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Comment by rambleraptor | Hacker News Reader

These are the same kinds of communities are just being ravaged by brain drain. Their brightest students And their college graduates are being driven out of town from lack of opportunity.

Those are the people who businesses want to hire. Instead, Youngstown’s best chances of a brighter future are moving to Columbus nearby or the coasts to places that already have plenty of advantages.

Remote work could change this. But, these types of communities really need to embrace white-collar workers and not keep praying for a blue-collar comeback.

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>But, these types of communities really need to embrace white-collar workers and not keep praying for a blue-collar comeback.

Lot easier said than done. Famously, Racine Wi tried to get legions of white collar workers. The result was similar to what we see outlined in this article. Only instead of spending millions to get blue collar jobs, in Wisconsin we spent hundreds of millions to billions to get white collar jobs. End result was the same, basically, a predictable crash and burn.

Here's reality. These places are a tough sell. And until these places are willing to accept the fact that they are a tough sell they will continue to be easy pickings for slick corporate attorneys in dark suits.

I’m still angry about that.

FWIW Youngstown has also placed some big economic development bets on white collar industries. Last I checked, the Youngstown Business Incubator had a solid success with at least one software company: https://www.google.com/search?q=turning+technologies&rlz=1C5...

There's also been a lot of work to nurture additive manufacturing businesses (https://ysu.edu/center-for-innovation-in-additive-manufactur...). A mixture of federal grants (partly from the Appalachian Regional Commission IIRC) and support from the university going into that.

But to your point of embracing white collar workers ... does that solve the problem economic development agencies are actually trying to solve? An interesting case study a few miles down the highway is Pittsburgh. There's been a much-hyped boom in high skilled tech jobs seeded by CMU (robotics, software startups) plus a relatively strong healthcare/biotech sector there. But that doesn't do much to replace the big swath of steel and manufacturing jobs that were around a generation ago. So average wages go up and there's probably _some_ trickle down benefits, but the new tech jobs don't do much for the median Pittsburgher whose parents/grandparents would have worked in the mills.

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