rust belt: Definition from Answers.com

Rust Belt refers to an economic region of the United States concentrated in the formerly dominant industrial states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. By the 1980s, the Rust Belt became what the Dust Bowl had been to an earlier generation—a symbolic name for a devastating economic change. The 1984 Democratic presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, is generally credited with coining the term. During the campaign, Mondale, the former vice president from Minnesota, attacked the economic policies of incumbent Republican president, Ronald Regan, stating that the president was "turning our great industrial Midwest and the industrial base of this country into a rust bowl." The media, however, repeated and reported the notion as "Rust Belt," and the phrase stuck as a good description of the declining industrial heartland, especially the steel-and automobile-producing regions in the Northeast and Midwest. The phrase became synonymous with industrial decline in the once-dominant U.S. heavy manufacturing and steel industries.

The Rust Belt has indefinite boundaries, although in 1979 Joel Garreau dubbed the same general region the "Foundry." Both terms aptly characterized the region's economic history and underpinnings. Readily available coal, labor, and inland waterways made the region ideal for steel manufacturing. Moreover, the automotive industry—a major buyer of steel—developed nearby. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the U.S. steel industry rapidly fell from world dominance. The U.S. worldwide market share of manufactured steel went from 20 percent in 1970 to 12 percent by 1990, and American employment in the industry dropped from 400,000 to 140,000 over the same period. Starting in the late 1970s, steel factories began closing. Among the hardest hit of the communities was Youngstown, Ohio, where the closure of three steel mills starting in 1977 eliminated nearly 10,000 high-paying jobs. Also hurt were foundries in Buffalo, New York; and Johnstown and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the last outmoded steel plant closed in the late 1980s.

Although thirty-five states produce steel, the large steel plants in the Rust Belt faced particularly hard times because they relied upon large, unprofitable, and outdated open-hearth furnaces. Many were sulfur-burning, coal-fired plants, which had difficulty meeting stringent environmental regulations on smokestack emissions. Layoffs occurred even as worldwide demand for steel grew. Other countries, in particular Japan, met this demand with lower-cost and sometimes higher-quality steel. The American steel industry rebounded by developing low-cost, highly automated minimills, which used electric arc furnaces to turn scrap metal into wire rod and bar products, but the minimills employed fewer workers.

The region had been the nation's industrial heartland and contained many large, densely populated urban areas. These cities, which began showing signs of decline, initially had served as a destination for early European immigrants and tremendous numbers of African Americans who migrated north to join the industrial workforce following World War II. Industrial decline, however, permanently eliminated thousands of well-paid, benefit-laden, blue-collar jobs. Many families left the Rust Belt and relocated to the Sun Belt and the West, seeking jobs and better living conditions. The black populations in the Chicago and Pittsburgh metropolitan areas declined, reversing earlier patterns of northward migration from the Deep South. The population shift meant fewer congressional representatives from the region following the 1990 reapportionment.

Bibliography

Cooke, Philip, ed. The Rise of the Rustbelt. London: UCL Press, 1995.

Florida, Richard, and Martin Kenney. The Breakthrough Illusion: Corporate America's Failure to Move from Innovation to Mass Production. New York: Basic Books, 1990.

Garreau, Joel. The Nine Nations of North America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

or Rustbelt, economic region in the NE quadrant of the United States, focused on the Midwestern (see Midwest) states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as Pennsylvania. The term gained wide use in the 1970s as the formerly dominant industrial region became noted for the abandonment of factories, unemployment, outmigration, the loss of electoral votes, and overall decline. Since the 1960s, manufacturing cities throughout the Great Lakes region and in the Northeast have suffered a decline in population and economic strength as manufacturers relocated, primarily to the Sun Belt, overseas, or more recently, to Mexico. Meanwhile, the nation as a whole has shifted toward a service economy. Detroit, although still one of the world's largest manufacturing centers, has been especially hard hit and unable to reduce its dependence on the manufacturing sector. Suburban flight induced by the decline of the central city has been dramatic in large cities such as St. Louis and Cleveland, as well as smaller cities like Gary, Ind., and Akron, Ohio. By the 1980s, the economy of some Rust Belt cities had noticeably improved after the introduction or expansion of non-manufacturing industries. Pittsburgh, initially devastated by cutbacks in its steel industry as early as the late 1950s, has since emphasized its role as a center for research and development and finance.

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