
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 19, 1993                   TAG: 9309190160
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WE'RE A RUST BELT CITY ON OUR OWN

We may speak with Southern accents (most of us, anyway). We may pine for peanut soup at the Hotel Roanoke or cheer on Dale Earnhardt at Martinsville Speedway. We may even have trouble lining up Yankee soldiers for the Civil War re-enactments at Green Hill Park.

But in one critical aspect, Roanoke is not Southern.

A computer-assisted study of four decades' worth of economic data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau points to this conclusion:

Economically speaking, Roanoke is a Rust Belt city.

In the landscape of the nation's economic geography, Roanoke appears to be misplaced.

Its economic trend-lines over the past 40 years run counter to those of the other big metro areas in Virginia and North Carolina. Instead, Roanoke's economic profile from 1950 to 1990 more closely matches the sagging industrial centers around the Great Lakes.

That's unflattering, but not necessarily surprising. "Roanoke is a Rust Belt city in disguise," concludes David Rusk, the Washington-based urban consultant commissioned by the Roanoke Times & World-News to help analyze the numbers.

Here's why:

The places most like Roanoke in 1950, by population and income, were industrial cities in the Midwest - places like Muncie, Ind., and Muskegon, Mich.

Today, we know that part of the country as the Rust Belt. In 1950, American manufacturing was king, and the industrial Midwest was the wealthiest part of the country. The reason Roanoke rivaled these Midwestern cities was rooted in Roanoke's blue-collar heritage: The railroad was its main employer and the railroad paid good money.

By contrast, most of our Southern neighbors were dirt poor at the end of World War II. But they've since retooled economies based on agriculture, textiles and other low-wage industries, turning themselves into modern centers built around research, banking and other high-wage jobs.

Now they're the most affluent cities in the region.

Meanwhile, Roanoke started out as one of the best-paid cities in this part of the country. But as railroad and manufacturing jobs have disappeared, Roanoke has not only fallen behind neighboring cities, in terms of median family income, Roanoke has lost ground economically, compared with the national average.

In 1950, Roanoke's median family income was 7 percent above the national average; today it's 2 percent above.

The result: Roanoke's median family income is one of the lowest among major cities in Virginia and North Carolina.

Why?

Why has Roanoke been losing economic ground while its neighbors have been gaining? Economists and geographers - whose specialties overlap in a field called "economic geography" - pinpoint several reasons: Roanoke's failure to build a new economic base to replace the railroad; its lack of a four-year state university; the wrong mix of industries; the wrong road connections to the wrong cities; a bad location, period.

For the details, turn to today's Horizon section - and Monday's paper, as well.

by CNB