Why people stay after local economies collapse − a story of home among the ghosts of shuttered steel mills

Steelworkers line up for their paychecks at U.S. Steel’s South Works in Chicago in 1959. Bettman Collection via Getty Images by Amanda McMillan Lequieu, Drexel University It was midday on a Saturday, and Simonetta led me from the open front door of her home in southeast Chicago to her sitting room and settled next to her husband, Christopher, on the couch. In the 1980s, Christopher had worked a few blocks away at U.S. Steel South Works, earning three times the minimum wage with a high school diploma – more than enough to buy a house near Simonetta’s parents before their first baby arrived. Like their neighbors in southeast Chicago, Simonetta and Christopher’s expectations for work and home were set by the steel industry. Between 1875 and 1990, the employment offered here by eight steel mills created a dense network of working-class neighborhoods on the marshlands 15 miles south of downtown Chicago. For the tens of thousands of employees who lived and worked in this region, steel was a rare breed of work: unionized, blue-collar jobs that paid middle-class wages, with starting salaries in the 1960s at nearly three times the minimum wage. Opportunities for promotion, benefits and secure job tenure...