News of the Rust Belt from around the world, brought to you weekly by the staff of Belt. 

Free Downtown Buffalo Wi-Fi To Debut By June [Buffalo Business First]
By providing the service, officials said it sends a message to Gen X and Millenials that Buffalo is moving towards being a cutting-edge city and trying to shed its Rust Belt image.

Chicago, Illinois: Back To The Water’s Edge [Great Lakes Review]
The lake was there (is there), wide and wild sometimes, water rolling and crashing. Wild like we wanted to be, pulled by the moon on warm summer nights. And The City twinkled in the high rises behind us while we stood at the water’s edge.

Saying Goodbye To Detroit [The Michigan Daily]
Do I move to Detroit and remain in Michigan, or do I leave to pursue opportunity elsewhere? If I leave, am I a total hack for spending half my college career preaching about the great rising of the city down the road?

Rust Belt Cities Are Trading Factories For Farms [TakePart]
…as other rust belt communities have shown, when a city with a vacated steel industry looks to its agricultural economies for growth, eating more local vegetables can yield big results. “We’re encouraging healthy eating. But beyond health, it’s an economic issue, and it’s also an environmental issue as well,” explained health director Kristen Wenrich.

Rust Belt Grotesque: An Evening Of The Macabre [American Repertory Theater of WNY]
A showcase of some of the best WNY playwrights in the macabre telling of Western New York’s history. Justin Karcher: “The Buffalo experience is not one that can be summed up by just simply a positive or negative news story, but by the penicillin grime in the cracks of the city, by the gonorrhea gleam in the gaze of our shadow history. If our lives are grotesque, then we must embrace this grotesqueness. We’re freaks and must shout out that we’re freaks.”

Author Interview: Rust: The Longest War [NewsWorks]
[Rust is] actually the most destructive natural disaster in the modern world. It amounts to something like 3 percent of our GDP. It’s tearing apart our infrastructure. … Because we’ve all seen it on the side of the road or under our cars, we sort of interpret it as familiar, which allows us to say, ‘well someone must be dealing with it.’ Or maybe no one is dealing with it because it’s just a thing that we see everywhere.

Grocery Store Chain Gambles On Downtown Cleveland [Next City]
“We’ve seen a lot of ups and downs of the city, but the changes that are happening today in terms of residential living, are very different from years past. From our perspective, hoping to continue the momentum of both people and businesses wanting to be downtown is important to us as a Cleveland company who needs Cleveland to be a viable city going forward.”

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