Story Archives of 'recession'

At the turn of the century, the city of Flint, Michigan was a lively metropolis. The original home of General Motors boasted grand hotels and lavish restaurants that have faded over the past forty years.

Boarded-up windows and foreclosed homes now line many of the city’s streets. Local officials faced the risk of those empty houses becoming magnets for crime and pestilence, or trying something new: tearing them down.

More than one thousand abandoned homes have been demolished so far, due in part to the efforts of Dan Kildee. He’s the treasurer of Michigan’s Genesee county and a driving force behind Flint’s efforts to raze abandoned neighborhoods. A number of other Rust Belt cities are closely watching the results. Dan Kildee joined us from his office in Flushing, Michigan.

The Telegraph (UK): U.S. Cities May Have to Be Bulldozed to Survive

(Photo by justindula via Flickr/Creative Commons)

June marks the beginning of wedding season, which kicks the matrimony industrial complex into full swing. The weak economy has couples tightening their cummerbunds and finding creative ways to scale back. Deciding when to scrimp and when to splurge on a monumental day isn’t easy. Garen Daly, better known as The Frugal Yankee, is here to help us sort through some recession-era wedding conundrums.

(Photo by Ricardo Wang via Flickr/Creative Commons)

When we talk about the recession, it’s easy to get bogged down in headlines about huge banks going under, or statistics about the hundreds of thousands of unemployed. It’s more difficult to get a grasp on how peoples lives are lived day-by-day. As part of NHPR’s ongoing series Working It Out, we’re looking at how the economy is affecting every aspect of our culture, from career choices to how we entertain ourselves.

We’re joined by Jennifer Senior with a look at how money changes the way we think and behave, and why not having as much of it around might not be such a bad thing afterall. She’s been tracking some of the upsides to the downturn for New York magazine, where she’s a contributing writer.

She found that the recession may mean an end for the “hedonic treadmill” that New Yorkers have been living on, and that the changing economic times may even be changing what we desire. Volunteerism is on the rise, as is enrollment in divinity schools.

Housing prices are down, allowing first-time home owners to break into the market. But the earning potential of students graduating college right now will be 10 percent lower than those graduating in non-recession times.

New York: Recession Culture

(Photo by henrybloomfield via Flickr/Creative Commons)