Bill,
I agree. I'm not sure what the people here can do about it though. Start small businesses and work for yourself, but that costs money and if you don't have any....plus even if you have money or can get a loan to start a business, who is going to patronize you when no one else in town has any money?
In a sense, what's going on is the reversal of the great migrations from the south decades ago into the factories of midwestern towns like Fort Wayne, Toledo, Dayton, Detroit, etc. Just as people who could afford to leave moved northward years ago, their descendants are moving southwards and westwards, if they can afford it.
The area I am in is prosperous because, first, it is lucky, and second, because some decisions made 40 or so years ago have paid off. It's fortuitous that a number of universities exist within a few minutes of each other. It's fortuitous that the climate is pleasant (excepting August, and today: high of 99). It wasn't fortuitous when political and business leaders from neighboring cities set aside a great big chunk of real estate and began lobbying businesses who could take advantage of the academic resources to move here. Simultaneously, they persuaded state government to invest in education so the locals could find work at these new places.
IBM was one of the first, perhaps the first, to move here, shifting a facility from upstate New York. I believe a key factor was the willingness of employees to move here, especially when they saw the low cost of housing and how far their salaries would go. Granted, moving employees in from another state is not the same as hiring the locals. But, move enough people making $80,000 and up into an area and the product and service demands they generate will create more than a few jobs.
However, Fort Wayne and the other places have some strikes against them. They lack the attractions -- climate and academic -- of this place. And that's in addition to the cultural issues you mentioned. Can anyone imagine employees of a techie business in California happily moving to Indiana or Ohio? The business would not even consider it, because they know their employees would balk.
Also, what I see when I go back to visit is that local leaders, political and business, seem to think that the way to a prosperous future is to replicate the past. That is, if the jobs disappeared when GM and Delco closed down, then the solution is to bring in mirror image replacements: big industrial facilities that employ thousands of people in lifetime unionized jobs.
Of course, that's not going to happen. Those cities need to look at the assets they still have. They need to stop bickering about problems that get in the way of the biggest problem: creating jobs. And, frankly, they need to understand that their cities are, at best, going to shrink down to a much smaller stable population.
