by Anne Trubek
SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?
Fear of retail competition, fear of a home investment losing value, fear of taxes rising, fear of other races, fear that your kids might fall behind other kids—our preoccupation with mobility seems driven as much by fear as by romance. These days it’s not so much fear of oppression or persecution but fear of being left behind in a policy environment that favors flight and abandonment, that privileges those with the wealth and inclination to move. It can even start to seem as if this policy environment might not be an accident—that it is an intentional effort to make sure the advantaged can always leave behind the disadvantaged. But that would only happen if these policies were crafted by people who already had most of the wealth and power and felt entitled to even more. And that would never happen, would it?
So let’s be nice and assume the policies weren’t created with our current result in mind, but that the set of assumptions that underpinned those policies haven’t held true in the Rust Belt and we’ve had unintended consequences. The primary faulty assumption has been that population would continue to grow. When you combine subsidized residential mobility with flat or shrinking population, you get rising taxes, property depreciation, and economic stagnation, and all the social ills associated with those stresses.
But of course regions do go through cycles of growth and shrinkage, so it makes sense to question the assumption that mobility is the solution to every problem. In our Rust Belt scenario of regional population stagnation, a romanticized devotion to mobility has often caused more problems than it has solved. Desegregation was made possible by greater mobility. And suburban flight to escape school busing was also made possible by mobility.
All of that said, sometimes flight is the smart response. Sometimes moving to another place is the best way to “reset” a student’s approach to school. Sometimes a simple change of scenery opens up one’s mind to new possibilities and helps to shed old negative expectations. An August 24, 2015, New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell described a study by the University of Oxford’s David Kirk that compared the recidivism rates for prisoners who were in a Louisiana penitentiary during Hurricane Katrina. Many of their home neighborhoods were destroyed by the storm, so when they were eventually released from prison, some had to relocate to other places while others went back to their old neighborhoods. The ones who went back to the old neighborhoods had a 60 percent recidivism rate, while for those who went to other places it was 45 percent. Human behavior is shaped not just by the inclinations of the individual, but by social settings that reinforce or discourage particular actions.
Of course that’s also the thinking behind the breakup of concentrated poverty that was embodied in high-rise housing projects by tearing down the housing and dispersing former residents throughout a region. Statistics show that such measures have decreased crime and increased opportunity for many of the people who had lived in the projects. But that doesn’t mean all neighbors are eager for Section 8 housing on their own street (all those old fears at play). The people who have most exploited mobility have not been those whom it would most benefit (people stuck in toxic poor neighborhoods) but the wealthier half of society using their money to distance themselves from poverty, and all too often that pattern of flight has had negative effects on the regional economy, not to mention the social fabric.
The view from the airplane makes it clear that in trying to spread too far too quickly, we weaken our very fabric—not only is it frayed at the edges, it’s also unraveling in the middle. Flying into a Rust Belt city, you’ll often see the blue sparkles of swimming pools giving way to cast-off neighborhoods left to rot as if they were fast-food trash tossed out the car window. We may be able to drive around that on the ground, but from the air it is plain to see that we are not only allowing weak places to compromise the structural integrity of the whole, but we are also missing an enormous opportunity to revive the existing fabric with new designs and stronger material. In our age of easy mobility, it’s always an option to set out for what we imagine is that Better Place. But we might be smarter to invest where we are to make our place better.
Leaving and Staying
SALLY ERRICO
Losing Lakewood
I MOVED TO LAKEWOOD, OHIO, a few weeks after breaking up with my boyfriend and, not coincidentally, a few weeks after I started sleeping with Adam. My boyfriend and I had lived together on Cleveland’s east side—his native stomping ground—and as soon as the first winter had hit, I had become desperate to leave.
“You realize the snowbelt that goes all the way to Buffalo starts here, right? Like, specifically here. If we lived twenty minutes west, we’d have an entirely different climate.”
“I like the east side,” he’d said. “Now hand me the ice scraper.”
There were other reasons for moving to Lakewood. It seemed to me a city in the best possible ways: progressive in both its politics and its society, a place where a proud Cleveland met a youthful liberalism. It was full of shops and restaurants and bars, and their interconnectedness—the sheer number of them and their proximity to one another, and to residential streets, and to Cleveland itself—was to me a characteristic of what urban life should be.
On a more practical level, Lakewood was also where Adam lived.
I met him at a party in December, and when he mentioned that he and his girlfriend would be moving in together in May, I thought, I have six months to make you fall in love with me. I had known him for an hour.
The intensity of my attraction was unlike anything I’d ever felt: he was tall, slim, and impeccably dressed, with curly brown hair and eyes so dark they were almost black. As we got to know each other better over the next few months, I also discovered he was sometimes vain. He could be jealous and resentful. But his flaws made him more appealing, which is why I maintain that my attraction wasn’t just physical. I was in love.
The situation was complicated by 1) my boyfriend and 2) Adam’s girlfriend. For a while, I imagined that Adam and I could just … hang out together forever, complacent in our respective relationships, no rocking of boats. We had mutual friends, so there was always an excuse to see each other; we enjoyed the same things, so if we happened to find ourselves at, say, the same concert, hey, what a coincidence! But then one night, after we attended a wine-fueled fund-raiser for the Cleveland Public Theatre, he kissed me. I was living in Lakewood by the end of the month.
I found my apartment by driving around and looking for FOR RENT signs in the windows of buildings (it was a kinder, simpler, realty app–free time: 2004). I checked out houses, duplexes, and apartment complexes, some near the lake and others closer to the airport, some beautiful and others one leak away from being condemned. When I called the number in the window of a building on the corner of Detroit and Riverside, the owner said he could show me a one-bedroom immediately—he was there now, renovating it. For $525 a month, it was mine.
The neighborhood was everything. I could go to the dry cleaner and the liquor store on the same walk. Sushi, falafel, and pizza were just a short drive up Detroit. And if funds were low, so were prices at Marc’s, that T.J. Maxx of food, with its dented tuna cans and inexplicably large selection of peanut butter. Stores and restaurants flew rainbow flags year-round, and the one business I knew of that was openly homophobic—a taxidermy shop that appeared closed even when it was open and had a bumper sticker reading GOD MADE ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE in the window—was also openly mocked. I could go for a morning run in the Metropark, and in the evening, have a glass of wine at Three Birds. By comparison, my hometown near Cedar Point had not one single store at which to buy a CD, and there was opposition to plans for a Taco Bell because the locals believed it would attract gangs. Lakewood was a Shangri-La.
And just off of Detroit: Adam’s apartment, the seat of both my joy and misery. He hadn’t broken up with his girlfriend yet, but soon, I just knew, it would happen. They’d never have the chance to move in together. In the meantime, my plan was simple: c
ontinue sleeping with him and wait for him to give in to our obvious chemistry. But I’d forget this on the days I’d drive past his street on my way home from work and see his girlfriend’s car parked in front of his building. Her carrrrrrrr! I would be in agony as I pulled into my parking lot, imagining them in a Kama Sutra’s worth of positions—or worse, doing something like making dinner, throwing little puffs of flour at each other and laughing, a scene straight out of some stupid romantic comedy. I’d drag myself up the stairs of my building, collapsing in tears on the slipcovered couch that had been a hand-me-down from my grandparents.
This, as it turns out, is not a way to build self-esteem. I recognized that I’d become the kind of woman I’d always pitied, the “crazy” one waiting for a kind word or sign of affection from an emotionally (and otherwise) unavailable man. But I didn’t know how to break out. I’d decide that I was done, that I was too disgusted with myself to continue, and I’d go on dates with other guys. But then Adam would call, and the adrenaline would flood me.
Complete escape seemed the only option. For years, I’d entertained the fantasy of moving to New York City—a giant Lakewood!—and I began to plan in earnest. But really, it was both a distraction and a bluff: I was sure Adam would stop me. Our relationship wasn’t just sex, after all. We’d been friends before we’d been anything, and we’d spent nights talking about our lives, our ambitions, our secrets. That had to count for something.
I packed my apartment slowly, waiting. He never came. I got in the van and left Lakewood, this time by taking Detroit across the bridge and into Rocky River. I didn’t want to drive down the streets we’d walked, or pass the diner where we’d sat across from each other in squeaky vinyl booths, talking over coffee until 4:00 A.M. More than anything, I didn’t want to see his building. I felt at the time that he had taken Lakewood from me, but now, of course, I understand that I was the thief, and a cowardly one at that. I was leaving the only apartment I’d ever have that would be just mine: no roommates, no boyfriends. I’d been too obsessed with my heartbreak to allow myself the pleasure of being a single twenty-four-year-old woman in a city that I loved.
I later learned that Adam’s girlfriend had been cheating on him all along. They had broken up right around the time I’d settled in New York, where every street had been full of things I wanted to tell him about and every face was that of a stranger.
MARGARET SULLIVAN
Notes from the Expatriate Underground
WE WERE SO TIRED OF those people—the ones who had moved away from Buffalo, but still wanted to lay claim to it. The ones who gathered at Buffalo taverns in various cities to cheer (or grieve) the Bills, but didn’t have to think about the rusting steel mills along Route 5, or the problems of the second poorest city in the United States, or the constant infighting on the school board.
Although we true Buffalo people—the ones who actually lived in the Queen City—welcomed them back, with wan smiles, on the Wednesday nights before Thanksgiving, on Elmwood or Chippewa, we didn’t think for a minute that they were really Buffalo People.
No, they were poseurs, in their “City of No Illusions” T-shirts, swigging Genny Cream Ale and debating the virtues of wings at Duff’s versus Anchor Bar. Because after the holiday, or the wedding, or whatever had brought them back for a few days, they were gone, and we were here.
Still here.
I tolerated them for years, for decades. Now, I’m one of them: a Buffalo expatriate. And now, finally, I get it: the constant craving for the hometown, the need to talk about it all the time, the nostalgia for what was left behind.
I left for New York City in 2012, after most of a lifetime in Buffalo, including thirteen years as chief editor of the Buffalo News, where I had come as a summer intern after college in Washington and graduate school in Chicago. Three decades, somehow, went by. Parents died, children were born and raised. Then a job at The New York Times beckoned.
Now, after four years in Manhattan, I live in Washington, DC. These cities have their wonders, no doubt—glamour, spectacle, a sense of importance and being at the center of the world.
But so far, I haven’t found anything as real as the First Friday fish fry at St. Mark’s parish in north Buffalo. Or the Turkey Trot as a crucial calorie-burner before the big meal of the year. Or the first warm day of the spring when Delaware Park is alive with runners, tennis players, would-be hoop stars, and toddlers in strollers.
And that sense of place—that authenticity—is why we expatriates hold on so tight.
It’s why we gather together in other places—for example, in a Buffalo bar in Sarasota, Florida, to watch the Bills get crushed on their overseas road game in London. Or why we gravitate to other Buffalo people who have made the same move. When I moved to New York City, I found a group of literary women with western New York ties; we called ourselves the Buffalo Gals, and met monthly for dinners to speculate on such matters as whether the Peace Bridge had been lit purple for Prince’s death or for Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, and to talk about the accumulated snowfall in the Southern Tier.
It’s also why Tim Russert, who grew up in south Buffalo, never stopped mentioning Buffalo sports teams when he was the host of NBC’s Meet the Press. It’s why Lauren Belfer, the novelist who wrote the Buffalo-based City of Light, comes to her hometown so often to speak to groups as varied as the working-class patrons of the Tonawanda Public Library and the white-gloved ladies of the Twentieth Century Club and the hipsters of Larkin Square. And it’s why I’ve been so happy to write book reviews for the Buffalo News, and to come around every summer to delight, from a kayak, as the late-afternoon sunlight sparkles upon beautiful Lake Erie.
In short, we want the connection. We need the connection.
And while we know that this yearning may seem, to you who shovel the snow and pay the real estate taxes, like the passing interest of a mere dilettante—you may even feel it has a whiff of condescension—we must beg your indulgence.
Allow us expatriates to lay claim to the Buffalo that forged us and that sustains us. Because we frankly aren’t sure who we would be without it. Without those roots grounding us and feeding us, we might wither away altogether.
So when we come around for the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, or for the Fourth of July family reunion, or for our best friend’s wedding reception at the Historical Society, we’ll be listening for the words we want to hear.
Even if you deliver the phrase with an invisible roll of your eyes, please say it: “Welcome home.”
JASON SEGEDY
Confessions of a Rust Belt Orphan; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Akron
Go to sleep, Captain Future, in your lair of art deco
You were our pioneer of progress, but tomorrow’s been postponed
Go to sleep, Captain Future, let corrosion close your eyes
If the board should vote to restore hope, we’ll pass along the lie.
—“CAPTAIN FUTURE,” The Secret Sound of the NSA
IN THE BEGINNING …
As near as I can tell, the term “Rust Belt” originated sometime in the mid-1980s. That sounds about right.
I originated slightly earlier, in 1972, at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio, Rubber Capital of the World. My very earliest memory is of a day, sometime in the summer of 1975, that my parents, my baby brother, and I went on a camping trip to Lake Milton, just west of Youngstown. I was three years old. To this day, I have no idea why, of all of the things that I could remember, but don’t, I happen to remember this one. But it is a good place to start.
The memory is so vivid that I can still remember looking at the green overhead freeway signs along the West Expressway in Akron. Some of the signs were in kilometers as well as in miles back then, due to an ill-fated attempt to convert Americans to the metric system in the 1970s. I remember the overpoweringly pungent smell of rubber wafting from the smokestacks of BFGoodrich and Firestone. I recall asking my mother about it, and her explaining that those were the factor
ies where the tires, and the rubber, and the chemicals were made. They were made by hardworking, good people—people like my uncle Jim. But more on that later.
When I was a little bit older, I would learn that this was the smell of good jobs; of hard, dangerous work; and of the way of life that built the modern version of this quirky and gritty town. It was the smell that tripled Akron’s population between 1910 and 1920, transforming it from a sleepy former canal town to the thirty-second largest city in America. It is a smell laced with melancholy, ambivalence, and nostalgia—for it was the smell of an era that was quickly coming to an end (although I was far too young to be aware of this fact at the time). It was sometimes the smell of tragedy.
We stopped by my grandparents’ house, in Firestone Park, on the way to the campground. I can still remember my grandmother giving me a box of Barnum’s Animal Crackers for the road. She was always kind and generous like that.
Who were my grandparents? My grandparents were Akron. It’s as simple as that. Their story was Akron’s story. My grandfather, George Segedy, was born in 1916, in Barnesboro, a small coal-mining town in western Pennsylvania, somewhere among Johnstown, DuBois, and nowhere. His father, a coal miner, had emigrated there from Hungary nine years earlier. My grandmother, Helen Szabo, was born in Barberton, Ohio, in 1920. Barberton was reportedly the most industrialized city in the United States, per capita, at some point around that time.
