America’s next ghost towns?

I just came across this in a story about a small, struggling manufacturing town:

Part of the vast aluminum complex is closed, and the rest is for sale — its orders down, its workforce reduced, its future uncertain. Shumaker stands at the locked plant gate and, after a year without work, worries what’s next for him and his community. “The way things are going,” he says, “there’s not going to be anything here.”

It reads like something from any number of North Country towns trying to hold onto some sort of manufacturing plant – and jobs. The “vast aluminum complex” though is in small-town West Virginia.

Ravenswood, with 4,000 people and one big factory, is like many towns in the USA where things still are made: caught in a winter between recession and recovery, hoping the latter will arrive before the former kills the last decent blue-collar job.

The story also quotes a Cornell labor-relations professor who says, “We had ghost towns in the past. We could have them again.”

The difference is that people could leave a ghost town — miners could work new veins, farmers could till fresh land, merchants could move closer to road or rail.

But, according to this article, these options aren’t available.

So people are staying put and they may end up in living in a new kind of ghost town:

a place where people stay, because they have nowhere else to go.

You can read the complete USA Today article here.