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With the exception of Chicago (If I made a great coin) I could never under any circumstances ever live up there so I don't blame them for all moving down here.
I like most rust belt cities. I like the large amount of historic and beautiful architecture they usually have. Plus they are usually structurally dense cities. Sun belt cities are usually too new for my taste and can be a lot more car dependent and have less walkable/bike-able neighborhoods. I also like how those rust belt cities saw major immigration from back in the day and are a lot ethnically, culturally, and religiously different from most sun-belt cities due to this immigration. I am from New Orleans and the above descriptions fits this city and it is kind of a rust belt city where it's past glory days and population peak (for city limits) are over but has a bright future. Lots of transplants in a city can kind of be annoying too and New Orleans has been seeing quite a few transplants but really it is good for the city. A draw back might be the winters in the northern cities but I have never experienced those types of winters before and I cannot say for certain how bad it might be but like most things you probably get used to it. There are a lot more important factors on deciding where to live, obviously, but I just choose these comparisons and it is not like I am actually moving anywhere or have to really think deeply about it. I am happy in my sun belt city now (if it even truly is a sun belt city) and I probably could see myself in most of the cities on either side but I like the rust belt cities more.
To live? The Rust Belt - hands down. We have the architecture, the history, the quirks and the crannies. We are NOT suburban, by definition, because we are the places people left after WWII for greener pastures. As in "Green Pasture Estates".Subdivisions.
I was raised in the suburbs and I liked it then, but it's become unaffordable at least on my terms. Burbs in the Sun Belt have become more ...burby.
The Rust Belt has the Academics, and that's important to me. The Rust Belt has soul. In any way you wanna take that.
The sun belt is way too Red for me in terms of a permanent place to live. And like it or not, our country has divided along those lines. I don't like it but I don't wanna fight with folks who this the Prez was born in another country.
The Sun Belt intersects with the Bible Belt. I'm a Church member, but not a fundie. A liberal Protestant.
The Sun Belt is a wonderful place to visit! Some pretty beaches and friendly people. I have good friends who are Southerners, but their ROOTS are there. Mine are not. The Northern people who relocated there are far more conservative than the ones who grew up their. The transplants made a choice. And some of the reasons, to me are pretty ugly.
The Sun Belt that's in the desert seems depressing.
Having to run the A/C 24/7 365, makes me uncomfortable. And piping in water? Perhaps the Good Lord didn't intend for us to live in the middle of the freaking desert.
I enjoy boiled nuts and southern Gothic literature. Falkner, McCullers and Capote are among my faves. Grits rock.
But I'm not a fan of the Rodeo or the Gun and bible culture.
I love urban archeology and photography. And snow on Christmas morning.
I choose the "rust belt," but not for the cities. I like the non-rusty parts of the rust belt. You know... the rural areas. Not to mention the Great Lakes shoreline, forests, etc.
If you're going by land area, only a very small percentage of the Rust Belt actually fits the stereotype of factories and industrial areas. It's not mile after mile of factory and grungy urban areas. You can drive for hours here and see nothing but farms and forest.
The Sun Belt, on the other hand, has the benefit of having a name with positive connotations. Everybody loves sunshine!
If we called it the "Drought Belt" or the "Dust Belt" or the "Oppressive Heat Belt" it wouldn't sound nearly as appealing.
Change the name of the "Rust Belt" to the "Lakes, Farms and Forest Belt" and it sounds a lot nicer, while still being accurate.
Having lived in both, rust-belt. People are more authentic, genuine and environments are much more interesting, historic, etc... Sun belts are good at hype, PR/marketing and people have bought into that. I don't see how sitting inside in A/C for 4-5 months/year is better than snow for 3- 3 1/2 months/year. Some of the sun belt climates are so oppressive that they aren't really better. Also, you have a lack of community in lots of these sunbelt areas, true community and that's a factor in psychological health. The other charges, too, water, landscaping, HOA just replace the higher taxes. You might make out a bit better, but not significantly or like you think.
It's neither; it shares some of the characteristics of a Rust Belt city, but it's just geographically and climatically far enough south to not be in the Rust Belt. But, it's geo., clim. and culturally not a Sun Belt City as it is where the Midwest shakes hands with the South, so to speak.
I'm sure some die-hard Midwesterner from Peoria or Dubuque will contest my statement. I'm from Kentucky originally, have lived in Louisville and know what I'm talking about.
I see Louisville as similar to Indianapolis and Columbus. All of them are essentially "lower midwestern" cities. However, because the former two have city-county mergers, and the latter has annexed a ton of unincorporated suburban land, they function more similarly to sun-belt cities than rust-belt cities, where the "urban" predominates.
The core of these cities has still experienced continued decline, but this is masked by the amount of suburbs within the city limits, leading the cities as a whole to seem like greater success stories than they are.
Of course, the traditional urban cores of a lot of southern cities faced the same issues, until gentrification began changing those as well. The point is many of the differences has to do with how easy it is to annex runaway suburbs.
A vast majority of people who live in the "rust belt" really don't have anything to do with manufacturing or live in run down has-been areas anyway. Gary is 0.8% of the metro area. Even crappy areas around the south side and west sides are only around 11% of the metro population of Chicago (which I wouldn't call rust belt anyway, just that it has select areas with those qualities).
E. St. Louis and the north side of the city are something like 8% of the metro population. Cleveland is around 14% of its metro area, and that's counting the nice areas of Cleveland as well.
Rust Belt is hard to define and talk about because it's not a uniform region, it's a collection of industrial centers and their old historical population areas that have hit upon hard times. That's what you always hear about and the pictures you see on TV....but they're normally not showing the 85% of people living within the metro area who are in nice suburbs or older residential areas that are doing just fine and look like anywhere else in the country.
Most people left the hard hit areas years ago - because just like the pictures and stereotypes express - most people don't want to live there. So they don't. There are tons of metros peppered within the "rust belt" that really don't fit the picture at all anyway.
The Midwest has more people in it than it ever has before. Every state in the "rust belt" has more people in them than they ever have before except Michigan which is 0.6% off its peak population in 2000. People moved out of many areas, but a majority of them just moved to the nearby suburban areas or other cities, with some moving out west or down south. In the past 4 years hundreds of thousands of people have moved out of the Midwest, but still it's only around 0.8% of the population during that time. More than made up for by births over deaths and immigration.
Last edited by Chicago60614; 06-11-2012 at 08:36 AM..
The Rust Belt is easier to define than the Sun Belt...I'm not even sure I know where exactly the "Sun Belt" is...other than places like Florida and Arizona...
Just to clear something up, suburbs vary and I'd say more so in the Rust Belt versus the sun Belt. For instance, the Buffalo suburb of Kenmore is one of the top 100 most dense communities in the country(15,400 people within 1.4 square miles and a very nice community to boot). So, you can find urban/walkable/relatively dense suburbs in many, if not all Rust Belt metros.
I see Louisville as similar to Indianapolis and Columbus. All of them are essentially "lower midwestern" cities. However, because the former two have city-county mergers, and the latter has annexed a ton of unincorporated suburban land, they function more similarly to sun-belt cities than rust-belt cities, where the "urban" predominates.
The core of these cities has still experienced continued decline, but this is masked by the amount of suburbs within the city limits, leading the cities as a whole to seem like greater success stories than they are.
Of course, the traditional urban cores of a lot of southern cities faced the same issues, until gentrification began changing those as well. The point is many of the differences has to do with how easy it is to annex runaway suburbs.
The urban core of Louisville has not been on a continual decline on the same scale as other places. Old Louisville, The Highlands; these among others are nice areas comfortably in Louisville's old city limits.
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