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The Rust Belt
The deindustrialized manufacturing belt of the Great Lakes
The Rust Belt is the once-mighty manufacturing region of the Great Lakes and northeastern interior - broadly western New York and Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. From the late 1800s it was the industrial engine of the United States, its cities built on steel, automobiles, glass, rubber, and machinery, drawing waves of immigrants and, later, the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South.
The name captures its decline: from the 1960s onward, automation, foreign competition, and the shift of industry to the Sun Belt and overseas hollowed out factory towns, costing millions of jobs and shrinking cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. The region is now a study in reinvention, with medicine, education, and technology rebuilding some metros even as others still struggle with the legacy of lost industry.