General Motors' Legacy

I grew up in Anderson, lived most of life there. I spent time in Muncie and live here now. Both cities shared a connection with General Motors.  Both cities were colonies of GM. 

Today I read an op/ed piece by J.P. Hall, General Motors divorced, abandoned Muncie. What does that mean for former site?

I understand the Feds' motives here, as we measure all economic development in this country by jobs created — or in this case jobs saved elsewhere — but what Muncie was left with was neither jobs, nor the potential to create jobs. They were left with a blighted, vacant, and toxic piece of land.

He writes about Muncie. The same should be true for Anderson. 

The author gives no specific solutions but a sensible method:

We need to think upstream. Instead of solely focusing on the symptoms of the problem, we need to start to understand what’s causing them. In our case, the nasty divorce with GM. A post-industrial transition plan, focusing on adapting areas associated with the site away from their original dependency to GM, might be helpful in reframing the long road ahead... A sit-and-wait approach, or acting as if the land will heal itself, is misguided, hurtful to citizens, and sends the wrong message. This is more than just an economic development project. This is a “community preservation” project. We would all benefit from the shift away from the old paradigms.

It will be interesting to  see which of the two cities comes up with a plan and how close that plan comes to the above proposal. I have my opinion on which will do what.

sch 7/8/22