed on, they in heaven, found peace at last
Picture a place that they exist, together
There has to be a place better than this, heaven
So right before I sleep, dear God, what I’m askin’
Remember this face, save me a place, in thug’s mansion

Ain’t no place I’d rather be
Chillin’ with homies and family …
… Chromed out mansion in paradise
In the sky”

For Tupac, being segregated by race and economics in this life has direct implications for eternal life.  Heaven is a good place, a peaceful place, where family and friends live together forever.  As a place of forgiveness and grace, heaven is a place where even thugs can “kick it.” However, Tupac’s “thug’s mansion” is segregated.

Many White Christians may bristle at the idea of heaven being segregated.  A recent CNN.com story regarding interracial churches quoted Theodore Brelsford:”[White church members would] say, ‘Can’t we just get along without talking about race all the time?  Can’t we just be Christians?’”  And yet, the same article observes:  “integrated churches are rare because attending one is like tiptoeing through a racial minefield.  Just like in society, racial tensions in the church can erupt over everything from sharing power to interracial dating.”  In the past, the American Protestant community has been a sad exemplar of a segregated heaven. Most notably, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists have either splintered or divided over race issues at some point in their histories.  If this is the example that Christianity offers, what was Tupac supposed to think about heaven?

Research by Curtiss Paul DeYoung, professor of Reconciliation Studies at Bethel University, shows that “only about 5 percent of the nation’s churches are racially integrated, and half of them are in the process of becoming all-black or all-white.” If this is our example, then what are Christians teaching our children?

Paul Gordiejew, with guest Rev. Rob Johnson