Recent Recessionary Road Posts

Recessionary Road Is Over

Chadwick Matlin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:24:56 +0000

If you've been following Recessionary Road via this blog's RSS feed, you probably thought the project died a very quiet death. But worry not! We forgot to keep putting excerpts of the full pieces on this blog, and they ran elsewhere on The Big Money. Now that I'm back from the road, I've realized that we let this lapse, which may have messed with your RSS feeds. So as an apology, here's a digest of what you may have missed, with links to the pieces. Thanks for reading, and email me with any thoughts.

* August 4, 2009: The Schizophrenic Stimulus: On the ground the stimulus is working. Nationally, who knows ? By Chadwick Matlin

Let's get right to it. This is the final article in a 12-piece series about the stimulus. That means that in the back of your mind, you're hoping to get an answer to the one question—the only question—that we've all asked since this thing began:

Is it working?

No offense, kind reader, but that's an awful question ...

* July 30, 2009: Radioactive Recovery: The stimulus goes nuclear. By Chadwick Matlin

RICHLAND, Wash.—I may be in Richland, but I am actually at Hanford, a former nuclear production site and a place all its own. To locals, Hanford is not necessarily a town, but it's definitely a destination. This is not the Washington of your imagination, the one with pine trees, rain, and good coffee. Hanford is brown everywhere you look: brown mountains in the distance, brown tufts of grass, brown sand caking the earth. It is the perfect setting for Cormac McCarthy's next novel. So hot that people arrange outdoor meetings at 7 a.m. to beat the heat. So dry that trucks drive around all day squirting water out of their butts, wetting the sand so it can't blind workers when the winds start blowing. So bleak that even the mountains take on a dirty sheen ...

* July 30, 2009: Stimulus Served Sunny Side Up: How a solar business in Colorado is basking in new Recovery Act initiatives. By Chadwick Matlin

BOULDER, Colo.—It was Feb. 17, and Blake Jones was in Denver to make a speech. When you're the president of the largest solar company in the Boulder-Denver corridor, this whole speech thing isn't unheard of. But this was Feb. 17, 2009. This was the day the stimulus was going to be signed. This wasn't a normal speech; it was an introduction of the president of the United States. Barack Obama needed a warm-up act, somebody who could put a face on both the stimulus and the future of the American economy. Blake Jones was that guy ...

* July 28, 2009: Pity City: Albuquerque's mayor is struggling to get a fair share of the stimulus. By Chadwick Matlin

Over the last six months, [Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chávez's] optimism has spoiled into exasperated defeat. When he talks about the stimulus—as he did with me for a half-hour in Albuquerque—he speaks in a soft, flat voice that rattles off examples of how his city has been slighted. Albuquerque is in line for $59 million of stimulus money as of now, and hardly any has arrived. New Mexico is receiving $2.4 billion: 2.5 percent of the state's stimulus haul is planned for a city with about one-quarter of New Mexico's population. The government giving Albuquerque only $59 million is like the tooth fairy leaving an IOU under the pillow. The city had to go through all sorts of pain—a 72 percent rise in unemployment in a year—to get the tooth fairy to show up; the least she could do is leave a fair reward. And so for Chávez, that $59 million is a symptom of the stimulus's limitations. And—though he won't say it explicitly—maybe the stimulus's failure ...

* July 27,2009: Texas Weatherizes the Storm: Austin waits on stimulus funds to cut electric costs and create jobs. By Chadwick Matlin

AUSTIN, Texas—Some myth-busting to begin with: Weatherization—an imposing term that brings to mind solar panels, torn-down walls, and smashed energy meters—isn't actually that impressive. It's really rather drab: a couple of guys with some hammers, a few glass panes, and an insulation truck full of what's essentially heat-trapping cotton candy. It's a small process that takes a small amount of time. And costs a small amount of money: between $1,500 and $1,800 for a 10 percent to 15 percent drop in energy bills. Which is why the government's throwing so much of the stimulus at it ...

* July 22, 2009: Dredge Funds. My day tracking the stimulus on the Mississippi. By Chadwick Matlin

MEDORA CROSSING, La.—If Michael Bay is looking for his next Transformer, I have found it in the middle of the Mississippi River. It's a dredge boat named the Dodge Island, and it's eerily anthropomorphic. On its side are two dragarms, giant metallic appendages that are lowered down by winches that make the sound of a whale's cry. When the arms are dropped dozens of feet into the river, its hands—called dragheads—scoop up sediment that has settled at the bottom of the river. It pumps the sand through its arms like a heroin addict injecting through the wrist. The sediment is pushed against gravity and into the tubes, where it's deposited in the ship's hopper ...

* July 20, 2009: Teaching Kids Left Behind: The Stimulus is paying youths to get their GEDs in rural Alabama. By Chadwick Matlin

GREENSBORO, Ala.— Come the fall, this GED class will be funded by the stimulus. But only through some seriously nested bureaucracy. The class is part of a national program called YouthBuild, which is backed by the Department of Labor. YouthBuild pays kids who are about 20 years old to get their GEDs and learn how to build a house. For six months, the students split their weeks into two days of class, two in the field, and one in leadership seminars. They work for $25 a day. Forty-seven million dollars of YouthBuild's budget comes from DoL's stimulus funding; $550,587 will go to this program ...

* July 13, 2009: FutureGen: The Mystery of Mattoon: Hunting for $1 billion of stimulus spending in rural Illinois. By Chadwick Matlin

MATTOON, Ill.—We had come from afar to look for the treasure of Mattoon. For years, it's been rumored that the government would help build a clean coal plant here. It was to be called FutureGen but has taken so long to get here that it's jokingly called NeverGen. It was the great hope that this prototypical small Midwestern town (population 17,177 in 2008) has always been searching for but could never find ...

* July 10, 2009: Czar Power: Meet the woman keeping track of all of Michigan’s stimulus billions. By Chadwick Matlin.

LANSING, Mich.—The stimulus doesn't come with an instruction manual. When both receiving and applying for money from the federal government, all 50 states are left wondering: How should we keep track of where all the money is going? What are the criteria to apply for more money? How should we calculate the number of jobs we've created or saved? How should we decide whether this thing is working?

These are the central questions of the stimulus, yet the feds only send advice, not answers. And if the feds don't know the answers to these questions, then who does ...

* July 5, 2009: Introducing Recessionary Road: A cross-country trip to discover what the stimulus looks like from the ground. By Chadwick Matlin

The stimulus's time has come. When it was signed into law in February, the Obama administration slow-played its effects, saying it would take months before we saw any progress. Money had to be allocated, states had to be advised about what to do, and grant applications needed to be sifted. The stimulus was a curtain-raiser to a brighter future, one that we were allowed to see but not touch. Obama seemed to say as much at the bill's signing ceremony: "Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles. Nor does it constitute all of what we must do to turn our economy around. But it does mark the beginning of the end ..."

The Fate of a Stimulus-Funded Health Clinic

Chadwick Matlin — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:41:26 +0000

NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Unwittingly, Mary Bufwack first applied for stimulus money a year and a half ago. George Bush was in office, Barack Obama was campaigning in Iowa, and the economic crisis was still fermenting on the books of AIG (AIG). It was in December 2007 that Bufwack, the CEO of United Neighborhood Health Services, a network of local health clinics here, sent in an application to Bush's Health and Human Services Department.

The uninsured need health clinics like the homeless need homeless shelters. Clinic rates are adjustable, they almost exclusively serve the needy, and they want to help as many people as possible. Bufwack wanted extra grant money to build a health clinic on Dickerson Road, the thoroughfare of a hardscrabble district on the north side of the city. For whatever reason—lack of mobility, inaccessibility to public transport, neighborhood territoriality—the Dickersonians weren't coming to UNHS's pre-existing clinics. Rather than go to a doctor, they would wait until their illnesses got so bad that they'd have to use the emergency room. And as one of UNHS's educational pamphlets says, "The ER is not a doctor's office"...

Click here to read the full article.

Questing for Clean Coal

Chadwick Matlin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:57:58 +0000

MATTOON, Ill.—We had come from afar to look for the treasure of Mattoon. For years, it's been rumored that the government would help build a clean coal plant here. It was to be called FutureGen but has taken so long to get here that it's jokingly called NeverGen. It was the great hope that this prototypical small Midwestern town (population 17,177 in 2008) has always been searching for but could never find...

Click here to read the full article.

Ken, 54, Secretary of the Interior

Chadwick Matlin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:44:47 +0000

ST. LOUIS—As we go across the country, we’ll be asking people we meet the same question: What stories will you tell your grandkids about the recession? A new response is below.

“Alright, I’ll tell you my story. And that is that growing up my parents were children of the Depression, they had lived through the Depression, so they were always reminding us of how difficult those times were. In the last year, we’ve seen the economy being as bad as it has been, it brought back many memories of what my parents have told me, and those are stories that I’ve shared with my children and stories that I’ll share with my grandchildren. And my hope is that because of the efforts that we have going on with President Obama being focused on the economy like a laser beam, that we won’t have the same kinds of hardships that we saw back in the Depression.”

For a Recessionary Road dispatch from Secretary Salazar’s event, click here.

(Photo by David Backer)

A Senator, a Mayor, and a Cabinet Secretary Walk Into a Court House

Chadwick Matlin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:21:53 +0000

ST. LOUIS—The place: 12:45 p.m., Friday, in an old courthouse overlooking the Gateway Arch. The courthouse was once used to hear the Dred Scott case but has now been turned into a St. Louis history museum. Red, white, and blue banners are draped across the banisters, accentuating the giant American flag that hangs below the 90-foot-high cupola.

We're in a room that couldn't have been filled with any more fluorescent light. At the front of it sits a podium with the Department of Interior seal balanced at its center. At the rear are a few tables arranged in a rectangle, where there was just a meeting between the national dignitaries and local business leaders.

The people: Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. Salazar, as always, is bedecked in his bolo tie. The room is half-filled, journalists, Park Service rangers, and a few business leaders. No members of the public appear to be present. Outside the door, tourists mill around the courthouse soaking in St. Louis' history.

The event: We're all here to announce or witness the announcement of $7.8 million of stimulus money put toward the courthouse roof and the Gateway Arch's tram system. Political lip service was paid: Salazar says that repairing national landmarks and monuments like this helps America better tell her story to the world. "The Department of the Interior for me is the Department of the Americas." McCaskill says that she's happy to bring jobs to Missouri through the stimulus and that she's proud of the way the Interior is spending and tracking the money. Slay says he's a "big fan of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" like he's talking about Albert Pujols.

I ask Salazar how they came up with the $7.8 million number. How do we know the number isn't too high? Or too low? He says the National Park Service estimated the costs and that the projects have been sitting in a $9 billion backlog. (The Interior is throwing $1 billion of stimulus money at the backlog.) But he doesn't quite tell me how the National Park Service knew what to throw at the project. It's an understandable hole in his understanding; high-level Cabinet secretaries don't usually have to deal with cost estimates for small, local projects. But it's a question that hangs over all of these stimulus projects. Ignoring whether a project is worth money in the first place, how do we know how much money to spend on it?

The takeaway: Sometimes the stimulus can be as big a boon for politicians as it is for communities. Salazar gets to go on a road show and prove the Department of Interior is doing something to protect America's treasures. McCaskill gets to show she brought home jobs to Missouri by using her influence in Washington. Slay gets to trumpet his commitment to improving St. Louis' economy.

When another journalist asked Salazar how many shovel-ready jobs would be created, he didn't have an exact number. Today was about the politics, not the projects.

Todd, Hen House District Manager

Chadwick Matlin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:38:56 +0000

ARCOLA, Ill.— As we go across the country, we’ll be asking people we meet the same question: What stories will you tell your grandkids about the recession? A new response is below:

“You know, that their forefathers liked to spend money. Basically, we just don’t have any, my feeling, my personal feeling, is that nobody really cares what’s getting spent, what’s getting saved, or who we’re spending money on. There’s nobody representing the common man. You know, there really isn’t. I don’t believe this is what our forefathers believed what the government should be, it’s better than any country in the world, don’t get me wrong, but we don’t have anyone representing the common person. Everybody has all their special interests … Nobody cares about the common people anymore and that’s where everyone’s hurting.

We’ve definitely seen a decline. People have less money to spend. They have to be more cautious about what they spend and how they spend it. And I mean it used to be pretty, I mean, the people we see, used to be twice a week, now it’s one time a week …”

(Photo by David Backer.)

Meet Michigan's Stimulus Czar

Chadwick Matlin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:09:43 +0000

LANSING, Mich.—The stimulus doesn't come with an instruction manual. When both receiving and applying for money from the federal government, all 50 states are left wondering: How should we keep track of where all the money is going? What are the criteria to apply for more money? How should we calculate the number of jobs we've created or saved? How should we decide whether this thing is working?

These are the central questions of the stimulus, yet the feds only send advice, not answers. And if the feds don't know the answers to these questions, then who does...

Click here to read the full dispatch.

Flushing Stimulus Money Into the Sewer

Chadwick Matlin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:22:37 +0000

LANSING, Mich.—As we rode into town, our dulcet-challenged GPS lady got testy when we were forced to turn off route. In front of us stood very loud, very bold “Road Closed” signs and a fresh hole in the ground. We had run into Lansing’s sewer modernization project, and it was pretty impossible not to. Right in the middle of town, the earthmovers were slowly moving up Allegan St., choking a central artery.

The two blocks of sewer retrofit cost $3.4 million, part of the stimulus’ $10.5 million contribution to Lansing’s sewer project this year. Because of the Clean Water Act, Lansing has been legally mandated to clean up its sewer system, which now tosses rain water in with sewage and then dumps it out into a river. That’s less than ideal. So they’ve been trudging away at a 30-year, more than $500 ~~billion~~ million plan to bring the sewer system in line with federal code. This year they almost couldn’t afford to keep the project going, which would have cost them a $25,000 fine. But when you can’t afford to spend several million, $25,000 isn’t that bad. “The lesser of two evils,” as Chad, the city engineer who showed us around, told me.

Of course next year the stimulus money probably won’t be making a repeat appearance. And that’s a problem for Lansing. They need to spend $25 million next year, $283 million over the next 11. Chad is worried that the city won’t be able to spend the money, risking a slap on the wrist from the feds. Another alternative is to raise the sewer fees, a tenuous prospect at best. So Lansing continues to scrape for funds to fulfill an unfunded mandate. For a fleeting moment, there were monies to dredge up. Next year, it’s back to the bottom of the barrel.

(Photos by David Backer)

This post originally misstated that the total sewer expenditure was $500 billion. It is $500 million.

A Stimulus Project That’s Not Creating Any Jobs

Chadwick Matlin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:52:40 +0000

LANSING, Mich.—It should be said up top: I have found a stimulus project that has not created a single job. Nor has it saved any. Twenty-thousand dollars have gone to the Lansing chapter of Volunteers of America to restock their food kitchen, and according to the Obama administration’s rubric, it should be a failure of a stimulus project. The $20,000 comes from FEMA via the United Way, and it has gone toward buying more goods for the food pantry here, where they've served 85,439 meals this year, a 9 percent increase from last year. Next year, they’re aiming to serve 100,000 meals. Because when you're a homeless shelter/food pantry in Michigan, the community’s need isn’t going to ebb any time soon.

So now the complicated question: If the stimulus is supposed to create and/or save jobs, does that mean we don’t want to fund anything that doesn’t do that? The $20,000, of course, pales in comparison to the huge pot of $499 billion of nontax stimulus monies being doled out. Patrick, the VP of operations who showed us around, isn’t shy about saying there weren’t any jobs created. And presumably he’ll have to write that into his report on what he’s doing with his stimulus dollar. But the money has already been obligated to Volunteers of America (it hasn’t actually been paid, despite being due a week ago, but that’s a separate story), so it’s not like the government is going to pull back the funds. But the fact remains: This is a stimulus project that is not creating or saving any jobs.

But I’m not sure that that’s a reason to stop these kinds of funds. The work that these people are doing is good work. It’s necessary work. It’s work that has everything to do with the recession. Without the 14.9 percent unemployment rate in Michigan, the pantry wouldn’t have such an increased load. And the stimulus is supposed to counteract the recession. So it’s doing its job there.

Unfortunately, the $20,000 is marked as stimulus money, so it has an extra responsibility to work harder. It has the expectations of a nation weighing it down, demanding that it does more than just help create something but also that it helps employ somebody new to create that something. But these are distinctions that mean little to the kitchen at Volunteers of America. They’ve got an extra $20,000 and an extra 20,000 people to feed. That responsibility is clear cut.

(Photos by David Backer.)

For more on Recessionary Road's trip to Lansing, see dispatches on Michigan's stimulus czar, youth workers renovating an old school into a community center, and a sewer project in the middle of the city. For posts from outside of Lansing, visit the RR blog.

Paid Internships, Courtesy of the Stimulus

Chadwick Matlin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:34:15 +0000

LANSING, Mich.—The teenagers tore at the ceiling of this
old elementary school as though they were seeking revenge for a tortured scholastic past. There were eight of them here today, young construction workers who didn’t have any construction skills but who did come cheap. Free, really. Their $7.50 salaries are paid by the stimulus plan, making them free labor for Spartan Internet Consulting, the private company that’s turning this old school into office space and a community center. All of them are fresh-faced, some with teenage peach fuzz, others with young heads stuck on top of already-chiseled bodies.

These are what created jobs look like. They’re short-term, certainly, but they’re also real. During our visit I didn’t catch any of the kids slacking on the job. Our impressive tour guide was a construction management student named Nate Mahoney (pictured at left), who was in charge of the worksite along with another young guy named Anu. (Nate was hired by Spartan and isn’t stimulus-funded.) His voice brimmed with pride and excitement for the construction site and what the kids were doing with it. He told us that Spartan couldn’t be overhauling the place without the youth workers. It was a charming display of paternalism, but it’s unclear whether he was exaggerating. In theory, Spartan could have afforded to renovate the school if the youth workers weren’t there to offer cheap labor. Sure, they’d have to pay more for experienced workers. But that would have made the project less profitable, not impossible. Nevertheless, for the kids, the stimulus has worked.

The school they’re working on won’t be transformed into office space until October. For now it’s a mess of stripped urinals, chalkboards, and lockers. Because of the empty rooms, the light in the building billows through like it’s an old Italian church. Amidst the rubble one youth worker, 18-year old Zach Lansing (pictured below), told us he’d been looking for a job for a year. He finally got hooked up with the youth employment program through his church, and it’s given him a chance to get a job even though “he didn’t know how to use a grinder” at the beginning of the summer.

Come August Spartan Internet will sit down with the kids and work on their résumés, hoping to get them another job once their stimulus funding runs out. By then Zach will be back at high school, finishing out his senior year. Afterward he’s either going to Lansing Community College or Ohio State on a football scholarship. (It’s apparent he’s a linebacker before he tells you he’s a linebacker.) By then he’ll know what it’s like to have his education supported by free money.

(Photos by David Backer)

Ford’s Yesterdayland

Chadwick Matlin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:48:00 +0000

DEARBORN, Mich.—On the ride over to Ford's (F) Rouge manufacturing plant, Henry Ford's great-grandson came on screen to welcome us to a place where "our past and our future are side by side." I should have known then that the factory tour would completely ignore Ford's present.

Tour is the wrong thing to call what we went through. It was more an anachronistic theme park ride. In Disney World, every ride has a lengthy preamble that narrates a back story before you get to the main event. The music creates a mood; the lighting tells the eye where to focus; the placards and short films set the stakes. It is the ride before the ride—an exercise in storytelling that heightens the payoff later on. It was no different inside the Ford tour.

Ford's ride was bisected just like Disney's. First you go through an elaborate foyer of sorts, one designed to dispense a slice of propaganda with a dose of history. Then, once you're good and indoctrinated, you progress on to the real deal, the factory itself.

When we first entered the foyer, the music was already swelling to a crescendo. Its major key implied triumph, adventure, and invention. We may as well have been inside a Lord of the Rings movie. In some of the films screened during the tour, the music only got more grandiose, like adding another cup of sugar to a birthday cake that had already turned saccharine. It wasn't the music of a company emerging from trouble or a resourceful, plucky upstart making do with what it has. It was a score for Ford's cocky past. I've embedded a bit below for you to get a taste:

The lighting was dimmed from above, yet the room was illuminated in spots from below. The Ford cars that were parked in the showroom rested on a shaft of light that, when juxtaposed with the overall darkness, drew the eye. The combination gave the room a bluish-pink quality, like we were in that ethereal state between early morning and a new dawn.

Dotted around the room were placards that didn't emphasize fuel-efficiency, Ford's independence from government aid, or new fuel-cell technology. Instead they either focused on Ford's past or its star truck, the F-150, which is produced at the Rouge plant. The F-150 blurbs were designed to sell the trucks in 2004 (when the factory tour began) not 2009. "Strength from the bottom up" one said about the F-150's "strongest frame." "Strength when you need it," described its tow hooks. I was looking at the world as it once was, when it was a safer, less-threatening place for Ford and for Michigan.

The evasion of the present didn't stop there. Inside a movie on Ford's legacy, the narrator said that "Rouge was not immune to the darkness of the great depression." But there was no mention of the current situation. Lip service was paid to Rouge being one of "the most environmentally advanced plants in the world." In an effort to prove this was true, the tour included a visit to an observation deck overlooking Rouge's "living roof," where we were told that having grass (sedum, actually, but we'll gloss over the difference) on your roof makes the roof longer-lasting and thus adds efficiency to the plant. All well and good, but again there was no mention of whether the cars were just as sustainable. The sales pitch was again aimed at a different era, one where the Prius was just a funny-looking thing from Japan.

But all of those oddities paled in comparison to the most overwhelming aspect of the tour's introduction. After the legacy film we were ushered into another room, one where about 50 individual swivel chairs were arranged in a diamond pattern on the floor. Above hung seven screens that spread the full 360 degrees around the room. We were treated to a wordless film that could have been a film student's thesis if it wasn't so lacking in irony. We saw an F-150 being manufactured from start to finish; but as our tour attendee put it, we weren't just going see it being created, we were going to smell it and feel it, too.

Never before have I watched a movie on seven screens while the seat below rumbled and the ceiling above hissed smells into the room. When rain poured on screen, strobe lights flashed in the room; when metal was forged in underground fires, the room got hotter; when a coat of red paint was applied to the F-150, the room turned crimson. It was a show of brute force—impressive the way a theme park ride is, and one that leaves you just as hollow. The whole experience was miscalibrated; a company that is struggling like Ford is shouldn't be treating me to this kind of lavish entertainment.

Finally, after all that foreplay, came the factory. Conveyor belts were everywhere, outnumbered only by the number of steel beams criss-crossing the ceiling. It was an engineer's wet dream; a small community planned for perfect syncopation. Different parts of the cars are suspended from the ceiling, shimmying along until they caught a ramp down to the floor. There, folks moved them along while chatting with others. Robotic arms spun and jabbed along with the workers. Everyone was dressed casually, many in shorts and T-shirts; it appeared there was no official Ford uniform.

The workers had just come back from a week off and were nearing the end of a 10-hour shift. Rouge has reduced its production to four days a week, which means it's only running two shifts, down from the usual three. At two shifts the place cranks out about 1,100 vehicles, and when you're overlooking the factory the accomplishment is considerable. As one of the tour guides told me, every 53 seconds another truck is produced.

And there was still no mention of the current situation on any of the factory's official placards. Ford, remember, is the responsible one of the Big Three. It doesn't have outstanding loans with the U.S. government, as they've chosen to go it alone and avoid Obama's watchful eye. A factory tour is the perfect place to emphasize that independence. Rather than all the propaganda about Ford's legacy, why not push the message that Ford is the only responsible carmaker left in America? "We're the only one that managed to build a country without later robbing it," the official line could go. It's a compelling case, yet nobody's making it to the hundreds of tourists that come through Rouge every day.

Perplexed by this, I asked one of the tour guides whether any of the materials had been changed since their introduction in 2004. "With Ford's financial situation, it hasn't been a top priority," he said. That's the kind of inside-out thinking that got Detroit into this mess, and the kind that Ford has avoided better than its competitors. Not that you'd know that from the tour.

(Photos by David Backer)

Sandy, 56, Bowling Alley Employee

Chadwick Matlin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:27:26 +0000

WAYNE, Mich.— As we go across the country, we’ve been asking people we meet the same question: What stories will you tell your grandkids about the recession? But it’s already apparent people don’t like sticking to the question. So, consider this freeform from here on out. Our latest pull quotes are below:

“My own son-in-law works for Fords and he’s off and on and off and on. And like two of the girls in our office, their husbands work for Chryslers, and one is fired and one is laid off. Yeah there are a lot of them here. But my husband works at Kroger’s and me, well, it’s not as desperate as that. And I try to do what I can to bring in more business.

We’ve done a lot of things to counteract (the economic downturn). Well, we offer our summer rates, okay, where a lot of businesses don’t, we tailor them to fit the economy, and we’ve scaled the price down, then we give them a free pass that’s good for three free games of bowling that’s good for the rest summer. So, you pay the fee once a week, but you’re gonna bowl all week, with three free games, so for a family, it’s the cheapest way to spend.

(Are you less profitable?) Definitely, because it’s free bowling. But we also offer like this one right here. We did this because of the economy, 21 and older gets to come in on Wednesday night after 9 p.m. and there’s no catch. We’re just trying to bring them in. I mean if they come, fine, but we’re trying to offer them something. I mean it’s bad enough to be out of work and not having an income, so we try and offer them a place to come and do something.

We always have to fight for the customers. Like we give them passes when they come in, we call them “bounce-back passes,” so that when they leave we give them one free one, like buy-one-get-one-free so…anything we can do to make it easier for them.

You can visit the website of Sandy's employer, Wayne Bowl, here.

(Photo of Sandy at Wayne Bowl by David Backer)

Jimmy and Kendall, 25 and 26, Musicians

Chadwick Matlin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:36:29 +0000

CLEVELAND—As we go across the country, we’ll be asking people we meet the same question: What stories will you tell your grandkids about the recession? A new response is below:

JIMMY: So I know what I’ll tell my grandkids. I’ll tell them to just be prepared, prepare yourself for success, prepare yourself for failure, you know, as long as you try to succeed and you fail, well at least you tried, so that’s how I look at it … like we try and be realistic about what we could make and why. … We use other factors, like other strengths, to exercise on our weaknesses, you feel what I’m saying, we do as much as we can, and we get help wherever we can, to try to prepare … compromise, have a plan and a system. …Well if you fail, at least you tried, 'cause you gonna die anyway, you know, so I’d rather die trying.

KENDALL: It takes faith too, you gotta have a lot of faith, like, whatever it is, you know, I have faith like that, that everything is going to work out as long as I work hard and try, like if you study hard for a test, you expect to pass, and if you work really hard at your job, you expect to get paid for those two weeks. I think if I work hard and try, if I work my ass off, there’s no way we can fail.

JIMMY: In Cleveland, there’s been a recession in Cleveland for as long as I’ve been born, here. … So just to be able to pay my bills, you know, doing music alone, even though it's not that much even though I do just make enough to pay my bills, its overall, just doing that with my artistry, you know what I’m saying, I feel like I’m a millionaire just doing that.

You can listen to Jimmy and Kendall’s band, Cloud Nine, at MySpace.

(Photo of Cloud Nine by David Backer. Jimmy is on the left; Kendall, on the right.)

A Barren Oasis: General Motors in Ohio

Chadwick Matlin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:53:15 +0000

LORDSTOWN, Ohio—From the horizon I thought it was an outlet mall. We were driving down I-80 in eastern Ohio and hadn’t seen anything substantial for miles. But then came this sprawling complex beyond the shoulder: tan, bland, and stretching on for at least a quarter of a mile. It was just nondescript enough to be a mall that draws people from across the state, eager to cash in on the cheapest deals.

But the parking lot was too bare to be a shopping center. It looked as though it had long ago gone bald, the occasional car sprouting out of the pale peach of asphalt. But as we neared the end of the stretch of buildings, we saw two huge banners hung on one of the buildings.

Of course. A GM (GMGMQ) plant was the only place that could be this empty and depressed on the Monday after July 4. We had stumbled upon GM’s Lordstown outpost, a $350 million investment to increase production and domestically manufacture a new car, the Chevy Cruze. A bit of Googling after the fact revealed that it had been shut down since the end of May, forced to watch the company’s bankruptcy from the sidelines. Nearly 3,000 people have been laid off during GM’s tumult, and the workload has been reduced to only one shift. That shift reportedly resumes later this month, at which point the Lordstown plant will transition back into production.

For that, Lordstown is lucky. Its GM plant is staying open. It makes the fuel-efficient Chevy Cobalt and the upcoming Chevy Cruze, two of Chevy’s centerpieces as it emerges from bankruptcy. Seventeen other plants are closing, yet Lordstown’s remains. The parking lot will be filled once again. Nevertheless, it will still be emptier than it used to be.

(Photos from a moving car by David Backer.)

Old Sign, New Meaning

David Backer — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:04:50 +0000

Pittsburgh. July 6, 2009, 3:40 p.m. Taken from outside a Jimmy John's Gourmet Sandwiches.