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I have seen Chicago referred to as being in the Rust belt and can agree with that. Rust belt status is defined by *deindustrialization*. Ever been down to the far South Side where the steel mills used to employ thousands of people and support hundreds of ancillary businesses? Ever ride through the West Side or Northwest Side on the Metra trains past the miles and miles of derilect factories? All of that represented a huge part of Chicago's economy until they all went bust in the 70s/80s. That's Rust Belt.
But it wasn't the primary job employer that destroyed the entire area. It was felt very hard in certain areas of the city, but even when everything was going belly up the total number of jobs in the metro kept increasing, and normally with high paying corporate jobs as opposed to very low paying crap jobs like what they were left with in Flint, MI or Youngstown when everything left.
Chicago certainly has elements of rust belt, and while it teetered in the 1970's and 1980's, it never faultered, and fully righted itself in the 1990's and was done with the industrial past for the most part.
Chicago certainly has elements of rust belt, and while it teetered in the 1970's and 1980's, it never faultered, and fully righted itself in the 1990's and was done with the industrial past for the most part.
To be fair, the term "Rust Belt" is just a catch-all term. Of course there are varying degrees of how "rusty" each city currently is or was based on factors such as historic industry mix in blue-collar trades, how early their turnaround began and how each city has succeeded in revitalizing.
Historically, I don't think there's one meaningfully sized city in the Midwest or Northeast that doesn't have at least a little "Rust Belt" element, either in the city proper or its urban area environs.
Even the most successful post-industrial cities/metros, like Boston or New York, have some "rusty" remnants of the past. This conversation is based on a continuum, not "either-or."
Many of the major rust-belt metros have or are in the midst of revitalization. Chicago did so long ago, Minneapolis in the early 2000's, Pittsburgh as of late. But also Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Buffalo... have made lots of progress.
But I think CLE is the next big rust-belt success story.
I never heard of Chicago being a Rust Belt City, I always thought it was an international city but to answer the question Pittsburgh even thou I only been to Pittsburgh once it was very nice for a medium type of city.
What Chicago had heavy industry, it was never as dependent on manufacturing as the true Rust Belt. The Chicago Board of trade and Mercantile Exchange made Chicago as important of a financial center as it was industrial. The economy has always been too well diversified for to be a true Rust Belt city.
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