The

The Welcome back to Ten Blocks. This is Seth Barron, associate editor of City Journal.

A new report indicates that cities in upstate and western New York are doing poorly.

In many ways, upstate is similar to the part of the country called the Rust Belt,

the Midwest or the Great Lakes region. What are the unique challenges facing this area, and why is

the decay so hard to overcome? I'm joined by Aaron Wren, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,

and a contributing editor to City Journal. Aaron is a nationally

regarded analyst on cities and what makes them successful. He writes frequently for City Journal

and is published in a wide variety of other publications as well. His blog, The Orbano File, is widely

read and cited. Hi, Aaron.

Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you, Seth.

So what's the situation in upstate New York and how does it compare to other parts of the country?

Well, there was an interesting report out from the Empire Center that looked at year-over-year jobs data from April.

New York State created 106,000 jobs.

92,300 of them were downstate, so in Metro, New York. And actually, 67,000 of them were actually in the city. So we have sort of a metro-centric economy today. But what we also see is

big global cities like New York have done well, but post-industrial regions in the northeast

and Midwest, and then a handful of similar cities in the south have just really struggled to

reinvent themselves for the 21st

century economy after going through a long process of deindustrialization in the 60s,

and 80s.

So what are some of the problems facing these regions?

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