Rust Belt Boomerang: The Pull of Place in Moving Back to a Legacy City

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 17. Work and Family

Abstract

The consequences of deindustrialization are still being felt in American communities, particularly in cities located within the Rust Belt. Research and journalistic accounts typically depict deindustrialization and globalization as forces that homogenize spaces and render some jobs and places as outdated, arcane, and useless. These accounts persistently focus on population decline and as a result we know little about a growing trend currently taking place in Rust Belt: return migration of young professionals and knowledge workers to the region. Why do these individuals choose to return to a place that so many flee? I answer this question by focusing on young professionals who have moved back Youngstown, Ohio, a city with a notoriously bad reputation for its unemployment, crime, corruption and overall low standard of living. Despite reporting alternative and perhaps more economically rational work opportunities elsewhere, these individuals returned. While some reasons can be anticipated from the literature, such as family need, I emphasize the importance of place-based considerations in decision-making processes that worked to pull them back. Respondents cited an alignment between personal identity and place, which intimates the salience of non-material factors in decision-making. Young workers see their return as both contributing to new forms of development and extending cultural norms of hard work rooted in the city's working class past.

Author

• Jill Ann Harrison, University of Oregon