MSNBC Sets Up Watch on Elkhart, Indiana

Recently, a post here at the International Property Investment  web site about the small midwestern town of Elkhart, Indiana ruffled a few local feathers. Elkhart, Indiana is a place with many pleasant features and the lovely Saint Joseph river running through it, and apparently some people who grew up there have happy memories of the place and don’t really want to hear anything negative regarding it.

That’s understandable. We all like to keep our happiest memories, especially the ones associated with a home town in such a pastoral and quiet state.

But Elkhart Indiana also is a town that has one of the highest unemployment rates in the United States, and is losing manufacturing jobs at such a rapid rate that it has become the focus of a regular feature at MSNBC.com called The Elkhart Project.

I mention this here for a couple of reasons.

First, the fact that MSNBC set up a special web site to keep an eye on what happens in Elkhart, Indiana shows that the issues facing the midwest are national issues, not local opinions or biases. The midwest as a whole has lost ground in recent years because manufacturing has lost ground. When manufacturing  jobs leave an area, the tax base is degraded and cities can’t function properly. Real estate loses value. People move away.

Elkhart, Indiana has become emblematic of the loss of jobs and the steady erosion of the real estate market that provoked the current economic crisis, and as such is of great interest across the U.S., not just in Indiana.

All of which leads me to my second point: The fate of Elkhart, Indiana is in large measure the fate of the United States as a world power. If Elkhart comes back, the United States comes back. If it doesn’t, then what? If we aren’t the world’s banker, and we aren’t the world’s factory, what are we?

A country that doesn’t manufacture much, that can’t offer plentiful and decent-paying jobs to hard-working ordinary people, is not a country in which most investors are going to want to sink a lot of cash. MSNBC is watching Elkhart, Indiana for the same reason bankers and retired people are watching the stock market.

Wall Street and Main Street are joined at the hip in the U.S.: You can’t have recovery in one without recovery in the other.

An old saying used to advise that, “What’s good for Detroit is good for the nation.” Detroit is struggling too right now, and Detroit’s problems are all over the papers on a nightly basis. For that matter, papers themselves are struggling.

The canary in the coal mine however is a small town in Indiana with a river running through it; one that used to manufacture RVs and musical instruments and now depends somewhat more heavily on food banks and unemployment checks.

Say all you want about the DOW. We’ll know the U.S. is back when Elkhart, Indiana is back.