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And now for something completely different. I've been doing some homework in the background on the phenomenon of rising regional inequality, with a focus on the problem of small-town and rural decline. And I've been doing some work on the case of Utica, New York. 1/
Why, you ask? Well, I was born in Albany but lived in Utica until I was 8, before moving to Lawn Guyland. And Utica is kind of a classic case: an old industrial city, once boosted by the Erie Canal, but kind of left stranded by change 2/
But there's more to the story, in Utica and a lot of small cities. You see, cities may rise fast, but they usually decline slowly, because a durable housing stock gives them the advantage of a low cost of living 3/ repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewconten…
This keeps old residents there, but also tends to attract certain kinds of new residents. In particular, immigrants are playing a surprisingly strong role in sustaining small rust-belt cities – Utica included 4/
And there turns out to be a special Utica twist: refugees! Specifically, Bosnian Muslims who arrived in the 1990s. These refugees haven't just helped fill local-service jobs: they're important to the region's "export" sectors (to other places within the US as well as abroad) 5/
One important Utica example: Chobani yogurt (which is really Turkish, not Greek) has its headquarters and one of its main plants near Utica. Yes, it's dairy country, but the refugees probably brought something to the mix 6/ cnbc.com/2018/07/02/how…
You know, there are a lot of advantages to being a country that welcomes the suffering and oppressed. And some of the biggest advantages accrue to place in the heartland 7/
