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TheStar.com
| Business | Shrunken Rust Belt city shows grit

Shrunken
Rust Belt city shows grit

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Mar 14,
2008 12:28 PM

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RAMIT
PLUSHNICK-MASTI
The Associated Press

JOHNSTOWN, Pa.– Under the shadows of a steel mill's rusting carcass, a new
Johnstown is slowly taking shape.

Quaint cafes and even an upscale bridal shop have appeared in long empty
storefronts. Downtown lofts are being snapped up. Biotech companies and
high-tech firms have set up shop.

Decades after heavy industry died, taking much of Johnstown with it, this
Rust Belt community appears to be regaining its footing. An aggressive city
planner, a creative redevelopment authority and tourism officials are trying to
turn Johnstown into a postindustrial tourist center with a vibrant downtown.

Since 2004, real estate tax revenues have been flat at about $3.4 million, an
indication the city is holding its own after years of declining revenues during
the peak of deindustrialization, city manager Curtis Davis said.

"I don't know if Johnstown's found its way, but it's on a path," said Dan
Santoro, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.

Santoro looks at the city's massive hospital complex, the growing tourist
industry and what many refer to as the pork-barrel economy – an array of
defense-related industries lured in by powerful U.S. Rep. John Murtha – and he
sees the backbone of a new diverse market. Santoro points to Murtha as part of a
regional leadership that is helping the economy by dealing with the reality of a
smaller Johnstown – down to 22,000 people from a high of 63,000 just 55 years
ago.

"The place won't disappear," said William Kory, Santoro's colleague and a
demographer at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. "There will be a dot
on the map for Johnstown. It may be a smaller dot.''

In the 1950s, steel companies and mining employed thousands of people.
Johnstown produced 2 million tons of steel annually and an additional 23 million
tons of coal. Downtown was packed with department stores and restaurants.

But by the mid-1980s, when manufacturing collapsed, Johnstown and other small
industry-dependent communities in the Rust Belt were destroyed and forgotten.
Lacking the resources, political might and manpower of the bigger cities, these
towns fought to attract new businesses while the unemployed left in a mass
exodus.

The struggle to reinvent has had mixed results. Cities like Lansing, Mich.
and Bethlehem, Pa., where outmigration is slowing and new businesses are
opening, have done better than communities like McKeesport, Pa., Flint, Mich.
and Aliquippa, Pa., where drugs and crime have added to their economic woes.

Some towns razed their mills, filling the sites with unfulfilled dreams.
Others, like Johnstown, couldn't afford to demolish their mills, and planners
are seeking new taxpaying businesses to fill the eyesores.

Poverty and unemployment still plague these towns. In 2000, the last year
U.S. Census figures are available for Johnstown, it had a poverty rate of nearly
19 percent, more than double the state's.

"What is often missed in the study of American industrialization is that
there was a vast heartland that was created ... that involved smaller towns and
cities," said Walter Licht, a history professor at the University of
Pennsylvania. ``They really were responsible for the great growth of American
industry and we have forgotten them and these are the communities that are
tremendously suffering today.''

To recover, Johnstown is using the few incentives it has available to woo
businesses to the financially strapped flood zone.

Richard Idem Somiari exemplifies the new type of businessman Johnstown can
attract.

He looks at the slow-paced town he lives in today and longs for his Nigerian
hometown Port Harcourt, where oil refineries spew smoke alongside peddlers
hawking wares from headborne baskets.

But then he recalls the $1.8 million in low-interest loans, grants and aid he
received from Johnstown to bring his promising ITSI Biosciences company to the
city's business district. He thinks of the money he is saving running his
enterprise from Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands rather than from London or New
York.

"In Chile and Brazil ... life science businesses are located in three-bedroom
flats. Some of them you think they are not companies, they don't have signs.
They're churning out millions," Somiari said. "That's the kind of role Johnstown
can play.''

In the seven years Somiari has been in Johnstown, he has watched the slow
transformation.

Pre- and post-World War II buildings have been renovated. Scaffolding on
others bodes well for the future. A new bank is going up on a main drag. An old
downtown department store is home to government offices and one of Johnstown's
best restaurants.

But in some neighborhoods, industrial sites share space with homes that have
battered porches, broken windows and overgrown weeds. The worst are being
demolished, part of a battle on blight.

State and federal grants are helping to clean up Johnstown's brownfields,
about 65 percent of them already in use, said Deborah Walters, program manager
at the city's redevelopment authority.

The Johnstown Area Heritage Association is helping turn an 1860s-era Cambria
Iron Works blacksmith shop, a National Historic Landmark that can't be
destroyed, into a working area for artisans. Along with a steel theater, a
children's museum, an immigration museum and a flood museum, Johnstown will be a
"working man's Williamsburg," envisions Richard Burkert, the association's
executive director.

"Johnstown is as good a place as any to tell a story of what was gained, of
what was lost and the reality of the industrial story," he said.

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