Can Anyone Carry Gary?

Long thoughts on post-industrial urban blight, protectionism, and when economics becomes culture

They don’t make nothing here no more
You know, capitalism is above the law
I say, “It don’t count ‘less it sells”
When it costs too much to build it at home
You just build it cheaper someplace else

— Bob Dylan, “Union Sundown”

In a recent “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” piece, I featured a building I learned about from a YouTube channel I recently found, Joe & Nic’s Road Trip.

Many of the videos on that channel are explorations of run-down small towns and cities, with some data (income, crime, housing values, etc.), and some history, often centering on an industry or company that used to float the town and has closed up, moved overseas, or downsized.

One of the videos we watched was of Gary, Indiana, which is famous for being the hometown of Michael Jackson, its sometime designation as the “murder capital of America,” and its dramatic decline and urban blight generally.

It’s worth noting up front, as Joe from the channel does, that even in some of the most distressed places, there are still basically normal and functional neighborhoods, and lots of people who still live in these places, just as people would live in any place. They’re not all criminals, not all desperately poor, not all trapped, etc. Sometimes what presents itself as sympathy is a kind of condescension, and that’s not my intent here.

That video reminded me of an interest I’ve had over the years in this cluster of issues: urban decay and urban blight, and the question of trade and outsourcing. In grad school I was an intern at Public Citizen, one of the old Ralph Nader-founded public interest orgs, in their Global Trade Watch division.

At the same time I was helping Public Citizen oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, I was also taking a course on international trade—taught by George W. Bush’s former U.S. trade representative. (Getting to do those two things at the same time, and hear, see, and participate in both sides of a wonky policy debate on the ground in real time, was probably the highlight of grad school for me.) This was in early-to-mid 2016, when it was still mostly just a curiosity that the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, seemed to be on the old left-economic-populist side on this question. Simpler times.

I never thought that the simple and often self-interested protectionist agenda—trade barriers and heavy industry-specific protections, often based on political calculations—was the right answer to the problems of post-industrial decline. But I did think, and still do, that industrial policy writ large, and/or what some folks call “competitiveness policy,” deserved more attention.

Some of that stuff might not even be about trade, let alone trade barriers—it could be about better freight rail in America, or better educational programs, or support for emerging strategic industries, or making it easier for foreigners who completed higher-education degrees in America to stay here. Stuff that would help build a knowledge and industrial ecosystem within which innovation could take place. I don’t really think of this as protectionism, though it probably leans towards it more than the philosophy of the folks we used to call “free traders.”

But I did think, when I saw pictures of Detroit or Youngstown or Gary, or small towns that had once had maybe a single factory locally producing some consumer product, or regions that had entire industrial ecosystems that were hollowed out, that something had gone wrong.

Has it? I guess that’s the question. And how much of our (my) reaction to footage from these distressed post-industrial cities says something about the situation itself, let alone the right policy answers, versus my own feelings?

During the Gary episode, Joe drives down Broadway, the main drag, which has few well-kept or even apparently open buildings left. At the end of the main drag, before the shrunken but still operational U.S. Steel, is the old City Methodist Church, a massive cathedral-like structure which has slowly decayed to the point of near-destruction, looking like an old English monastery with only a stone shell standing.

Jesus, you say to yourself—you hope it’s a prayer. Damn these people to hell who let this happen. Is that sentiment a sin when the thing is, in fact, damnable?

But again, is it? How would you know? If you read about the history of the church, you’ll find that it was always a bit of a boondoggle. The pastor who backed it was pushed out, the maintenance costs were always ungodly, and the building has become more of a landmark in its decayed state than it was in its heyday. From this history of the church:

Since its opening, William Seaman [the pastor] had an ever-growing group of detractors who complained about the building’s Roman Catholic overtones and that it was merely a monument to himself. Immediately after opening, this group began labeling the building “Seaman’s folly.” Despite its beauty, the building was constructed at a great cost and stature for a congregation and city of that size. Maintenance costs would be a financial burden on the church throughout its lifetime, eventually becoming one of its downfalls.

What else was going to happen to it, as the seemingly stable economy of this oversized company town disappeared like a mirage? If the people who let this grand structure crumble deserve damnation, then what would have been their salvation? At what cost and opportunity cost should a fragile, unsustainable moment in time have been preserved?

Underneath the righteous anger, perhaps, is a kind of fear, or insecurity, or even a metaphysical error: the belief that death is avoidable, that all things must not pass. Perhaps it did not have to be this way. But to believe that as an article faith is to believe that decline is always a choice; that someone is always to blame.

You can imagine, in 1970 or 1980, or 1994 (NAFTA) or 2000 (permanent normal trade relations granted to China) that the other side might have won. What would that timeline have looked like? Would we all be paying a fractional amount, or even a significant amount, more for consumer goods, but with far fewer of the problems downstream of deindustrialization?

Or are the free traders correct that it isn’t just about the extra dollar a given unit costs, but about the dynamism and efficiencies that you get when you can specialize across borders and easily move capital? That countries attempting to wall off “their” industry will end up poorer in real ways?

I’m not an economist, and I’ve always had trouble with this question. Why can’t a country just make things? How do we know all of those downstream costs—addiction, suicide, crime, public assistance programs, entire communities disintegrating, kids going through the underfunded schools as the tax bases dry up in these places, the subtle loss of a certain tactile, mechanical literacy—how do we know, when we price all of those things properly, that we really came out ahead? Isn’t there an element of valuation there that an economist cannot answer?

But then, how do we know which things are worth mourning, let alone expending financial and political capital to save or preserve? There are a million ghost towns in America; a million embryonic towns that never grew beyond a few shacks. There are cultures and industries that came and went that nobody remembers. It’s trite to say that the automobile put buggy manufacturers out of business, but it’s true—and the buggy business probably put somebody else out of business.

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Here’s another video featuring a small town called Yazoo City, in Mississippi. As a much smaller place, it doesn’t spark the same sense of ruin as Gary, but nonetheless it seems sad. These faded towns seem like such cute little places, so similar in their outlines to some of the most expensive and loved places in America. But it’s a small place, and so are a lot of these faded towns. Places that went up and (partially) came down in the blink of an eye.

It makes me wonder: why don’t pictures of decayed American roadsides, or empty strip plazas with cracked, overgrown parking lots, capture that same consternation and moral outrage?

For example, take a look at this image that I found on Facebook. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of sites that look more or less like this, some in struggling towns, some just derelict properties in fairly affluent places.

These images are kind of spooky. But not much else. We mourn the dying towns as if they’re real places, but not the strip malls, which in many ways are the modern equivalent: the way we build now. If you built a commercial area in 1900, it was a little Main Street. If you built the same in 1950, it was probably¹ the image above.

Why does one or two blocks of cheap, quickly built two- or three-story buildings trigger something in us? That’s a town, this is just a strip mall. How different are they, really?

I remember a chat with someone who worked in the government of a small New Jersey town during a big redevelopment project. One building torn down, which had been viewed as historic and the demolition of which upset some people, turned out to be a brick exterior over a rotten wood frame. The aesthetic was pretty, but there was no reason that structure was worthy of preservation. Other, I suppose, than the fear that whatever would replace it would be worse.

Anyway, after all that, I don’t have a final answer. I think, sometimes, about this question of deindustrialization, which in some ways is the opposite end of the question of superstar cities and the fact that so much economic dynamism and opportunity is concentrated in a few places. I’m not sure what, if anything, urbanism has to say about a place like Gary, or Yazoo City.

Do we care about cities because of their built form, because they’re cities? Or is the urbanity in some ways incidental to the opportunity and culture? It’s almost axiomatic that housing is cheap in places people don’t want to live, but what if there is hidden, latent opportunity in some of these places?

There are a lot of threads here, and I’m really not quite sure what I think about all of this, so I would appreciate a comment on any aspect of this broad cluster of issues!

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Related Reading:

The “Vibecession” Was (And Is) Real, But It’s Not About The Economy

“We’re Rich, We Can’t Afford That”

Saturation

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1. Unless it was New Town, North Dakota, built in 1953. I wrote about New Town last year and I think it may possibly be the very last “town” that ever built in the United States (before the form was resurrected by the New Urbanists).