Youngstown Resurgent - The Miracle on the Mahoning

No matter how you look at it, this past month has been a good month for the Youngstown/Warren metropolitan area. While the rest of Ohio, and indeed the nation, languish in economic limbo, this little pocket of the rust belt is shedding its image and becoming a hot bed of economic activity. The recent mammoth economic downturn is giving America a taste of what this area went through thirty five years ago when the steel mills closed down and the area lost 30,000 direct steel jobs, with estimates of up to 100,000 support jobs.

Now, we are resurgent and ready to lead Ohio and the country into economic prosperity as we finally reap the benefits of thirty five years of trying to get our act together. We did it. There is still a long way to go, but we have gained national attention, and people are taking a look and liking what they see.

GM LORDSTOWN. That facility is becoming ground zero for the new GM. It will be the preeminent GM production facility producing the Cruz and possibly one other model. The announcement yesterday of an addition of a third shift is good news for here, and the country, as Lordstown consolidates and strengthens its presence in the region.

V&M STAR’s selection of Youngstown/Girard as the location for its $350,000,000.00 new pipe production facility next to its existing Brier Hill plant is a stunner, creating untold numbers of construction jobs and 350 good paying manufacturing jobs in an area where we were told to forget about any additional manufacturing. A new pipe mill in Youngstown/Girard…who’d have thought? Ground breaking is in April.

TMK IPSCO ( parent of Koppel Tubular Corporation) has announced it has leased the former Sharon Tube facility in Brookfield, and will be begin production of pipe connectors in April. This is the quintessential small business, employing 40 -50 new hires.

REVERE DATA, as San Francisco based research firm supplying information to various financial institution, is located in downtown Youngstown. It could have gone anywhere, but Turning Technologies and the Youngstown Business Incubator which has garnered national attention, attracted it here. It starts with 10 -20 employees, but will expand to close to 100.

SEVERSTAL STEEL has announced it is restarting its production facility in Warren. Preliminary start up work is underway with an unspecified number of employees being called back in the next few months. The plant has been idle since early 2008.

This doesn’t even begin to touch the thousands of call center jobs that have moved into the area at various locations including downtown Youngstown, Boardman and Austintown; and the sale of Gorant’s Candy to a local concern based in Warren; and the expansion of the Exal Aluminium (one of the largest beverage aluminum can producers in the country).

While Forbes Magazine dissed our region this month calling it one of the worst places to live in the United States…we were ranked higher than any other Ohio City, including Dayton, Toledo and Cleveland (deemed to the worst city in the United States). But Entrepreneur Magazine listed Youngstown as one of the top ten cities in the nation to found a new business, along with Atlanta, San Diego, Orlando, and Chapel Hill….not bad company to be in.

All of us who live here freely admit that we have problems, chief of which is a systemic high unemployment rate made up of folks who have become permanent victims of the largesse of federal social policies. These folks aren’t going away, resulting in a permanently high area unemployment rate. That is an issue for another day.

But for the most part, Youngstown has turned to the corner. Success breeds success, and as other companies take notice of what is going on here either through trade journals or the news, or through sending businessmen to the area to deal with Youngstown businesses, I believe the Youngstown area will continue to shed its rust belt image and not only lead Ohio out of the recession, but become on of the economic engines of the state reclaiming it rightful place. This is a great place to live.

Kudos to the local politicians, the Chamber of Commerce, Youngstown State University, and to the numerous other local promoters, believers, and dreamers, who have helped to establish what Congressman Tim Ryan calls, the Miracle on the Mahoning. It has been a long time coming.