Ohioans' Exodus to Texas

LORDSTOWN, Ohio

 

– Thousands of the men and women here in northeast Ohio build cars. Their fathers made steel. Home was Youngstown, a city of factories filled with neighborhoods of immigrants from Europe and the American South.

Today, however, most of these families have left. "I have three kids, and I don't see much future for them here," said Kevin Scott

, a 39-year-old with Magna Exteriors and Interiors who installs car seats atGM's giant Lordstown auto plant. His children likely will be forced to move on – as tens of thousands of Ohioans have to Texas.

Several of Ohio's cities have emptied as completely as medieval Europe when it was ravaged by the bubonic plague. Since 1950,Cleveland and Youngstown have lost more than half of their population. Cincinnati is down by 40 percent.While Texas grew dramatically in the last decade, gaining four seats in Congress in the 2010 census, Ohio lost two congressional seats and grew only a little – adding 183,000 residents in 10 years. Texas grew that much in just 5 ½ months.

Left behind were tens of thousands of abandoned homes, empty stores, churches and weedy lots. Ohio's local governments are demolishing these buildings and ripping up streets so they won't keep pulling down the value of occupied homes.

In the last decade, Ohio lost more than 600,000 jobs – a misery indicator beaten only by Michigan and California. Texas, meanwhile, added more than 700,000.

"You brought it down there by avoiding unions, with a better business climate, better taxes and better attitudes," said Hunter Morrison, an urban planner who teaches at Youngstown State University.

Several cities in Germany, Britain and other parts of Europe have gone through the same sort of depopulation and de-industrialization. The economic destruction was immense. In the Ruhr Valley or in cities such as Leipzig, Birmingham and Belfast, people left their homes behind in search of jobs elsewhere in the nation or abroad.

State and local governments in Ohio have tried different plans to attract businesses back with cash, tax and labor incentives or to break ground with colonies of creative entrepreneurs.

"An argument can be made that certain places just won't make it. But the eight major metropolitan areas of Ohio are all too big to fail," said Lavea Brachman, executive director of the Greater Ohio Policy Center in Columbus. "We have to help them find their niches."

Much of Ohio's economic muscle remains: The economic output of the state's 11.5 million residents last year was $429 billion, which outperformed Texas on a per-capita basis. Much of that is due to improved productivity in American manufacturing – more output from fewer workers.

Five of the state's universities are ranked among the top 100 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report. About 75,000 students a year graduate from the state's colleges and universities.

Alumni exit

But even in Ohio's strongholds, there is cause for alarm. Within three years of graduation, one-third of Ohio's university alums have left the state, according to a study of the graduating Classes of 2006 and 2007 done for the Ohio Board of Regents.

Eric Fingerhut, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents, which oversees the state university system, is pursuing a plan to enroll more residents in college and hold on to those who do attend. One focus is to get more university students to do work-study programs while in school and take internships with Ohio companies.

Fingerhut said Ohio has learned economic lessons that apply equally to Texas.

"This is a dynamic, fast-changing economy, and one can never assume that a company and its employment levels will remain as they are for the long term," Fingerhut said. "We always have to be striving to grow the small into the large and the large into the global. But you have to assume that which is your mainstay is not always going to be there."

Youngstown learned that lesson the hard way. The city was built on mills that stretched for 20 miles along the Mahoning River.

"Youngstown is the purest model of a community that placed all its eggs in one basket – called steel," Morrison said.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the mills closed and Youngstown lost more than 40,000 manufacturing jobs.

Since its 1950 peak of about 168,000, Youngstown's population has fallen 60 percent. There are more than 17,000 homes that are months or years delinquent on the property tax rolls – an indication of the city's enormous inventory of abandoned property.

Scott, the Lordstown autoworker, said two of his older brothers working in the steel mills moved to Arkansas for jobs on natural gas drilling rigs.

Their father was a steelworker for 46 years who blamed the industry's demise on foreign competition that was deliberately built up by the U.S. government after World War II.

"He'd say, 'We rebuilt Germany and Japan, so their steel is better quality and made with newer technology.' It was an embarrassment," Scott recalled.

Such feelings remain strong at the UAW hall in Lordstown. A bumper sticker on the wall reads, "Don't Put My Flag on Your Foreign Car!"

The Lordstown union local, once a hotbed of militant labor, agreed to concessions to help save General Motors Corp. and keep the plant from closing. Retirement and health care benefits were cut. A two-tier wage structure was instituted for new and older employees.

"We came to realize – both sides, management and labor – that the enemy is not between us. It's with Asian competition," said Jim Graham, president of Lordstown UAW Local 1112. "And that's a lesson for the entire country."

GM is building the Cruze, a new high-mileage compact, at Lordstown, and the factory is now back to running three shifts with 3,500 workers. But the manufacturing landscape is changing in Ohio. Honda employs 14,000 workers at four plants in the state and is now Ohio's largest manufacturing employer. V&M Star, a French-German steelmaking partnership with its U.S. headquarters in Houston, recently announced that it is adding a second line to its Youngstown pipe factory.

None of the jobs at Honda and V&M is union.

Jim Cossler, chief executive of the Youngstown Business Incubator, said the city won't find its future by trying to re-create the past. He's focused on attracting software companies to the downtown area.

"The single biggest problem was to overcome our disbelief in ourselves," he said.

President Barack Obama came to Youngstown in 2009 to celebrate GM's decision to build the Cruze at Lordstown.

"There are some who see this pain and suggest that it's all somehow inevitable – that the only way for America to get ahead is for communities like yours to be left behind," Obama told the Lordstown workers. "But we know better. We know that our success as a nation depends on the success of communities just like this one."

Cincinnati's business community is more diverse than Youngtown's. Nine Fortune 500 companies are located in the metro area, includingProcter & Gamble, Macy's and Kroger. The regional chamber of commerce, tying together parts of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, calls itself Cincinnati USA.

"We make things really well," said Ellen van der Horst, the chamber's president and CEO. "We also think well."

She said Cincinnati is "the Silicon Valley of consumer marketing," with research, branding and advertising companies all supplementing the big-product firms.

Two years ago, however, Cincinnati's economy suffered a blow when Delta and Northwest Airlines merged. The airport lost many of its domestic flights and five of its six direct international flights.

George Vredeveld, director of the University of Cincinnati's Economic Center for Education & Research, said the loss of flights was a big hit for the city's economy.

"We said for a long time air service is a key driver of the region," he said. "We believed it. And now we have less than half the number of flights we had."

HYPE program

Cincinnati also has struggled to hold its young college graduates. The chamber is running a program called HYPE – Harnessing Young Professional Energy – where established young professionals mentor newcomers.

"If you want to participate and lead and make changes, this community is open to that and looking for that," van der Horst said.

Vredeveld said Cincinnati has not gotten its share of economic growth, and could use more start-up companies. The city's big corporations also have to be concerned with the community's attractiveness among young professionals.

"The most important thing for these companies is a community and an environment in which their employees will live and prosper on a personal level as well as professionally," he said. "Cincinnati is not considered to be a great destination point for young people. ... It just might be cooler somewhere else."

Ohio's civic leaders are trying to restore the cachet of cities such as Cincinnati and Dayton. They take some of their inspiration from the writings of Richard Florida, who emphasizes the importance to cities of a "creative class."

Mike Ervin is a retired physician who lives in a gentrified neighborhood of downtown Dayton. Along with the city manager, he co-chairs Dayton's plan for attracting young professionals to live, work, play and learn in the city.

"Companies want to go where the talent wants to be," Ervin said.

He says Texas should want to help Dayton and other Ohio cities get back on their feet.

"The reason people in Dallas should care is that we're all in this together in a global economy," he said. "We in the United States, as a community, need to be strong together to compete with the world."

Dayton's plan emphasizes turning the Miami River, which runs through the heart of the city, into a recreation magnet. It emphasizes bike trails and restoring some city neighborhoods. The plan considers the downtown University of Dayton campus and Sinclair Community College as draws for research and start-up companies.

The scale of Ohio's needs, however, is immense. Youngstown State's Hunter Morrison said the cities in the Great Lakes region need a reconstruction investment on the same scale as the rebuilding of the defeated Southern states after the Civil War.

"Our country has walked away from manufacturing and shipped it abroad as a matter of policy," Morrison said. "People who have left here and gone to Texas didn't want to go to Texas. ... They're there because that's where the jobs are. But it's not where their hearts are."

In what looks like a coming age of government austerity, Ohio doesn't expect that sort of federal investment. Nevertheless, Cincinnati will push ahead, van der Horst said, by building on its strengths, concentrating on keeping the companies it has, and thinking of itself as a region competing with the world.

"Don't take anything for granted," she advised Texans. "Understand your community's strengths, and invest and invest. Skate to where the puck is going."