Why people stay after local economies collapse − a story of home among the ghosts of shuttered steel mills

Homes and businesses on tree-lined streets spread out from the sites of former steel mills along the Calumet River. U.S. Steel South Works was on Lake Michigan, just north of the river. H. Michael Miley via Flickr, CC BY-SA^[6][7]

Its collapse was devastating to people living in the neighborhood, Simonetta told me. As mill after mill shuttered^[8] in the last two decades of the 20th century, people began to leave to find new work – mostly service jobs – located far from southeast Chicago’s economic depression.

As we stared at the silent street, I asked them, “Why did you stay?”

Christopher paused, then said simply, “We had the building.” The couple owned their three-story row home outright after decades of paying off the mortgage. Sure, it had some crumbling corners and the roof sagged, but it was theirs. These four walls remained solid during and after the topsy-turvy years of economic collapse. More than just a form of equity or material space, this building was the foundation for their stability.

Why do people stay in hard places?

For the past 10 years, I’ve asked why people stay^[9] when their local economy collapses.

In my 2024 book, “Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt^[10],” I used ethnographic research and interviews to study the long-term outcomes of deindustrialization in a rural iron-mining community in Wisconsin and urban manufacturing neighborhoods set amid the steel mills of Chicago.

The causes of deindustrialization were macroeconomic and global^[11] – technological change, trade deals, environmental regulations and increased competition – but the effects were local. In the second half of the 20th century, towns and cities that grew up around industries that extracted iron and manufactured steel suddenly lost the core of their blue-collar employment.

Steelworkers on strike at U.S. Steel’s South Works in 1952. During the industry’s heyday in Chicago, South Works employed more than 15,000 people at its complex on Lake Michigan’s shore. It closed in 1992. AP Photo/Ed Maloney^[12]

Stretching from New York to Minnesota, the Rust Belt region has experienced five decades of nearly double-digit unemployment rates^[13]. In the wake of industrial closures, hundreds of thousands of unemployed people packed up their houses^[14] and sought their fortunes in factories or mines in the American South, or anywhere that wasn’t collapsing from economic depression. In the process, these deindustrialized places not only lost their grip on their residents but their place in the American story^[15] of economic progress, growth and resilience.

But not everyone leaves.

For this research, I talked with more than 100 people^[16], like Simonetta and Christopher, to understand why people stay in these neighborhoods as jobs dry up and stores close. Again and again, they argued that their stuckness in place offered them stability in a chaotic world.

Homeownership: A trap and a way to stay

The people I spoke with often began their stories with a practical – and economic – concern: the finances and freedoms of homeownership.

For many long-term residents, moving elsewhere was economically impossible. Depressed housing values meant they couldn’t recoup their investments by selling, and the process of moving is itself expensive. Yet they also argued that owning their house offered them a little piece of stability in the early years of unemployment.

In the mid-20th century, good wages combined with federally backed home loans opened avenues of homeownership for blue-collar iron and steelworkers.

In the 1950s, south Chicago’s business district, less than a mile from the mills, was thriving. Curt Teich Postcard Archives Digital Collection (Newberry Library) via Wikimedia^[17]

Beginning in the 1960s, southeast Chicago transitioned from a majority rental community to one where between 60% and 70% of houses were owner-occupied^[18]. For Christopher, Simonetta and thousands of their neighbors, buying a home was a sound financial decision and a path toward achieving the American middle-class goal of building wealth through private property ownership.

Of course, houses are more than simply material investments. Simonetta and Christopher’s house was also their family story. In the first half of the 20th century, Simonetta’s parents had immigrated from Mexico. Christopher’s grandparents had arrived from Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. Simonetta explained that since they had grown up in the neighborhood, when they got married, they wanted to buy a place within walking distance of their parents and webs of aunts, uncles and cousins.

The mill neighborhoods’ proximity to Lake Michigan means fishing and beaches nearby. Calumet Beach, shown in 2021, saw racial conflicts in the early 1900s but became popular with the entire community by mid-century. Jamie Kelter Davis/For The Washington Post via Getty Images^[19]

When they made the down payment in 1980, they benefited from plummeting house prices. Wisconsin Steel had just closed its nearby mill, and housing prices in nearby neighborhoods had already dropped by 9%^[20]. But they hadn’t expected the whole region’s housing bubble to pop.

Housing prices in their neighborhood began to fall^[21] as U.S. Steel slowly laid off workers through the 1980s and 1990s. Even today, the median price of homes listed in southeast Chicago ranges from $80,000–100,000, less than a third of Chicago’s median of $330,000^[22]. When the neighboring mill closed, their family networks were stuck.

Simonetta recalled, “My father, my parents still lived in the neighborhood. They weren’t going anywhere. Where were they going to go?” She continued, “It’s not like we’re rich. I mean, the mill’s closed. We were unemployed!”

People fish in the Calumet River, with the wall of the U.S. Steel South Works site behind them. The site has been considered for several revitalization efforts, most recently as a technology center for quantum computing. Amanda McMillan Lequieu, CC BY-ND^[23]

Even if their parents wanted to sell their house and start a new life in a more promising location, selling in the economic free fall of deindustrialization would have cost them too much. Mass unemployment turned homes that were once sound financial investments into nearly unsellable liabilities.

What is gained from staying at home?

Even while the economics of homeownership limited options, owning property was also a haven when everything else was in turmoil. Having “the building,” as Christopher called their house, made their path forward simple: Put food on the table by doing odd jobs and commuting an hour-plus to the suburbs, and look out for each other.

Home is also where family, socially constructed identities^[24] and familiar experiences coalesce. The people I spoke with drove me to their favorite lakes and parks, sketched maps to their beloved shops or hiking paths, and pointed out historical markers of industrial pasts. They celebrated the social networks that still anchored their identities in place – extended family, annual parades and regular school and work reunions.

Wrapped In Steel: A 1984 documentary on the neighborhoods of southeast Chicago. Produced and Directed by James R Martin.

Interviewees were quick to admit that the sprawling crisis of deindustrialization constrained choices and limited their options. But within the fractured scaffolding of postindustrial social life, a generation of long-term residents still belong to one another.

“We survived, and that’s why we didn’t leave,” Simonetta said. “The community has changed, but where else are we going to go? I mean, we’ve been here for fifty-something years. … This is my neighborhood.”

“That’s how you destroy neighborhoods,” Christopher interjected, “by leaving!”

Authors: Amanda McMillan Lequieu, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sociology, Drexel University

Read more https://theconversation.com/why-people-stay-after-local-economies-collapse-a-story-of-home-among-the-ghosts-of-shuttered-steel-mills-231370

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