‘Years of Effort, Undone in Weeks’

It has been nearly half a century since Erie, Pennsylvania, was officially recognized as an “All-American City.” But beginning with the first of our repeated visits nearly four years ago, Deb Fallows and I have come to think of Erie as an important bellwether location, a representative small city for the America of our times:

• It grew with a strong, classic-American manufacturing base, but suffered as its factories, like so many others in the “Rust Belt” region, closed during the globalization era of the 1990s, and again after the financial crash a dozen years ago.

• But over the past decade, like other cities along the Great Lakes swath from Buffalo to Cleveland, it has worked hard to reposition itself as a “Chrome Belt” economy, with advanced-tech industries (aerospace, sustainable energy, 3D-print and plastics rather than mass-production sites).

• During its industrial-boom heyday a century ago, Erie was a major magnet for immigrants, mainly from Italy and Eastern Europe. Now it actively promotes refugees as “new citizens.” Before the current clampdown on U.S. acceptance of refugees—about 110,000 four years ago, fewer than 20,000 now—as much as 20 percent of Erie’s total population was made of recent refugee arrivals. They came from Syria, from Sudan, and from other troubled spots around the world (as Deb Fallows described here).

• The proportion of Erie’s African-American population is slightly larger than the nation’s as a whole, and its past (and present) race relations track the strains and inequalities of black-white relations nationwide.

• At first glance, what you notice in Erie’s downtown is what is gone: the stores that are shuttered, the factories not making things any more. What we came to notice, on second and subsequent looks, was what was emerging: the stores being reopened, the smaller, newer workshops in the back rooms of old, broken-windowed factories, the little tech companies and larger start-up companies developing downtown. I described one of those firms in 2016 here, and another in 2018 here.

• Also at first glance, you see on Erie’s streets signs of America’s social distress—especially of homelessness, addiction, and grossly unequal opportunity in schooling. On longer exposure, we saw signs of efforts to reknit a civic fabric, from nonprofit organizations like the innovative Jefferson Educational Society (including its program to train cadres of future leaders); to the locally headquartered Erie Insurance company, which has invested heavily in new downtown structures; to numerous arts and civic organization we’ve described over the years.

In short, if you want to see the good and bad of modern America, its burdens and its possibilities, go to the Bayfront, or walk along State Street or Peach or Sassafras in downtown Erie, and look around, more than once.

Now all of the United States, with much of the world, faces a public-health emergency that is becoming an economic disaster as well. And from the “representative city” perspective, the most dramatic change in Erie is that the very institutions that have led its nascent recovery are most imperiled by this moment’s economic collapse.

Small businesses. Playhouses and music venues. Startup tech companies. Civic-action and resettlement groups. These have made a crucial difference in Erie, and many other cities. Now all of them face unprecedented stress.

“The story of Erie is is a microcosm of the challenges many cities are facing across the nation,” Ben Speggen and Bruce Katz wrote in an illuminating report, issued yesterday. (Speggen, based in Erie, has worked for the Erie Reader and the Jefferson Educational Society. Katz, co-author with the late Jeremy Nowak of The New Localism, is director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University, in Philadelphia.) They add that today’s Erie:

shows how a community writ large—and a group of remarkable, passionate entrepreneurs, and city builders—have been able to restore a sense of civic pride and purpose and put a city back on track, and how that years-long effort is at risk of reversal in a matter of weeks.

Years of effort, undone in weeks. That’s the prospect that Erie, and countless towns and cities like it, are facing right now.

Of course the pressure applies in every part of the nation, and restaurants and stores from San Francisco to New York are shuttered as well. But those cities’ ascent has been vastly more powerful than Erie’s uneven recovery. Battered as even the superstar cities are at this frightening moment, no one doubts that some time they will be back strong.

As for Erie? The Katz and Speggen report goes into “tell us everything” dollars-and-cents details for two businesses that have been important parts of the downtown revival. One is a relatively new coffee shop called Ember + Forge, which has anchored an important corner of downtown. The other is a relatively established local brewpub and restaurant called Lavery Brewing, which has been so successful that it recently opened a second location.

Both had been thriving; both have seen their revenue shrink virtually to zero; both have had to lay off most of their staff and are considering what it will take even to survive at all.

The full Katz and Speggen report is available in PDF here, with articles about it on the Drexel site and at the Erie Reader. I won’t attempt to summarize it, since its details are its strength. But I encourage anyone interested in the practicalities of American economic recovery to read it— and to compare it with some of the pre-coronavirus reports I mentioned recently. I completely endorse the “what comes next?” parts of its conclusion. In it they stress the complex, fragile networks that have allowed businesses like these two to emerge, and for cities like Erie to renew themselves:

On one level, a fast recovery in the long term (when the health crisis abates) is dependent on the nature and scale of the short-term response. The longer we can keep small businesses alive and workers employed, the quicker the recovery and rebound will be ….

Almost overnight, downtowns have eerily become lifeless movie sets— literally former shells of their former selves; the buildings are intact (unlike after a flood), but there is little or no business being transacted given the imperative of social distancing and the collapse of basic consumerism. If we can keep businesses alive, then the bounce back will be rapid and pronounced. If businesses collapse, then the recovery will be slow and painful.

On another level, the recovery will depend upon the kind of bottom-up responses and collaborative action that is a hallmark of Erie and many other communities. In our view, this crisis is too complex and multi-dimensional to be left to policymakers sitting in our remote national capitol. Rather, local networks of public, business, civic, university, and other leaders need to band together—now—to prepare their communities for what comes next and be a constant feedback loop for national and state governments.

At some point, the emergency will be over. Then the longer-term recovery will begin. Reports like this are important guides to what should happen next.