It's so sad to see our cities in such distress. 

I could offer reasons why it happened and what needs to be done, but I'd sound like a right wing lunatic.

i am not very political Lenn. 

I think the Brookings Institutions fella's audio comments are the solutions, the newspaper is offering to their readers. 

Thanks for the comment.

Christopher Leinberger from Brookings just completed a survey on "walkable urban places" and ranked Tampa Bay at the bottom. He never even came to St Petersburg so came to some erroneous conclusions. In looking at his original report, he also seems to be defining urban areas by 30 Million to 90 Million people - totally out of context for St Petersburg, which is part of the Tampa Bay area.

Maureen, with regard to Ohio's cities are dead, don't believe everything you read. Having visited Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toldeo, Dayton and Akron several times I think some of Ohio's cities are quite vibrant. They have to compete in the U.S. economy with other cities for jobs yes, but they certainly are not dead.

Maureen- Nice series.. I miss all the old cities .. I'm hoping we  see more of the older places brought back to life in the next few years.  There is something  really wonderful about most Downtown areas

Sharon makes a good point.

I cringe when I see articles about housing in my area.  They are ALWAYS wrong.  They don't KNOW our area.

If you look at the bank/government/university, etc. data, they have markets for my area that group Hagerstown MD with Washington DC.  They include Richmone or Virginia Beach in Northern Virginia.

They don't even know we have a souther MD area.  Baltimore includes everything from Baltimore and all the surrounding counties and parts of PA. 

Their statistics are totally meaningless.  That's one of the reasons I include so much local info in my web sites and blogs. 

Thanks all for the comments.  Today was Youngstown in the Columbus Dispatch.   I dutifully blogged about the Dispatch article  on CBB.  I've enjoyed the series, learned a lot about a couple of the cities. It made me miss Akron. 

It's been fun reading blogs in Cleveland,  Akron, Toledo (I ran into Carol Smth on one Toledo blog today), Dayton, Cinci etc. about what they think about what the people interviewed in their citiies. Mayors, city commissioners, etc and in some cases normal people had to say about their own cities.  Read Teri Lussier' posts about the Dayton installment on DaytonOS (a community blog) I get the impression they think the series sugar coated the truth about their city. Not plain spoken enuff and did not offer the solution they are looking for there.   

Tomorrow's the eighth day in the series... will the Columbus Dispatch do Columbus even though it is not considered dead, does not have the same problems as the formerly industrial cities? I hope so.  Or will it just recap the series?  Offer ssolutions?