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Midwest Witnesses a Rust Belt Rebound

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jim Maloof remembers the “For Sale” signs, the boarded-up windows and the skyrocketing unemployment in the 1980s. The worst memories, he says, are of the families that gave up.

“People would come in and put the keys to their homes on my desk. They’d ask me to take their home, take over their mortgage,” says Maloof, a Realtor who became Peoria’s mayor from 1985 to 1997. “They couldn’t do it. It really broke my heart.”

Like dozens of other cities around the industrial Midwest, Peoria suffered an economic slowdown in the 1980s so staggering that unemployment reached 20%.

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Communities including Cleveland, Detroit and Louisville, Ky., also suffered as older industries closed and the region earned dubious fame as the “Rust Belt.”

But things have changed.

A region that was losing jobs and residents a decade ago is on the rebound, the Census Bureau reports, as people move back to the industrial heartland.

“In many Rust Belt metro areas, unemployment is down, welfare rolls are down, crime is down, wages are up and the population is either up or stable,” the Census Bureau says in a statistical report.

Census analyst Glenn King noted that there is no formal definition of Rust Belt and many people would consider it to extend into the Northeast and perhaps as far south as parts of Alabama, but his report concentrates on the Midwest.

King says the reasons for the turnaround vary from community to community, with the improved national economy helping a great deal. In addition, he says, local growth strategies have been important, led by mayors, residents and businesses in different cities.

“Michigan, for example, has made a concentrated effort to diversify its economy away from being auto-dependent,” he said. “That has had a positive impact.”

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In general, the Rust Belt has followed the rest of the country in shifting from a goods-based economy to one based on services.

In 1979, for example, Peoria, a central Illinois city of about 114,000, had 50,000 people working in manufacturing. Today that number hovers around 33,000.

“Area manufacturing, in terms of sheer numbers employed, frankly never came back,” says Bernard Goitein, a business professor at Bradley University in Peoria.

Instead of manufacturing, new business growth has been in medical and agricultural technology, retail and business-to-business industry like computer services and advertising, says Bill Browning, president of the Peoria-area Economic Development Council.

In the 1980s, the Peoria region suffered a 7.3% loss in population. But in the period from 1990 to 1997, the area saw a 2% gain.

The Cedar Rapids, Iowa, metro area showed the biggest population rebound, from a loss of 0.6% in the 1980s to a gain of 7.7% in the period 1990-1997.

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Not far behind were Sioux City, Iowa-Nebraska, turning a 2.1% loss in the ‘80s to a 5.1% gain in this decade; and the Detroit-Ann Arbor-Flint, Mich., region, which had a 2% loss in the 1980s and a 4.9% gain in the 1990s.

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