New Orleans needs to recover not only from the catastrophic flooding of Katrina, but also from a much more enduring situation of post-industrial poverty, which, Robert Ross argues, places New Orleans alongside Detroit, Newark and others as a Rust Belt City. That examination frames New Orleans not so uniquely but as one of a surprising category : the Rust Belt cities that suffer from deindustrialization.
In the last decades of the 20th century a broad concept of the roots of urban poverty, African-American disadvantage and municipal fiscal difficulties became widespread. It was summarized as the problem of Rust Belt cities. The narrative, oft-repeated, went like this : as manufacturing left the Northeast-Midwest, the central cities of the various metropolitan areas suffered from joblessness, tax revenue loss and the concentrated poverty of the last big wave of migrants to the big cities β African Americans.
The logic of the linkage between deindustrialization and urban decline worked at both the metropolitan and regional structural level, and the family and neighborhood level, as William J. Wilson famously argued Wilson attributed the increase in lone mothers among African American ghetto dwellers as driven by joblessness among age-peer men.
The regional specification of the majority of central cities in distress was empirically accurate but analytically misleading. Age of central city was a major predictor of fiscal distress e. Dye and concentrated poverty. Older cities were settled before automobiles were the dominant mode of personal transport, and before trucks were the dominant mode of goods shipments ; thus, they were more center-focused and denser, and more influenced by the era of manufacturing and its ancillary industries as central city specialties.
The boundaries of the suburbs of older cities were defined earlier, and the income gap between cities and their suburbs was greater Brenner The Southeast industrialized in the Fifties and Sixties ; the southwest and California grew explosively then and continued through the Seventies and Eighties.
