I drove through Cairo, IL last week...

and I was amazed to how it has become a near ghost town. The historic section was completely abandoned. There was a pile of rubble from a torn down building and statue. I didn't see any stoplights either.

I tried doing some research on the town's history and all I could find that it was once a booming river town, but went on a steady decline. Also, despite being in Illinois, it was much more like the south in that it had lots of racial tensions.

Does anyone have more info on what has led Cairo to the sad state that is in? Other cities along the rivers seem to be doing fine. I would have thought that the confluence of two major rivers would always enable a strong small city/town to exist there (despite the high flood risk).

They're in rural Southern Illinois.
Cairo is an interesting town. For years it was owned by a few people who required anyone who lived there to buy shares in the city and lease plots instead of actually owning the land. That and their inability to control frequent flooding kept the city from prospering, even after the completion of the Illinois Central Railroad.

Cairo was also home to a number of civil rights protests. One effort to desegregate the city public swimming pool resulted in cement trucks coming from four states to fill the pool in the middle of the night. It was their way of resisting desegregation.

Today Cairo is just dirt poor with no jobs and no money to invest. They tried an effort to fix-up and revitalize downtown by creating a historic district but that didn't last long.

If you want to see a really hard hit, beat down hopeless town, go to Cairo, then go to Centralia.

Incidentally, the money to start the city of Chicago came from a Cairo bank.

May as well be AL or GA given the going-nowhere-fast syndrome. Lots of voting against their best-interests too. The only thing going in that area is when a new prison is built - lots of cheap labor but at times I wonder if not educated enough either. Land is cheap if one wants to retire down there or own land for hunting. That is what I see for sale most of the time.

over the country

they're in serious trouble now. At least Galesburg has Knox College going for it, but the Maytag plant was the economic engine of that town for decades. Thanks NAFTA!

the middle class in our state has made no economic progress since 1989, and we've been heading downhill over the last 5 years :(

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0511/21/ldt.01.html - 21 nov 2005

Well, as GM workers face massive layoffs, a disturbing new report illustrates the war on the middle class. A new study says the living standards of middle class workers in Illinois fell by such a dramatic rate that their financial condition is no better today than it was in 1989.

Lisa Sylvester reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LISA SYLVESTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Joe Bresnahan and his family are learning how to stretch a dollar. He worked for Maytag in Galesburg, Illinois, for 16 years, but the plant closed. His job shipped to Mexico, where the workers are paid in cents, not dollars.

JOE BRESNAHAN, FMR. MAYTAG WORKER: I'm not going to work for 58 cents an hour. There's no way that we can compete. It's got to stop. The gap -- there is no more middle class in my mind. You're either rich or you're poor.

SYLVESTER: Joe now works for a company packaging art supplies.

BRESNAHAN: I bring home every two weeks what I used to bring home in a week, and used to have good health insurance, dental, vision. And none of that now.

SYLVESTER: His story is being repeated all over Illinois. The state has lost more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990. Middle class families haven't just stalled on the economic ladder, they're being kicked further down.

A new study by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability shows the state's median income of $46,000 is at the same level as it was in 1989. During the '90s, when the economy was booming, the job growth was in the lower paid service industry, and many high-paying jobs were shipped overseas.

RALPH MARTIRE, CTR. FOR TAX & BUDGET ACCOUNTABILITY: We are truly feeling the impact of globalization, and it's not like the old days where maybe one high-paying wage sector would go away in the economy and another high-paying wage sector would jump up to replace it. That's not what's really happening now.

SYLVESTER: What's happening in Illinois is also occurring in the rest of the country.

LEE PRICE, ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE: Illinois a little bit more than the rest of the country. But the country as a whole, the typical family in the middle of the income spectrum is doing worse than they were five years ago.

SYLVESTER: That's because middle class families like Joe's Bresnahan's have not only seen their paycheck shrink, they're also coping with rising costs of gas, housing and food.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SYLVESTER: The workers who fared the best were college educated. Having a high school diploma is simply not enough to get ahead. And the authors of this study say
this trend of shrinking paychecks is only going to get worse unless policymakers come up with different decisions -- Kitty.

PILGRIM: Disturbing report. Thanks very much. Lisa Sylvester.

www.GlobalismScorecard.org

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

already.

I remember driving through there in the 60s and it looked like a shanty town then. I have no more information to add about why it was/is that way, though.

Carbondale, the school is the only thing. A great liberal island in the middle of a "Deliverence" remake.

in Southern Illinois. Carbondale is hardly an oasis.

Most of Southern Illinois is depresses and unemployed. When the supermax prison was opened in Tammes (About 20 miles west of c'dale) I belive that they got 25 times the applications to avalible positions. Until there is more demand for Illinois coal its going to remain that way