Rolling Midwest, Great Lakes, Great Plains, Rust Belt thread

i thought it might be cool to have a non-chicago-specific midwest thread to talk about various things happening in this region. i grew up in cleveland and i never thought i'd want to move back here, i ended up living on the east coast for about 15 years but then i moved back to cleveland last summer and feel like i have a much different awareness about it after living away for a while and getting older.

in terms of the "midwest" i'm kind of thinking of these states here:

http://www.erc.uic.edu/assets/img/content_images/midwest_maps.jpg

but if you live in pittsburgh or buffalo or whatever i think that's fine too. if you want to argue about what the midwest is that's fine but there is already a thread for that - What states do you consider to be part of the Midwest?

one of the things that has been interesting to me is the very slow, possibly unstable, but still definitely happening revitalization of some urban cores in various cities in this region. cleveland's downtown, which was completely dead when i grew up, now sees its apartments at like 97% occupancy, w/ mostly young people. but the schools still are terrible and all the downtown residents are renters, there is very little condo buying happening. but downtown has more energy then i've seen it have in my lifetime.

i saw this article about akron, OH the other day http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20170115/NEWS/170119861/residential-demand-is-outpacing-space-in-downtown-akron

accompanied by this image

http://www.crainscleveland.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/storyimage/CC/20170115/NEWS/170119861/AR/0/AR-170119861.jpg

and i thought whoa akron is getting this kind of treatment, i never really thought i'd see that. is there some kind of future where cleveland becomes unaffordable and then "artists" go to the cheaper akron instead?

common gentrification themes here, usual narratives of white educated young people moving in and opening breweries and boutiques and that becomes a story of a renaissance that is ignorant of and excludes the years of work that other community development groups have been working on to support the poorer long-term residents

i also realize that i don't really know a lot about the rest of the midwest. i've been to chicago twice, michigan maybe 3 times. st louis only twice. i've never been to wisconsin or minnesota, and i don't really know anything about the plains states at all.

marcos i don't know if you're an Emeralds/Steve Hauschildt fan but i found this piece on resident advisor really interesting

https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/2852

whoa cool! i've heard about emeralds before but i was never familiar with them/him, thanks nomar. listening and reading now. the photographs are beautiful in that piece.

i see that he is from the same cleveland suburb i am (bay village) and we are about the same age

I think - think! - what happened or is happening to a few other midwest cities is that, following a fallow period, they started exploding, at least on paper, right before the 2007/2008 housing bust. A few years of foreclosures and empty storefronts hit hard, but the cities, by and large, adapted by downsizing to better reflect their smaller populations. Cleveland, for example, was growing pretty quickly just in time to get kneecapped, went through a few tough years of transition, then started bouncing back a few years ago; Columbus is by many accounts thriving. Detroit has been going through a state of transition for some time now, but only recently has the city started coming around to or coming to grips with the new reality, and things are (relatively) looking up. I should ask my distant family in Omaha how things are doing there, or friends in Missouri, or other family in non-Pittsburgh central/western PA, aka Pennsyltucky, which embodies the best/worst of the midwest/east/south all at once.

(I should stress that these anecdotal recoveries do not, per America, mean that any recovery has been remotely equitable.)