Comments on: Replay: Invert the World

By: Kate

Kate — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:25:30 +0000

i am an indy resident who travels for a living – in fact for going on three years now i’ve commuted to boston (while this isn’t the greenest thing I can do – I am helping to support the IND airport. people are consistently asking me “what’s so great about indy that i don’t move already?” – and i think you hit the nail on the head with your description of what people say when they visit san francisco – something not mentioned – “the people” – as much as i love people in other locations there’s something i never can quite put my finger on about mid-westerners – perhaps it’s a combination of the “nice” factor, or that we stop and watch the corn grow, or our efforts to preserve our heritage – but there is something to be said for it. There’s something worth cultivating in that.

By: John

John — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:47:08 +0000

I can’t think of a better long-term asset than the Great Lakes. It’s such a unique feature in the world. People in Arizona and California will come back when the price of water gets high enough.

…or they’ll figure out a way to make desalinization cheap and continue to enjoy the better weather.

By: John

John — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:46:29 +0000

I can’t think of a better long-term asset than the Great Lakes. People in Arizona and California will come back when the price of water gets high enough.

…or they’ll figure out a way to make desalinization cheap and continue to enjoy the better weather.

By: Pete from Baltimore

Pete from Baltimore — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:46:52 +0000

MR Renn

I am not from the midwest .So you know far more about the midwestern way of thinking than i do.From what you describe, it is a very pessemistic mindset.

Where i am from we have the oppisite problem! Detroit obviously has tremendous problems.And they seem to realise it.Baltimore has many problems as well.We have abandoned houses by the thousands.A high crime rate.And much of the population is unemployed,underemployed or on welfare or disability.

Yet you would never know it from listening to our city “leaders”.They focus only on the richer neighborhoods.And act like we can survive off Johns Hopkins Hospital.tourism and the fact that we are 40 miles away from DC.These things are tremendous advantages.But instead of using them to our advantage ,our “leaders” act like we can “rest on our laurels ” .

It’s like a farmer saying “Well i got perfect weather this year.So i guess i dont have to bother looking after my crop”.There seems to be no effort on the part of Baltimore politicians.

It sounds like you midwesterners could use some of our optimisim and we could use some of your pesimistic realism.

Personaly i envy you midwesterners for the fact that your leaders admit that there are problems that need to be solved.I have read many of the blogs that this blog links with. Many of them talk about the issues facing the midwest.I can not find any good blogs about Baltimore and how it should or can solve it’s problems.Reading many of the local blogs ,you might think that we have absolutly no poverty.

i don’t know if our politicians are better at “spinning” than yours are.Or whether yours are more honest.Or if there is less of a disconnect between the upper-middle class and the blue collar middle class and the poor.But your mayors sound a lot more realistic about the problems that they face than ours do.

OR maybe the grass always seems greener on the other side

By: Tyson Meyer

Tyson Meyer — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:12:35 +0000

Along the same lines, more midwestern cities should use smart shrinkage to their advantage. Some of the cities I’ve visited with the highest quality of life have been small to mid-size cities, say 40-150K. Instead of bemoaning the loss of residents over the past 50 years and trying to reclaim the glory days, turn yourself into a small city with a higher quality of life, emphasizing all the advantages that come with a smaller population – short commutes, relatively low crime, pollution and taxes. And of course you still have your “big city” cultural institutions left from the good ol’ days.

By: Alon Levy

Alon Levy — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:43:30 +0000

On advantage of the Midwest’s flatness: the railroads are all perfectly straight, and have no mountains to cross. This makes it easier to increase speed both incrementally and through high-speed rail, on both passenger and freight lines. It’s much cheaper to fix the Chicago freight rail bottleneck than to build a freight tunnel under New York Harbor or bypass the Tehachapi Loop.

By: 5chw4r7z

5chw4r7z — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:27:36 +0000

As a transplant to Cincinnati, it amazes me how negative the people are here. Cincinnati has so much to offer its amazing, if P&G left town it would hurt, but there’s 9 other Fortune 500 companies headquartered here.
Awesome old building stock, scenic overlooks of the city.
I keep saying that Cincinnati has to stop trying to compete with Portland, Indy or St Louis, figure out its strenghts and be the best Cincinnati it can be.

By: nik

nik — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:04:40 +0000

So, are Midwesterners supposed to be bad at grammar? Or is “their’s no good beaches” a typo?

By: David

David — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:31:20 +0000

Apropos of your introduction to the broader point, you are absolutely right that the Indianapolis region has no contingency plan for the possibility that Lilly might ever be sold, but it’s not something that hasn’t ever crossed leaders’ minds, and the chance it might one day happen has certainly affected policy. A decade ago I was part of a consulting team working with then-Mayor Goldsmith’s economic-development group to plan what became Central Indiana’s technology initiatives. To motivate the private-sector working groups that the mayor had assembled, we asked them to conduct a thought experiment and envision what Indianapolis’s future might look like the day after Lilly was no longer locally controlled. That was a chilling discussion, and I think it largely worked. Efforts like BioCrossroads and its various programs to build a vibrant community of bioscience companies on a somewhat smaller scale than Lilly are a direct outcome of the process of regional thinking that was partly motivated by concerns exactly like this.