page_title: Rust Belt
section_title: Outcomes
hierarchical_section_title: Rust Belt / History / Outcomes
caption_attribution_description: Huber Breaker: The largest anthracite coal breaker in North America. Built in 1938, it closed in 1973. Ashley, Pennsylvania. 3 exposure HDR with +/-2 EV bracketing. Processed by Photomatix
context_page_description: "Rust Belt" is an informal term for a region of the United States that has been experiencing industrial decline starting around 1980. It is made up largely of the Great Lakes Megalopolis, though definitions vary. Rust refers to the deindustrialization, or economic decline, population loss, and urban decay due to the shrinking of its once-powerful industrial sector. The term gained popularity in the U.S. in the 1980s.
  The Rust Belt begins in Central New York and traverses west through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Indiana, and the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, ending in northern Illinois, eastern Iowa, and southeastern Wisconsin. New England was also hard hit by industrial decline during the same era. Industry has been declining in the region, which was previously known as the industrial heartland of America, since the mid-20th century due to a variety of economic factors, such as the transfer of manufacturing overseas, increased automation, and the decline of the US steel and coal industries.
context_section_description: Francis Fukuyama considers the social and cultural consequences of deindustrialization and manufacturing decline that turned a former thriving Factory Belt into a Rust Belt as a part of a bigger transitional trend that he called the Great Disruption: "People associate the information age with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, but the shift from the industrial era started more than a generation earlier, with the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt in the United States and comparable movements away from manufacturing in other industrialized countries. … The decline is readily measurable in statistics on crime, fatherless children, broken trust, reduced opportunities for and outcomes from education, and the like".
  Problems associated with the Rust Belt persist even today, particularly around the eastern Great Lakes states, and many once-booming manufacturing metropolises dramatically slowed down. From 1970 to 2006, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh lost about 45% of their population and median household incomes fell: in Cleveland and Detroit by about 30%, in Buffalo by 20%, and Pittsburgh by 10%.
  It seemed that during the mid-1990s in several Rust Belt metro areas the negative growth was suspended as indicated by major statistical indicators: unemployment, wages, population change. However, during the first decade of the 21st century, a negative trend persisted: Detroit lost 25.7% of its population; Gary, Indiana – 22%; Youngstown, Ohio – 18.9%; Flint, Michigan – 18.7%; and Cleveland, Ohio – 14.5%.
  In the late-2000s, American manufacturing recovered faster from the Great Recession of 2008 than the other sectors of the economy, and a number of initiatives, both public and private, are encouraging the development of alternative fuel, nano and other technologies. Together with the neighboring Golden Horseshoe of Southern Ontario, Canada, the so-called Rust Belt still composes one of the world's major manufacturing regions.
caption: The Huber Breaker (in Ashley, Pennsylvania) was one of the largest anthracite coal breakers in North America. It was built in the 1930s; it closed in the 1970s.
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