Elder Great Lakes Gays, Do You Remember The Rust Belt Exodus?

How far west does the rust belt even go? I’m in Flyoverstan but I think it’s out of the orbit.

Malls are dying everywhere. Atlanta, a rapidly growing metro, was littered with them when I lived there and more have gone down the shitter since then.

I never lived in the area myself, but I do recall visiting relatives in the area where my father was raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near Lake Superior. The town, Ironwood, Michigan, seemed quite depressed even then, and it had already lost about 50% of its population since my dad was a kid. I recently looked, and it's now down almost another 50% since the time I was there. No relatives of mine live in the area any longer.

Everywhere we went around town there were huge pieces of vacant land surrounded by broken chain link fencing that was supposed to keep people out because that's where the iron ore mines had been; so if you went beyond the fence, you might fall in a cave. That's what the big industry had been back in the day. But all these shuttered iron mines seemed very strange, like the making of a ghost town. I'm not sure how they market the town and generate any interest in doing anything there. Summer and winter recreation activities perhaps? The biggest employer there these days is a Walmart.