A Road Map for Reviving the Midwest

John Austin is a man with a mission: to revive the Rust Belt. The former president of the Michigan State Board of Education, he is also a researcher at the Brookings Institution and has been the director of multiple nonprofit organizations and government commissions. In 2006 he produced a plan for Rust Belt regional revitalization. Now, in a series of blog posts for Brookings, Austin has been evaluating which local development strategies have worked, and which have failed.

Austin believes that there are “two Rust Belts.” Rather than comparing states, he looks at the urban level, contrasting successful towns that have retooled themselves for the new economy, and languishing ones that have failed to find a strategy that works for them. He identifies two main types of success stories -- large, economically diversified metropolises, and college towns. The former include Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Columbus, while the latter include the likes of Ann Arbor, Michigan.