12/20/2021
Youngstown, Ohio was a city built on steel. The livelihoods of almost everyone who lived in the Mahoning Valley was dependent on the mills in some way.
In 1977 Youngstown Sheet & Tube closed its doors, laying off 5000 employees. And that was the beginning of what looked like the end of both Mahoning and Trumbull Counties.
Over the next two decades we witnessed the loss of most of our mills. Job loss was in the tens of thousands. The Valley was devastated. Work was hard to come by. People left the area to find jobs and support their families. Parents watched their children leave and move to other states where there was more opportunity. Our population decreased from 140,000 people in 1970, to 66,000 in 2010.
Once beautiful and wealthy neighborhoods fell into poverty. Beautiful old homes built in Youngstown and Warren's heyday were abandoned. Crime was rampant. And many said the Mahoning Valley would never recover.
In 1995, Youngstown gained national attention when Bruce Springsteen recorded the haunting and heartbreaking "Youngstown"; "Jenny" was a reference to the Sheet and Tube blast furnace. Our fathers had lived this story, and we grew up watching them try to rebuild their lives after everything they had spent their lives working for had been taken from them.
But the people in the Mahoning Valley are hard scrabble and they don't accept defeat easily. We built those mills and even after many gave up on us, we weren't ready to give up on ourselves.
It took a few decades for all those blast furnaces to cool, but we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, dusted ourselves off, and started to rebuild.
It has taken some time, but step by step, we began to bring Youngstown and Warren back. And over the last decade, the transformation has been remarkable in both cities.
Youngstown: A city that was difficult to walk in during the day has become a city with a bustling nightlife and culture, events and entertainment. All because we never stopped believing in this city or ourselves.
After 2010, we saw a continued gradual decrease, but now the city is growing again. Thanks to the revitalization of downtown, Jim Tressel's efforts on behalf of Youngstown State University, and a renewed interest in the beautiful homes and neighborhood on the Upper Northside, with home buyers purchasing these historical homes and restoring them.
Regent's Park properties are a project of the heart by a daughter of a steelworker who lost his job after 27 years in a Warren steel mill; a mission to save these beautiful historic properties, create an upscale rental community for professional people who work in and around Youngstown and Warren, and help continue the revitalization of a little portion of the neighborhood on the Upper Northside.
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