Kroger’s, an old line grocery chain, is clearly updating itself. More Walmart like than you could imagine, it’s a cluster of lawn furniture and produce. The Starbucks is in the middle of the beer aisle. The Starbuck’s tables are occupied by giggling elderly women.
I struck up a conversation with one of them.
“You look young for Mansfield,” she said, “Are you lost.”
“Well, that’s the
She went on to tell me what it was like to live in a town that was, as she said, “dying.” Her children moved out of state for better opportunities over 20 years ago. (There’s a real sense that the recession in the early 1980s never actually ended here.) The rapid aging of the local population As the kids left, the doctors began to follow. “If you get taken to a local hospital, you’re dead,” she said. “I spend five or six hours a month building my relationship with Cleveland doctors so that when I’m sick, I can go there.” These days, she hangs out at the Kroger-Starbucks, between the lawn furniture in the middle of the beer aisle with her best friends. “We come every day. There’s really no other place for us to go.” Will she move closer to her children? “I’m sort of stuck here. No one wants to buy the house. So, I visit with my kids twice a year and then come back to Mansfield.” The heart of Ohio, an hour south of Cleveland, Mansfield is typical of a number of midwest population centers. The 1981 Recession never stopped. The infrastructure is decaying. Everywhere you look, you can see abandoned opportunity. Recruiting is really, really different here. There are cost offset opportunities (like offshoring but domestic). There are smart people willing to
became a sort of death spiral.
