A new Youngstown rises from the ashes of the old

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(Gallery by Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer)

Michael Liberatore left Youngstown's west side for college suspecting he was leaving for good. Like so many bright young lights in the hard-luck city, he was programmed to look elsewhere for a career.

Yet as he studied computer science at the College of Wooster, he kept hearing about a tech scene emerging back home, near a downtown business incubator spinning out software companies.

One of those startups, Turning Technologies, went on a hiring spree that netted Liberatore. Breaking the mold, he brought his diploma home, joining a wave of young professionals who are quickening the pulse in the central city.

"I knew I wanted to come back and I thought, 'Hey, maybe this will be a great opportunity,' " said Liberatore, a 25-year-old software engineer. "It couldn't have worked out better."

Now he walks to Tech Tuesdays at the Lemon Grove cafe and scans the streetscape for vacancy signs, hoping to check out one of the new apartments opening up downtown.

Even before President Obama touted Youngstown in his State of the Union address last month, the city that big steel built and abandoned was drawing wide attention. Civic leaders have grown accustomed to accommodating researchers and journalists -- some from overseas -- who want to know more about an improbable comeback, one with lessons for Cleveland and every other city trying to reinvent itself.

No one is talking about a miracle on the Mahoning, but evidence abounds that a new Youngstown is rising from the ashes of the old.

Since the recession's end in 2009, the Youngstown-Warren metro area has boasted one of the most improved economies in America, according to analysis by the Brookings Institution. The region added thousands of jobs, knocking its unemployment rate below national averages, and more are coming.

The regional chamber of commerce is tracking $750 million in new investment expected over the next two years.

Experts credit some hard-nosed strategic planning, civic cooperation and pluck for helping a blue-collar town retool. That, and a little luck.

Located near the heart of Ohio's shale gas play, Youngstown is attracting outfitters and manufacturers who service the energy industry. Steel making is re-emerging alongside advanced manufacturing.

A French-owned, $650 million pipe mill opened in October along the Mahoning River, and companies like DE-CAL Inc. rushed to support it. The Michigan-based pipe fabricator employs 65 welders and pipefitters in a new plant on land that once held the Carnegie steelworks.

Throw in a budding software sector, and a former mill town suddenly enjoys something of a diversified economy.

"It's grown into an advanced manufacturing center," said Cleveland economist Jack Kleinhenz, who has studied the Mahoning Valley economy. "Most of the manufacturers are small; they're not that large. But it's a 10-year trend and it has traction."

Meanwhile, with young professionals walking Federal Street, developers and entrepreneurs are prying the boards off vacant buildings to open restaurants and cafes and even introducing apartment life.

From his downtown shop, Phil Kidd promotes his "Defend Youngstown" approach to community building. The philosophy generated smiles during hard times and added momentum to the city's comeback.

Mustering "Youngstown Nation"

"Youngstown is a real interesting place right now," said

, a 32-year-old Pennsylvania transplant focused on the civic spirit of his adopted hometown.

He's a muscular Army veteran who wears his hair military short. But a bright smile softens a crusader's zeal, and his straightforward tactics have endeared him to the community.

Kidd famously stood in Federal Plaza at the heart of downtown several years ago holding aloft a sign that declared, "Defend Youngstown." Now he runs a downtown shop, Youngstown Nation, that sells posters and T-shirts emblazoned with that rallying cry.

"We're probably 15 years behind Cleveland" in terms of downtown development and neighborhood organizing, said Kidd, an outreach worker for the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative. But progress has been quicker and more obvious than anyone expected, he said.

Hope is seeping in. People are daring to dream again.

"Even the people who lived here their entire lives are, at a minimum, cautiously optimistic," Kidd observed, as he sat in his shop on a recent afternoon. "That's a big paradigm shift. That's been a huge problem here: our own perception of ourselves."

Part of the reason Youngstown's recovery is so stark is because its downfall was so steep and crushing. Few communities lost more in the decline of American manufacturing.

For much of the last century, Youngstown roared as the hub of one of the largest steel-producing regions on earth. Its workers and families enjoyed the fruits of hard but plentiful jobs that paid a living wage.

If people in Youngstown speak frequently of the "good old days"-- and they do -- it's because those days are worth relishing, Kleinhenz said.

That was before Black Monday -- Sept. 19, 1977 -- when Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced it was closing its Campbell Works, tossing more than 4,000 people out of work at once and beginning the end of a 100-year-plus steel era. One by one, the giant mills lining the Mahoning River went cold.

Ultimately, the region hemorrhaged some 50,000 jobs, sparking an exodus that may not have fully abated.

Lights glow inside the V2 Wine Bar Trattoria, one of several new bright spots in downtown Youngstown.

Today, about 66,000 people live in a city designed for more than 200,000. Anywhere in Youngstown, blight and abandonment are never far away.

A city riddled with vacant structures is challenged to demolish or renovate much of its housing stock. Crime and concentrated poverty are crisis issues, piled atop burdens common to old industrial cities: racial segregation, poor schools and sprawl.

Downtown may be reawakening, but many in Youngstown are still waiting to taste the fruits of renaissance.

"We have not yet seen direct benefits in the neighborhoods," said Presley Gillespie, a former banker who runs the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp.

His nonprofit agency works with the local community college to retrain workers for the new jobs and, with the city inspectors, to address blighted and vacant properties. As his staffers labor to restore confidence and investment in city neighborhoods, Gillespie said, they are at least enjoying some wind at their backs.

"We actually now have momentum," he said.

When Youngstown observers look for the start of the turnaround, they point not to events but epiphanies.

With local resources scarce, regional cooperation took root and bloomed. By the late 1990s, local chambers had merged into the Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber, and the region began speaking with one voice for economic development.

Former Congressman James Traficant, the poster child of the valley's corrupt politics, left public life for prison. New and visionary leaders emerged.

Michigan-based DE-CAL built a new fabrication plant in Youngstown to service the shale gas industry. Company officials said they were attracted by a pool of skilled tradesmen like Brett Budd, a pipe fitter and welder.

Congressman Tim Ryan helped coin the term "Tech Belt" to describe the high-tech opportunities stretching from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, with Youngstown as its buckle.

The city's youngest and first black mayor, Jay Williams, helped sell a master plan, Youngstown 2010, that called for a smaller city with a diverse economy.

Hunter Morrison, a former Cleveland planning director who helped to craft the vision, says the change in mindset was critical.

"I think it broke the fever of always needing to be like you used to be. 'Bring the mills back. It will be like the old days,' " Morrison said. "The narrative changed."

Morrison said other cities, Cleveland included, can learn from Youngtown's harsh experience.

"It's important to figure out ways to collaborate and pool resources and present to the world a clear narrative that's believable," he said. "A plan has to be part of a broad civic vision. Youngstown's not afraid to be something new."

From big steel to big ideas

A life-sized cut-out of the Star Trek character Spock greets visitors to the Youngstown Business Incubator, which may be the largest center of its kind in Ohio. YBI, as it's known, spans 100,000 square feet in four connected buildings downtown, where space is still in ample supply.

Its campus now includes the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, which Obama referred to in his State of the Union address Feb. 12. Still being equipped, the $70 million research hub is expected to make the region a leader in additive manufacturing, or the design and building of products with sophisticated 3D printers.

Elsewhere in the incubator, enterprises are far scrappier. Its heart is a five-story warren of offices in a former furniture store where entrepreneurs collide, collaborate and defy the image of Youngstown as a simple place. Occasionally, they strike gold. A recent economic impact study found that YBI startups have generated about $76 million in sales and created or supported more than 600 jobs.

Orchestrating the innovation is Jim Cossler, a soft-spoken 57 year old who majored in philosophical literature at Youngstown State University and now wears the title "chief evangelist." He tends to start conversations with statements like, "Let's compare Silicon Valley to Youngstown . . ."

Cossler argues that the region produces computer scientists every bit as good as those on the coasts and offers dramatically lower startup costs. His arguments are starting to sink in.

"To claim in 2001 we're going to produce world-class software from Youngstown, I understand why people pushed back," he said, a trace of frustration in his voice. "Because there wasn't any. There was a belief you can't do that here. But we've crossed that barrier."

Cossler can point to a string of successes, companies YBI launched or attracted, but none more spectacular than the one next door.

Turning Technologies, which recently turned 10, employs 250 people in state-of-the-art offices, where they design and engineer audience response systems that sell to schools and event organizers nationwide.

The staff is young. The pay is high for the region. So is optimism. Company co-founder Mike Broderick, the chief executive officer, said he spends relatively little cash on recruiting because so many of his hires are gladly returning home.

They are people like Rean Thomas, 29, who moved back from New York City in 2011 to take a job as a technical support specialist.

"I did the big city thing. I missed Youngstown," she said with a shrug. "New York was fun and it was something to do in my early 20s, but this is home."

Newcomers Cris Young, left, and Lisa Kleinhandler brought Hudson Fasteners from New York to the Youngstown Business Incubator and plan to stay.

Shaking off the rustbelt mentality

Broderick and other business leaders see a foundation to build upon.

There's a Diaspora to tap and an infrastructure already laid. The new manufacturers rave over the region's rail lines, highways and other legacies of the steel industry. A San Francisco software company with an Ashtabula founder just moved jobs from Mumbai, India, to Federal Street.

Maybe the biggest barrier to rebirth, some say, is the self-perception that exasperates people like Cossler and Kidd: the feeling that Youngstown is not good enough to be great.

Lisa Kleinhandler, 52, and Cris Young, 51, are two of the more curious newcomers in the new normal. They arrived at YBI last year from New York towing a third-generation nuts-and-bolts company, Hudson Fasteners, and an idea for putting distribution on the cloud.

Cossler put them in the Inspire Lab, where novice entrepreneurs share work space, but the pair recently graduated to their own office on the fifth floor. They think their software will be ready to launch this summer -- from Youngstown, where they intend to stay.

"We think it's absolutely fabulous here," Young said.

She marvels to be in driving distance of three major airports -- in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Akron -- and across the street from the original Warner Brothers theater, where the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra plays.

Kleinhandler said she appreciates the community support but wonders why locals keep expressing sympathy for her having ended up in Youngstown. She wishes they would stop that.

"In New York, we're one of a million fish in the sea. Here, a small business can actually accomplish something," she said. "They need to shake away that Rust Belt mentality."

As more businesses and people like her arrive, maybe they will.

follow Robert L. Smith on Twitter @rlsmithpd