Outside Erie

The calls for an organized effort to bring together thinkers in Erie and other Rust Belt enclaves such as Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Buffalo is on.
And Erie looks like the central place for having that discussion.
As I’ve stated earlier, GlobalErie would love to play a key role in making this effort happen and in helping […]

An idea is getting thrown around by Janko, the blogger behind i will shout youngstown, to play host to a regional gathering of Rust Belt bloggers in Erie.

The idea is to get together thinkers in cities like Youngstown, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Erie, and Buffalo to talk about ways to discuss strategies to help each of these […]

Yesterday’s post on the potential renaissance of urban areas — and a corresponding decline of the suburbs — generated quite a healthy discussion.
But it seems this isn’t the only venue in which such discussions are taking place.
The Pittsburgh blog Null Space has a link to a recent piece by Inman Real Estate News that […]

GlobalErie reader and Just Thinking Out Loud writer Matthew Stewart agreed to head down to Pittsburgh yesterday to sit in on a town hall-style meeting on the state of U.S. manufacturing.
The host of the meeting was John Ratzenberger — the actor and host of the cable show “Made in America”.
Here’s what Stewart had to say […]

We’ve spent a lot of time this week talking about the community college, Halloween, and Fuhrman’s cider.
So I thought (for the sake of variety) that we’d single out a missive on another topic as this week’s top comment.
Here it is, from Nathan K., who suggests that Erie should stop lumping itself in with Rust Belt […]

I’m looking to see if there are any GlobalErie readers in Pittsburgh who would be interested in attending a town hall meeting on manufacturing in the Steel City and then report back to our readers about what happens.
The event is being staged by the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a national, non-partisan organization based in Washington, […]

Why has Erie been losing businesses and jobs while the rest of the nation has been growing?
Take a look at this essay today in The American Spectator by Robert Morris University economics professor Ralph R. Reiland for one theory.
Reiland uses Pittsburgh as his case study, but he might as well substitute Erie into the piece, […]

Erie has flirted with trying to require wealthier nonprofits to make payments in lieu of taxes to local government municipalities.
A much more substantial effort is also underway in Pittsburgh.
But lest you think this issue is confined to western Pennsylvania, check out this report that shows that several communities in the greater Boston area are also […]

Check out the newly released FBI stats on violent crime in Pennsylvania during 2006.
As usual, Erie proves to be an extremely safe city. A quick crunch of the numbers shows violent crimes occurred at a rate of about 500 per 100,000 residents
In Pittsburgh, by comparison, the rate was 1,006 per 100,000 residents.

Jim Russell over at Burgh Diaspora has picked up on our discussion about finding ways to create job opportunities for Erie expatriates.
Russell, who blogs about similar issues down in the Steel City, wonders whether our focus on bringing displaced Erieites is too narrow — since it won’t circulate new people and new ideas from other […]