Environment: Greening the Rustbelt

There is no housing bubble in the Rustbelt cities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Economic decline began shortly after World War II as manufacturers - enticed by cheap labor and unenforced environmental laws - relocated, first to the American South and then overseas. Fleeing residents left behind concentrations of people in older cities without the capacity to start again elsewhere: the physically handicapped, emotionally disturbed, homeless, or persons dependent on government services. Their presence often discouraged upper-class consumers from venturing into the city centers. In some cities, white flight created racial divides. In cities that remained largely white, such as Meadville, Pennsylvania, where I live, segregation fell along lines of education and income.

Yet even as unemployment soared into double digits in Pittsburgh, Erie, Detroit, and Youngstown, islands of vitality persisted within sight of forsaken factories. In every city, small pockets of family-owned groceries, hardware stores, pharmacies, stationeries, and favorite shoe repair shops clustered together like small gardens amidst urban decay. In Meadville, an organization called the Center for Economic and Environmental Development (CEED) at Allegheny College is using this base of strength, combined with environmentally sustainable building, as the city’s road to recovery, and other cities in Pennsylvania are following suit. The living commitment of small-town shop owners and their clients has become the foundation for these Rustbelt cities to regain their footing.

The Meadville Slump

Meadville, Pennsylvania, is a small city on the western edge of the state, fifteen miles from the Ohio border. Nestled in the bull’s-eye of the Rustbelt, Meadville is one hundred miles from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo. Like its larger, better known counterparts, Meadville’s livelihood depended on the strength of its manufacturers. Talon, the zipper maker, operated here for nearly 60 years, and American Viscose produced rayon fiber inside 44 acres of unyielding brick factory space. The Erie Lackawanna, which later became Consolidated Rail, repaired all of its locomotives in Meadville, the central point on the rails connecting Chicago and New York City. Together, all three companies employed thousands of workers, and when they closed their doors in the 1980s, local unemployment exceeded twenty percent.

Initially, the region’s redevelopment agencies responded by searching for replacements: perhaps subsidies, tax incentives, and a cheap, well trained workforce could entice an auto manufacturer to locate here. But the globalized economy during the ‘90s made competition too fierce. Manufacturers could pick and choose not only among Rustbelt cities pleading for large employers, but also among cities around the country and the world offering skilled workers at low wages.

When jobs finally came to Meadville, they bypassed downtown and took root in the suburbs. Job seekers found employment, but not living wages, at Blockbuster Video, AutoZone, Cracker Barrel, Staples, Home Depot, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. In most Rustbelt cities these days, thanks to these retail jobs and out-migration, unemployment has fallen back toward national and state averages. Poverty rates, however, in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Meadville, remain frighteningly high.

Green Is the Way

In 1997, I was chair of the Department of Environmental Science at Allegheny College, a liberal arts institution with approximately 2,000 students. At the time, my colleagues and I began to conceive a different model for Rustbelt redevelopment, launching the Center for Economic and Environmental Development (CEED). We hoped that CEED would counteract the mainstream notion that a rush to “jobs, any jobs” constituted sound economic development policy. In place of some of our classroom-based teaching, we put groups of students and community members to work solving some of the region’s problems.

CEED envisioned achieving economic and social stability through environmental sustainability. Meadville could become a green city if government, business, education, and non-profit leaders learned how to think about the environment as more than just a platform for plunking down factories. We suggested reconnecting the city to its waterways - most notably French Creek - and respecting the environment, rather than using and abusing it. One of CEED’s early allies in this endeavor was Andy Walker, Director of the Meadville Redevelopment Authority (MRA). Walker says today, “To rebuild this city, to resettle residents, and to bring consumers back downtown, we’re going to have to design a new city. We can’t compete with big box development out of town, but we can offer a livable, walkable city with a high quality of life. What we’re trying to achieve is nothing short of a rebranding of our city around eco-principles.” As examples, Walker cites a project to revive access to Mill Run, a creek running beneath the city, and the development of environmental businesses, like organic food stores and restaurants that use local foods.

CEED’s Arts & Environment Initiative tackles a challenge common to all Rustbelt cities where factories now lie inert: trying to overcome a sense of desertion and ugliness that has deterred visitors and potential investors. A recent survey performed by the MRA found that a majority of downtown purveyors and potential customers thought the city was depressing and unattractive. Along historic Route 6, at the entryway to Meadville, CEED’s Arts & Environment Project Director Amara Geffen, her students, and the employees of Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation (Penn DOT) have assembled a sculptural mural and a garden of larger-than-life flowers built entirely from recycled road signs. Getting the project built required a change in the focus of Penn DOT employees from highway engineering to the communities around their roads. Welder Randy Calvin questioned the source of Penn DOT’s materials and wondered how much energy went into Penn DOT’s activities. Jack Molke, a regional director for Penn DOT until his retirement last year, said, “This project has enlightened many, many of our employees, including me, about the value of recycling.” Molke added that Penn DOT employees were proud of the admiration the flowers evoked from friends and neighbors, who took a fresh look at the agency they had always thought was simply a road repair operation.

Today, hundreds of feet long, the mural highlights regional landmarks such as French Creek, surrounding forests and wildlife, and Meadville’s industrial history. The project, called SIGNS & FLOWERS, was installed at Penn DOT’s regional headquarters, beside the busiest road in Crawford County: 24,000 cars pass the site each day. Immediately, visitors from Florida, Canada, and beyond began to roll into the Penn DOT parking lot. They strolled through the flowers, reaching up to touch the petals, and snapped photos to take back to friends and families. Two years ago, Penn DOT received a request from a couple that wanted their wedding photos taken there. 

Market Alley Makeover

Geffen’s success designing SIGNS & FLOWERS opened the door for additional projects in Meadville. Now on her agenda is the transformation of Market Alley, a dilapidated alleyway, currently closed to vehicular traffic, in the heart of Meadville’s central business district. Geffen has worked with students, planners, architects, engineers, the mayor, local businesses, city council members, and other CEED faculty to make over the alley. Federal funds through the Community Development Block Grant program and TEA-21, the major federal transportation funding stream, finance the project, supplemented by largely free labor from students. The TEA-21 funds are being used to replace the crumbling brick surface in the alleyway with attractive, artfully arranged, colorful pavers. Already, garbage dumpsters have been replaced by the first commercial recycling project in the city. Next, the city of Meadville will move electrical wires underground, and will clean and repaint brick building façades. Beneath the alleyway, hidden under concrete and brick, lies the long overlooked Mill Run waterway. To encourage pedestrians to traverse the alleyway and frequent its businesses, Mill Run will be uncovered and TEA-21 funds will pay for a bridge over the stream. For the first time in nearly 80 years, shoppers will enjoy the sight and sound of running water in the city center, an experience the area Wal-Mart cannot hope to match.

Butch Kasbee owns a travel agency that has a backdoor on Market Alley. He is the only Republican member of Meadville’s five-member City Council, and an avid CEED partner. “I think CEED’s plan to renovate Market Alley and daylight Mill Run with a bridge over it is a great plan. I can’t wait for them to start construction on it. I think it will make downtown much more attractive and will be great for business.”

Directly across the street from Market Alley is Meadville’s market house, constructed in 1870 so area farmers could come to the city to sell their products. It is the oldest continuously operating market house in Pennsylvania. Like much of the rest of the city, not a great deal happened at the market house during the depression of the late-1990s. As part of a community-wide revitalization effort, CEED helped organize the Meadville Area Local Growers. Now more than twenty local, mostly organic, farmers sell their products downtown at the market house, bringing Saturday morning crowds in numbers that have not been seen in over twenty years. In addition to the farmers and baker at the market house (not to mention a musical instrument maker), a bulk food seller opened in a reclaimed theater in the central business district and a second, larger, bulk and organic food supplier is scheduled to open in 2006. Most customers so far come from Meadville’s wealthier neighborhoods and suburbs. One of CEED’s next steps is to diversify patronage at the market house by promoting the market to the city’s lower-income residents.

Sowing CEED

CEED is also having an impact on the eco-revitalization of other Rustbelt cities. CEED began the Northwest Pennsylvania Sustainable Forestry Project, a collaboration of faculty, students, landowners, foresters, sawmills, and lumber companies in partnership with the Rainforest Alliance. The Forestry Project works with forest growers in northwest Pennsylvania, an area that has become a national hotspot for hardwood extraction, to improve the quality of forest management so that, among other goals, they can win and sustain certification by the Forest Stewardship Council. (Such certification is akin to an organic food label for wood.) The project also tries to improve the state’s wood products industry by building links between these forest growers and green builders in western Pennsylvania, especially in Pittsburgh, which has more buildings certified by the Green Building Council’s LEED program than any other city in the United States.

Pittsburgh’s transformation has come largely from an unusually strong network of non-profit environmental groups focused on transforming the city that was once the poster child of an industrially-abused metropolis. Ann Gerace, Executive Director of Conservation Consultants, says, “It’s been a long road to get to this point, but we have changed the way redevelopment of the Rustbelt is happening. That started when we were able to get our civic leaders to understand the interconnectedness of environmental sustainability with social and economic sustainability.” Pittsburgh’s expanding green building industry, non-profits like Conservation Consultants and the Green Building Alliance, university involvement, and foundation support for
sustainable development, together are accomplishing in Pittsburgh what Allegheny College and CEED are achieving in Meadville. They are drawing a new class of young, high-tech, and artistically inclined entrepreneurs to the city, attracted by the quality of life.

A New Look at Meadville

After ten years of working with CEED, an impressive array of community leaders now understands the role of environmental sustainability in economic development. The Economic Progress Alliance (EPA), a regional development corporation for northwest Pennsylvania, now espouses the connection between environmental protection and sustainable regional development. Marsha Walker, Director of Business Development for the EPA, says, “We can’t go back to the manufacturing town that we used to be. We need to attract a more creative class of people, and CEED’s vision of a town built upon principles of sustainability makes a lot of sense to me. It’s the only way we can compete with more progressive cities around the country. We have to sell quality of life.”

In two years, Butch Kasbee should be able to open the back door to his travel agency for pedestrians walking the brick path in Market Alley. They will have just crossed the new bridge over Mill Run carrying vegetables from the market house in one hand and a cup of coffee from the Artist’s Cup in the other. And in three years, when the Department of Transportation reconstructs Meadville’s Interstate 79 interchange, they will do it with the assistance of CEED’s Arts & Environment Initiative. Every motorist passing by Meadville en route to Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Erie, or Cleveland will see a multicolored, environmentally inspired, artistic endeavor signaling the blossom of a green city at the center of the Rustbelt. Meadville, like Pittsburgh, is becoming a green city because environmental groups effectively encouraged government, business, education, and non-profit leaders to consider the environment as the basis for revitalization. Protecting the environment, it turns out, is an important step toward restoring the community.

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