Is the "west" midwest outperforming the "east" midwest?

The explanation is that you basically defined the Eastern Midwest as Ohio + Detroit, with everything else being the Western Midwest.

If you drew a line from Denver, CO to a point south of Buffalo, the midway point would be in Northeast Missouri. Basically the "Eastern" Midwest would be everything east of a line that runs through Duluth, MN while the "Western" Midwest would be everything west of that line. That would put the dividing point as roughly being the "Great Lakes" States of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin as well as Eastern Pennsylvania and New York, and the "Great Plains" States of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri and arguably the stretch of Colorado between the Kansas border and Denver.

If you use the "Duluth" line as the border than all of the cities you listed except Minneapolis are part of the Eastern Midwest. If you use the state lines as the border then you move St. Louis to the west.

The Urban Politician said:

^ Right, but to be honest I'm focusing more on the "great lakes" portion of the midwest and leaving out the "great plains" portion.

If you do that, the Indiana/Ohio line is a pretty reasonable middle point.

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The Great Lakes extend as far west as Minnesota. A better geographical dividing line would be the Mississippi River.

I don't typically think of Indianapolis as being in the western part of the Midwest. (Nor do I usually think of Pittsburgh and Buffalo being in the Midwest at all.) I also would include Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines, Peoria and maybe Wichita and Topeka in the "western" part of the Midwest. With that out of the way -- Since I think the heart of the old industrial / manufacturing belt of the Midwest is more in the eastern part of that region - it probably is generally true that the eastern part of the Midwest is struggling a little more right now because of the loss of industrial jobs over the past several decades.

to me, the dividing line between the eastern and western midwest has always been the mississippi river (how could it not be, it's such a real and prominent geographical division). i have never considered places like milwaukee, grand rapids, chicago, and indy to be in the western midwest.

cities right on the mississippi river like st. louis and the twin cities are harder to lump in one category or the other because they straddle the border.

The Urban Politician said:

Well, the purpose of this thread wasn't to focus so much on what the "dividing" line is but instead to shed some light on a trend, so I'll rephrase it this way:

Why does the easternmost portion of the midwest seem to be struggling in comparison to the rest of the midwest

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well, for one, you listed a pair of michigan cities that relied heavily on the american automobile industry and have yet to recover from their falls in the 70s and 80s.

Metro Detroit did actually recover from the fall of the 70's and 80's and peaked again around 2005. It has stumbled so much in the last five years that it basically erased the entire gain from the 90's and early 00's. Granted, that's if you believe the estimates are accurate. Flint, on the other hand, made up ground in the 90's and early 00's, but it hasn't peaked again, and is estimated to have dropped off again.

Everyone else has kind of hit upon this point, but it seems kind of silly to try and contrive a division where one has never existed.

There is really only one sensible way to divide the region, and that's to use the Mississippi River where you divide out the Great Plains from the Great Lakes region. The Great Lakes region isn't just geographically distinct from the rest but was the federally designated old Northwest, so they were developed fairly similarly (i.e. survey townships/towns). The only other way to divide its cities are those huge or large manufacturing ports on the lake that grew to national or international prominence in the first half of the last century (and those near-lake urban areas that grew to serve them: Akron, Flint...) and those cities which remained until relatively recently large, regional distribution centers.

There really isn't anything useful to be gained by a state-line cut between Ohio and Indiana. It doesn't make sense.

How about taking a look at the name "midwest"?

It really is an old term, going back to the days when the west was defined as anything west of the Mississippi. So are Minnesota and Missouri really western states? I wish we could change the term midwest to "northcentral", which is really what it is today. However, I understand that changing such long-time names is not likely.

To me, in late 2010, the midwest, is the Rocky Mountain region. Again, just for fun...I realize these terms won't change anytime soon.

Xusein said:

Probably because of deindustrialization, to answer the question.

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Bingo. That simple. Ohio, Michigan, Upstate New York, and Pennsylvania is one of the county's largest regions of hardcore industry (if not the largest). Going west, less about industry, more about agriculture. Everybody eats, not everybody wants American cars. Minneapolis wins. Of course, smaller, more homogeneous places west of the Mississippi have diversified their palette (namely, Omaha, Des Moines, Minneapolis, Kansas City) whereas older, more manufacturing-reliant cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Dayton, and Flint have had to diversify quick with a draining population.

Simplified, of course (we all know Chicago, Milwaukee, etc have been industrial powerhouses as well) but it gets the point across.

And there is no way Indianapolis is "western" Midwest, even using the Great Lakes as a reference.

pwalker said:

How about taking a look at the name "midwest"?

It really is an old term, going back to the days when the west was defined as anything west of the Mississippi. So are Minnesota and Missouri really western states? I wish we could change the term midwest to "northcentral", which is really what it is today. However, I understand that changing such long-time names is not likely.

To me, in late 2010, the midwest, is the Rocky Mountain region. Again, just for fun...I realize these terms won't change anytime soon.

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I've used the term "The North" for years. West Coast, East Coast/Northeast, North, and the South. The term "Midwest" makes no sense in today's America.

All of the Midwestern States have some form of the civil/survey towns/townships. In fact, that's what separates the "North" from the "South" and "West", and why states like Delaware and Maryland are and should be considered "Southern".

Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas are the only states that use some form of "town" government.

Every other state including what are increasingly considered "northern" states like Maryland and Delaware have always had largely unorganized sub-county land. Granted, some of the more rural areas of the Midwest (particularly the Dakotas, and parts of Minnesota and Nebraska) do have officially unincorporated territories, but that is only after town governments dissolved in the years since statehood. And even then, the Census Bureau treats a "UT" basically the same as a town for statistical purposes.

So while the main divisions of the nation are really "North", "South", and "West", the "North" is usually divided into two sections because of their historically large populations compared to the other two regions. The "Northeast" and the "Midwest". Though the area was originally the "Northwest", after the U.S. expanded to the Pacific it didn't make geographic sense, so the next best option was to call it the "Midwest".

hudkina said:

Every other state including what are increasingly considered "northern" states like Maryland and Delaware have always had largely unorganized sub-county land. Granted, some of the more rural areas of the Midwest (particularly the Dakotas, and parts of Minnesota and Nebraska) do have officially unincorporated territories, but that is only after town governments dissolved in the years since statehood.

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i don't know about the rest of the midwest, but we have unincorporated areas in illinois. not too long ago i was working on a project in unincorporated cook county, and because there was no local jurisdiction, we had to obtain building permits directly from the county itself, so does that mean that illinois is now a southern state too?

I always find the discussion of what or where the "midwest" is very interesting.

As a native of northern MN, I've never considered myself a midwesterner. To me "midwest" always meant farms and tractors - and we didn't have either. We had lakes, forests, mines, taconite plants, logging, Great Lakes shipping, moose, wolves, bears...and hockey. We were from the Northland. The midwest started somewhere west and south of the "cities" but definitely didn't include places like Duluth, the Arrowhead, Border Country, or the Iron Range.

We're an interesting state in that regard. I always have to laugh when people describe Minnesota as farm country or associate it with the Great Plains. That's just so foreign to me. Likewise, someone from Redwood Falls or Albert Lea would probably laugh at being lumped in with the northwoods or the Great Lakes.

Bringing it back to the discussion of economic success, I'd say we're equally divided. The industrial northeast (Duluth and the Iron Range) trend with places like Detroit and Pittsburgh and have suffered through some very tough times recently. The agricultural south and western parts of the state have done much better by comparison, posting very low unemployment rates similar to those in North and South Dakota. The Twin Cities probably fall somewhere in the middle.

In Illinois, especially in the Chicagoland area, the townships have a weak form of government (if any responsibilities at all), but they do still technically exist as sub-county divisions.

Cook County:
Chicago - 2,896,014 - 224.84 sq. mi.
Thornton TWP - 180,802 - 46.98 sq. mi.
Wheeling TWP - 155,834 - 35.90 sq. mi.
Proviso TWP - 155,831 - 29.68 sq. mi.
Worth TWP - 135,623 - 31.85 sq. mi.
Maine TWP - 135,623 - 25.97 sq. mi.
Schaumburg TWP - 134,114 - 30.64 sq. mi.
Palatine TWP - 112,740 - 35.69 sq. mi.
Bremen TWP - 109,575 - 37.65 sq. mi.
Lyons TWP - 109,264 - 36.38 sq. mi.
Niles TWP - 102,638 - 21.25 sq. mi.
Elk Grove TWP - 94,969 - 27.83 sq. mi.
Leyden TWP - 94,685 - 19.84 sq. mi.
Bloom TWP - 93,901 - 46.59 sq. mi.
Orland TWP - 91,418 - 35.74 sq. mi.
Cicero TWP - 85,616 - 5.85 sq. mi.
Hanover TWP - 83,471 - 33.50 sq. mi.
Northfield TWP - 82,880 - 34.30 sq. mi.
Evanston TWP - 74,239 - 7.75 sq. mi.
Rich TWP - 67,623 - 36.36 sq. mi.
New Trier TWP - 56,716 - 16.02 sq. mi.
Berwyn TWP - 54,016 - 3.89 sq. mi.
Palos TWP - 53,419 - 33.91 sq. mi.
Oak Park TWP - 52,524 - 4.70 sq. mi.
Stickney TWP - 38,673 - 12.51 sq. mi.
Norwood Park TWP - 26,176 - 3.67 sq. mi.
Calumet TWP - 22,374 - 4.48 sq. mi.
Lemont TWP - 18,002 - 20.40 sq. mi.
Riverside TWP - 15,704 - 4.02 sq. mi.
Barrington TWP - 14,026 - 34.98 sq. mi.
River Forest TWP - 11,635 - 2.51 sq. mi.
TOTAL - 5,376,741 - 945.68 sq. mi.

In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Chicago is the only incorporated city in Illinois that is considered a "sub-county division". Everything else is a separate level.

^ oh, you're talking about townships. yeah, they're largely meaningless in illinois (at least in cook county anyway), except sometimes for demarcating school district boundaries and stuff like that. they exist as lines on a map; they don't exist as real, incorporated municipal bodies, which is why illinois counties have significant bits of unincorporated land administered directly under the jurisdiction of the county government itself.