A tale of two Midwests:

1) The edge city boomburb: https://twitter.com/aaron_renn/status/1263834289432678402?s=20

2) And the older industrial city, hollowed-out by deindustrialization and disinvestment: https://twitter.com/aaron_renn/status/1263837006477627393?s=20

3) In national media stories about the Midwest, the declining industrial cities, small towns, and rural areas tend to get all of the coverage.

But there are a lot of economically successful suburbs like Carmel throughout this region.

4) Interrogating the social and economic reasons for why places like Hamilton County, IN; Warren County, OH; Delaware County, OH; Medina County, OH; have flourished while nearby urban areas continue to struggle is an untold story that is largely ignored by an uninterested media.

5) Lost in the one-dimensional and woefully incomplete media coverage of deindustrialization and disaffected Trump voters, there exists a Midwest of pristine new housing developments, ample retail options, overflowing local tax bases; existing in tandem with mind-blowing decline.

6) I wrote about how it is playing out where I live over six years ago - a hellishly difficult issue to untangle, full of all sorts of social and economic disparities.

The silence from those who might be in a position to change it is still deafening. https://thestile1972.tumblr.com/post/71691657173/today-is-yesterdays-tomorrow

7) The 12-county region where I live has lost 7% of its population since I was born.

The 4 core cities of Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown have collectively lost 50% of their population since their historic peaks.

8) It doesn’t take an expert in finance or public administration to imagine what collectively losing 750,000 people has done to these cities’ tax base, housing, and infrastructure. They were built to accommodate double their current population.

9) Over the past 50 years, new, whiter, wealthier versions of these cities have been built immediately adjacent to them. Untold billions of dollars in new investment on previously undeveloped, while the overall population of the region shrinks.

10) Diving into why all of this is happening this way would consume volumes. It is an extremely complicated issue with very few obvious, politically-feasible solutions. Anyone who tells you the have a simple answer to it is mistaken or lying.

11) But the first and biggest hurdle to be overcome is for many of the people who live here to even acknowledge that any of this is a problem. "So what?" "Who cares?" and "It doesn't affect me" are the most common reactions to the decline of our urban core areas.

12) Sliced and diced into dozens of units of local government with their own tax bases, school districts, and socioeconomic realities, there is simply no sense of felt, shared responsibility for doing something about the problem. Until there is, we are unlikely to get anywhere.