The closing of the steel mills has had a profound impact on the city. The number of people living in the city has dwindled to about half its peak in 1930 to less than one hundred thousand today.
Steel Mills in Youngstown circa 1900-1905
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.
Neighborhoods that once were alive with people are now nearly empty. See: Ethics of a Plant Shutdown in Youngstown.
An economic report compiled by the Pace Associates of Chicago, dated June 1951, gave several reasons why the “high cost of producing steel in the Youngstown area makes the district a marginal producer”. Youngstown is landlocked. Iron ore being shipped from Michigan had to be off-loaded at Ashtubula and sent by rail, while the facilities at Gary, Indiana and Buffalo, New York received their shipments by barge. Another problem was the lack of cooling water. Re-circulation of the cooling water raised its temperature to one hundred thirty degrees, making it more difficult to cool the steel. It cost an additional three to five dollars per ton to produce in Youngstown. At ten million tons per year, this cost was a significant thirty to fifty million dollars annually. In the 1950’s, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company invested $100 million in the expansion of their mills in the Indiana Harbor while other producers increased capacity in areas other than Youngstown. Capacity in Pittsburgh increased from 22,385,461 to 26,145,000 tons between 1951 and 1953 while capacity in Youngstown went from 10,065,800 to 10,205,800 tons in the same period.
In January of 1975 the Northern Ohio Urban System (NOUS), an urban planning firm from Cleveland, produced a document entitled A Look At Youngstown’s Future. In the summary of that report the authors noted that in 1969 “nearly 37,000 persons of a manufacturing labor force of 81,000 in the Mahoning and Trumbull Counties worked in blast furnaces, rolling mills, and closely aligned metal industries.” The fate of Youngstown in the year 2000 was dependent to a large degree on what was done to revitalize the steel industry in the valley.
The report quoted another study of industry analysis in Ohio, noting that at least 44 percent of plants and equipment in Ohio were obsolete. It further noted that “the landlocked firms in Youngstown were being allowed to deteriorate. The decision to close them down permanently or completely modernize them must be made by 1975.” Youngstown and Warren had the highest rate of obsolescence. Eighty percent of their plants and equipment were over 10 years old. Predicting the future, the report sounded a sharp warning that “if existing commitments to modernize the facilities are not carried out and if additional commitments are not forthcoming, Youngstown will find it difficult to maintain its position as a major industrial center.”
This analysis led NOUS to the conclusion that even if the investments that were necessary to maintain the level of employment in the steel industry were met, Youngstown would not create any additional employment in the future. Furthermore, the outlook for expansion of the steel industry was not expected to keep up with the rest of the economy’s growth. Thirdly, firms involved with supplying the steel industry were not going to expand even if the necessary investments were made in the steel industry. The study said that if everything went right for Youngstown the most that was to be expected was a no growth economy.
Without investments forthcoming, vultures were soon circling the city. In 1969, Lykes, a ship building and real estate firm out of New Orleans, leveraged a buy out of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company. Not only did Lykes not make the necessary investments, they took the profits from the company and invested them in their non-steel subsidiaries. In 1977, Lykes lost control. Losses piled up; the nation was in a recession; the alternative was to shut down the Campbell Works. Approximately 4,100 workers were told they were out of work overnight.
The closing sent shock waves through the community. For whatever reason, Lykes gave no warning to the community. On Monday September 19,1977, the announcement was made and by the end of the week the gates were closed. There were no programs in place to ease the burden of unemployment. Health and human service agencies were not permitted access to the company records or even the names of the laid off workers. Furthermore, any communication by company officials with outside agencies would be punished by “blacklisting”. The officials that were making the decisions were not in the community and there was no communication of their intentions Terry Buss explains:
The effect of this policy by the Lykes Corporation is that a company, which had dominated the area economy for 77 years, closed its largest facility in a matter of weeks. It left behind unemployed workers, empty buildings, and rust coated, antiquated, useless facilities (Buss, 22).
After the closing, Lykes remained in financial trouble and sought to merge with LTV which owned Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation. On June 21, 1978, Attorney General Griffin Bell approved the merger over the objections of his staff. As soon as the merger was approved LTV closed down the Briar Hill works putting an additional 1,400 out of work.
The closings continued. Youngstown was devastated by a wave of plant closing that wiped out three-quarters of its steel jobs and slashed manufacturing employment from 93,000 to below 50,000 (Buss, 3). Unemployment reached a staggering 30 percent. The carcass of the steel industry had been picked clean.
In the mean time, the downtown was in the midst of an urban renewal project known as “the Central Business District Urban Renewal Area No. 1, Project Ohio R-81”. It had the best of intentions. Its aim was to “eliminate structurally substandard commercial and industrial uses . . . Construct and reconstruct streets . . . to enhance the area as the focal point of the Youngstown Central Business District . . . Provide an adequate supply of off street parking facilities . . . and provide Architectural and financial advice to property owners and tenants” (Project R-81).
Most of the Central Business District on the East End was demolished in the Urban renewal project. The renewal did result in a new office structure and a new parking facility. Federal Plaza was created as a pedestrian walk way. To accomplish this, the major east-west traffic axis was eliminated and the north-south axis allowed the only flow of traffic through the central square. Given what was happening to the industrial base of the community a quarter of a mile away, investment potential dried up and the central business district was left with an abundance of vacant land. Much of the development that has occurred is more suburban in character due to the changes in zoning laws that respond to the need for on-site vehicular parking.
The problems of the downtown grew in the 1950’s when the movement of people from the inner-cities to the suburbs began. Movement in Youngstown was even more dramatic than many other cities of its size. In 1960, for example, retail sales in the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area increased 16.6 percent while the sales in the Central Business District fell by 27.1 percent. Cities of similar size were off by 14.9 percent.
The largest mall developer in the country, Edward J. DeBartolo, is headquartered in Boardman. The Boardman plaza, one of the DeBartolo Corporation’s early developments, was built in the 1950’s. The company took advantage of the demographic shifts that were occurring. The problems associated with living in a city that was environmentally polluted from the emissions of the mills precipitated a shift to the suburbs even before it occurred in other cities. This shift was eased by the automobile that became the dominant and the preferred mode of transportation.
Youngstown’s population peaked in the 1930 census with 170,002 residents, while the county population stood at 236,142. From that point on a trend of steady decline in the city population continued while the county population grew. By 1980 the city population was 115,436, while the county stood at 304,545. The 1990 census reported 95,732 city residents and 264,806 within the county. Between 1970 and 1990 the population of Youngstown and the county lost 40,000 residents.
The decision of the steel companies not to modernize their operations here was, in the final analysis, the reason for the collapse of the steel industry. Reliance on outdated technology, e.g. open hearth furnaces, meant that it was only a matter of time before the operations would become obsolete. The transportation of raw materials remained a problem. However, if the mills had installed the Basic Oxygen Process (BOP), a process that reduced the time to “cook” the molten metal from nine hours to less than one hour, they could have remained competitive.
Even more advanced than the BOP is that of the Electric Furnace. This technology does not rely on the costly transportation of raw materials. The basic steel making ingredient is scrap steel, which is in abundant supply in the region. Decisions made in the board rooms miles away from the affected people determined what happened in towns like Youngstown.
North Star Steel, which operates in the old Briar Hill plant, uses the Electric Furnace. The steel pipe that is produced here is made from scrap metal that was once a part of the steel buildings, where thousands were employed. North Star employs 250 people.
Today the city is digging its way out of the ashes. As many as 10,000 new jobs have been created since 1983. New industrial parks in the Salts Spring area and on the LTV property east of the downtown are home to new smokeless industries and distribution centers. Youngstown must build its future not on what has passed but on what is ahead. The aim of this study is to discover the assets of the city and to build a future out of these assets.
References:
Buss, T. & Redburn, F. (1983). Shutdown at Youngstown: Public policy for mass unemployment. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Burgham Family Tree 