Bruce Springsteen sings about the smokestacks of Youngstown, Ohio once reaching “into a beautiful sky of soot and clay.” Today there is less soot—and many fewer jobs– with so much of the steel industry in that city long gone. Yet reporter David Brancaccio has been finding surprising signs of economic vigor in some Rust Belt cities. In Youngstown, it is a story of reversing the city’s decades-long brain drain.
