Ohioans’ exodus to Texas offers lesson to Lone Star State
JIM LANDER | Dallas Business News
January 2, 2011
LORDSTOWN, Ohio – Thousands of the men and women here in northeast Ohio build cars. Their fathers made steel. Home was Youngstown, a city of factories filled with neighborhoods of immigrants from Europe and the American South.
In Lordstown, Ohio, GM North America president Mark Reuss drove Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (front-seat passenger) in the first Chevrolet Cruze compact sedan off the assembly line in September. The UAW local agreed to concessions to help save General Motors and keep the plant from closing.
Today, however, most of those families are gone. “I have three kids, and I don’t see much future for them here,” said Kevin Scott, a 39-year-old with Magna Exteriors and Interiors who installs car seats at GM’s giant Lordstown auto plant. His children likely will be forced to move on – as tens of thousands of Ohioans have to Texas.
While Texas grew dramatically in the last decade, gaining four seats in Congress in the 2010 census, Ohio lost two congressional seats and grew only a little – adding 183,000 residents in 10 years. Texas grew that much in just 5 ½ months.
Several of Ohio’s cities have emptied as completely as medieval Europe when it was ravaged by the bubonic plague. Since 1950, Cleveland and Youngstown have lost more than half of their population. Cincinnati is down by 40 percent.
Left behind were tens of thousands of abandoned homes, empty stores, churches and weedy lots. Ohio’s local governments are demolishing these buildings and ripping up streets so they won’t keep pulling down the value of occupied homes.
In the last decade, Ohio lost more than 600,000 jobs – a misery indicator beaten only by Michigan and California. Texas, meanwhile, added more than 700,000.
“You brought it down there by avoiding unions, with a better business climate, better taxes and better attitudes,” said Hunter Morrison, an urban planner who teaches at Youngstown State University.
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