Small cities in the US Rust Belt are leading an urban transformation charge. After empty streets and ruined economies, cities try to write a new chapter with new apartments, breweries and thriving arts scenes. Guardian Stephan Starr in Evansville Indiana Thu 4 Jul 2024 Life in Evansville, Indiana, during the 20th century mirrored much of the rest of the US’s industrial midwest: booming growth powered by manufacturing in the early decades – then a steep decline that left its streets empty and economy in practical ruins. Since its heyday as an industrial powerhouse in the 1960s, Evansville’s population has fallen by 18%. But today, following decades of urban decay, downtown life in this city of 115,000 people is changing. It boasts hundreds of new apartments, a host of breweries, a thriving arts scene and even a Taylor Swift-themed escape room. “It’s a more vibrant space. You’ve got more residents downtown, which means more businesses, more hotels [and] a new medical campus,” the mayor of Evansville, Stephanie Terry, said recently of the current downtown compared to a decade ago. “People are really energized.”These and other changes prompted Logan Jenkins, a southern California native, to move to Evansville last year as part of a relocation program that offers a number of perks to move there and to other cities. “I would have been one of 10 such businesses in Indianapolis, or one of 20 in Cincinnati,” he said. Jenkins works with tech startups and the local university, and he said that living downtown means he is within walking distance of about 20 restaurants and cafes.
“The big thing for me is that there’s times where I don’t have to drive for a week,” he said. Evansville isn’t alone. At a time when some major US cities are grappling with business closures and high rents, a number of small, post-industrial cities in the midwest are experiencing a boom centered on their downtown cores. In Lansing, Michigan, another former industrial hub that’s lost tens of thousands of residents since its mid-20th century heyday, local and state authorities plan to invest more than a quarter-billion dollars on housing, a music and arts center and other community projects. Similar experiences are playing out in Dayton, Ohio; Charleston, West Virginia; and other smaller, once-struggling manufacturing towns. The turnaround is being fueled by a combination of affordable housing, flexible work environments and other opportunities. The Joe Biden White House is spending billions of dollars across the midwest in an attempt to turn the Rust Belt into America’s “Silicon Heartland” – meaning that thousands of new jobs are en route to the region. A 40-minute drive north of downtown Evansville, Toyota is investing $1.4bn to manufacture a new electric vehicle that is expected to bring hundreds of new jobs into the area.
The rise of work from home means that cities are looking towards concepts such as the 18-hour streetscape, which places recreation and housing alongside, rather than secondary to, access to work. In many towns in the midwest, that means breweries inside residential apartment buildings, free outdoor concerts and whitewater parks opening up.In 2019, Evansville wasranked the city with the most homeowners in their 20s per capita in the country. Affordable housing projects on the city’s Lincoln Avenue, Market Street and Bond Street have all broken ground or opened in recent years, with the number of downtown housing units rising from 176 a decade ago to 568 today – with another 228 under construction. But while there’s been significant progress for smaller mid-western cities, challenges remain.......read on https://www.theguardian.