PREVIEW: The Friday Edition. - How does revitalization work?

Summary

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Tangle Podcast Episode Summary

Episode: PREVIEW: The Friday Edition – How Does Revitalization Work?
Host: Isaac Saul
Date: June 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Tangle dives into the challenges and mechanisms of revitalization in distressed small and mid-sized American towns, particularly those in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Hosted by Isaac Saul, the podcast uses personal narrative and concrete examples to explore how towns hit hard by industry decline attempt to rebuild their economies, strengthen communities, and create opportunities for future generations. The discussion specifically focuses on the origins and deployment of revitalization funding, the strategic pillars required for effective recovery, and features real-world examples of success and ongoing efforts.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Personal Roots in Appalachia & The Need for Revitalization

• [03:29] Isaac Saul: Saul opens the main segment by recounting his family's deep ties to the coal industry in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
  • The 1990s saw a boom, but this was quickly derailed by industry changes—automation, emergence of natural gas, and external competition—leading to a sharp economic and social decline.
  • A personal anecdote:

    "Remember, if you work hard, you can get big checks like this, too. Coal was, and I guess still is, in our DNA."
    (Isaac Saul, 03:51)

• Loss of jobs led to increased poverty, population decline, and a sense of abandonment paralleling the Rust Belt’s economic collapse.

The “Rural-Urban Divide” is Not New

• The narrative situates the plight of these towns within a larger, decades-old historical context.
  • Over 79 million Americans (about 1 in 4) live in small to mid-sized cities, many of which have endured repeated cycles of economic hardship.
  • Cites Ronald Reagan's 1981 inaugural address on the nationwide issues of unemployment and economic stagnation.

    "Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity."
    (Ronald Reagan, quoted by Isaac Saul, 05:31)

Where Does Revitalization Funding Come From?

• Multiple, intertwined sources of funding are discussed:
  • Federal: Economic Development Administration (EDA), Small Business Administration (SBA), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Department of Transportation.
  • State: Earmarked funds for targeted cities.
  • Private: Foundations, local efforts.

• The complexity of navigating these overlapping programs is highlighted.

  "The knot of potential programs is so tangled that a smaller city like Johnson City could be forgiven for not knowing exactly where to start the process."
  (Isaac Saul, 07:44)

Strategic Vision: The Three Pillars of Revitalization

• Revitalization strategies are generally built around:
  1. Workforce Development: Training and retaining workers for modern industries.
  2. Community Development: Quality of life improvements—affordable housing, infrastructure, beautification.
  3. Business Development: Incentives for private sector growth.

  • "Small to mid sized cities need to have a strategic vision that directs their recovery."
    (Isaac Saul, 08:14)

Case Study: Workforce Development in Dayton, Ohio

• Dayton's 2020 Vision Plan (adopted in 1999) aims to reverse population and industry loss by pivoting toward STEM employment.
  • Partnerships: Sinclair College and United Grinding created a 4-year apprenticeship; University of Dayton collaboration for low-tuition, in-demand training.
  • Notably, almost 80% of 250 graduates have stayed in the area.
  • The Re Entry program at Sinclair prepares formerly incarcerated adults for in-demand jobs, boasting a 92% completion rate—funded by Pell Grants (an innovative use of educational funding).

  • "These programs are all focused on small sectors of the workforce, but they combine to have a large effect."
    (Isaac Saul, 13:14)

• Memorable Example:
  • Mary Evans, a Re Entry graduate, after serving a sentence, became a founding member of the Journalism Lab and created the podcast "Re Entry" to support those adjusting post-incarceration.
• Combined outcomes: From 2011-2018, Dayton saw a 4.6% increase in job growth and over 10% rise in monthly earnings.

Workforce Development is Multifaceted and Collaborative

• Kalamazoo, Michigan: Edison Early Childhood Education Career Pathway—a program filling critical child care vacancies while offering apprenticeships.

• Insight from Professor David Bosenko (Northwestern University, public economics expert):

  "Successful workforce development programs require collaboration between the city, local industry, and academic institutions to ensure that workers land in jobs that match their skills and and align with their interests."
  (Paraphrased by Isaac Saul, 14:34)

• The mosaic of narrowly focused programs—often funded by a mix of public and private sources—is emphasized as a replicable model.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• The challenge of revitalization:

  "...understanding how to get the money is only half of the battle."
  (Isaac Saul, 07:39)

• On the general approach:

  "Revitalization efforts can take decades to complete, so most strategies are broken down into phases that build on one pillar before moving on to the next pillar."
  (Isaac Saul, 10:51)

• The importance of partnership:

  "Workforce development initiatives can offer more than just training... none of these programs are transforming the workforce in large numbers by themselves. However, they provide a framework for how to effectively connect potential workers with local businesses that are hiring—something that larger government-backed initiatives often get wrong."
  (Isaac Saul, 14:35)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|-------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:29 | Personal family history in Appalachia, coal, economic collapse | | 04:30 | Rural-urban divide in historical context, Reagan quote | | 06:45 | Where revitalization funds come from; federal/state/private mix | | 07:44 | Complexity in navigating funding programs | | 08:14 | Need for a strategic vision: workforce, community, business dev. | | 10:51 | Revitalization as a phased, multi-decade process | | 11:00 | Case study: Dayton, Ohio: STEM focus & apprenticeship programs | | 13:30 | Dayton's job growth statistics, impacts of combined programs | | 14:34 | Professor Bosenko on collaboration for effective programs |

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Tone & Style

The episode blends a personal, reflective tone (Saul's family stories) with clear, non-partisan analysis of policy realities. It’s informative but also empathetic to the challenges facing small communities.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This installment serves as a compelling introduction to the realities of community revitalization in America’s distressed regions. Using real-life case studies, personal narratives, and expert analysis, Isaac Saul lays out the nuts and bolts of how government, local businesses, non-profits, and individuals are slowly steering these towns toward recovery. The show is a reminder that revitalization is never simple or quick—but a careful mosaic of strategies, funding sources, and partnership.

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To access the full episode and future content, consider a subscription at readtangle.com.

Transcript

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[Isaac Saul]

From executive producer Isaac Saul. This is Tangle.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Pod podcast. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and I'm just here for a quick introduction. At Tangle, we don't discriminate against good ideas based on where they come from. A person on our sales team can have a fantastic pitch for an editorial change that we should make. And just because it came from the sales side and not a senior editor, doesn't mean we're going to ignore it. I've learned over the years that I have the great privilege of working with a lot of brilliant people with smart ideas who have interesting things to say, who can also write even though they aren't on our editorial team. So when Candida hall, our head of product and featured employee in the October 2025 edition of Press Pass, pitched me the idea for a story about small town revitalization and her experiences in Appalachia, I was immediately intrigued. Over the last few months, Candida has been working on this story with our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, and today I'm thrilled to share it with our audience. I hope you all enj.

In mid July 1997, I was a carefree 10 year old sitting between my granny and my aunt and our little Ford Ranger, waiting to drop off the week's paychecks to the couple of drivers employed by our modest trucking company. Roughly 428 million tons of coal were being produced every year in Appalachia in the 1990s, and we were in the midst of a boom. During a particularly good month, my aunt leaned over and said, every word covered with a hint of pride and elbow grease. Remember, if you work hard, you can get big checks like this, too. Coal was, and I guess still is, in our DNA. My family owned a couple of trucks to transport coal from the mines to processing plants. My dad drove one of them until he opened his own garage, repairing coal trucks from all over the county. My papas, my uncles and neighbors joined the nearly 13,000 other coal mine employees in the area in the early aughts. Downtown Whitesburg, Kentucky, where we lived, was not only beautiful, it was full of places to gather, eat and shop. But as I got a little older, things started to change. The explosion of natural gas and increased automation made other areas a lot more attractive than southeastern Kentucky for energy companies. The checks became less a source of pride and more a reason for an apology as the number of coal loads decreased. Whispers and hushed tones about another mine closing, about our neighbor being out of work, and the did you hear that Johnny's dad went to jail for selling dope? Followed by the obligatory to shame started replacing the laughter at backyard greetings. Our neighbors started moving. Mines kept closing. In 2016, Letcher County's unemployment rate set at 10.7%, and the population had decreased by about 26% from its high in 1981. During that 2016 election cycle, it was impossible to escape talk of the rural urban divide and how people in rural areas were being left behind. But Americans had been left behind long before 2016. By 1981, the Rust Belt had lost nearly 30% of total jobs over three decades and was suffering from higher unemployment rates in the rest of the country. Amidst the nationwide recession that year, Ronald Reagan stood before the nation to deliver his inaugural address where he vowed to get the government out of the way so that our economy could begin recovering from a period of high inflation and unemployment. In one of the more memorable lines, he declared, idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity. The people left behind in today's economy live in areas all over the country, not just rural counties. More than 79 million Americans, or roughly 1 in 4, reside in a small to mid sized city. These small to mid sized cities include cities with up to 150 people like Dayton, Ohio, and towns of 50,000 like Hickory, North Carolina. Many of those cities have endured multiple periods of hardship. The Rust Belt decline, the manufacturing shock caused by open trade with China, and just general urban decay defined as a lack of investment in infrastructure, a loss of population, high unemployment rates and a slide into poverty. These days, walking downtown in my new home of Johnson City, Tennessee, an Appalachian small city in the midst of revitalization efforts and thinking about Reagan's speech, I wonder how revitalization happens at all. What motivates private industries, or any company for that matter, to set up shop in areas that have lost a chunk of their workforce or population? And beyond that, where does the money for those efforts come from? Funding to support distressed communities can come from many places, but the federal government's primary vehicle for contributions is the Economic Development Administration, or the eda. Every year, the government pours millions of dollars into the eda, which is the federal administration within the Department of Commerce that sets the administration's economic development priorities for the term. The EDA then channels its funds into communities through a myriad of support programs. For the last 14 years, recovery efforts for distressed communities have been on that list for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Separately, the government also authorizes loans for startups and small businesses through the Small Business Administration, or the sba. The SBA is an independent agency that helps small businesses and entrepreneurs succeed. Other revitalization funds are provided through less obvious departments like the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or hud, and the Department of Transportation. But funding doesn't just come from the federal government. State governments earmark revitalization funds specifically for different cities, and a range of privately funded programs are also available to support similar efforts. The knot of potential programs is so tangled that a smaller city like Johnson City could be forgiven for not knowing exactly where to start the process. And understanding how to get the money is only half of the battle. Small to mid sized cities need to have a strategic vision that directs their recovery. These strategies will vary from town to town, but they're generally built on the following three pillars. Workforce development, which is the strategies taken to create, train or advance a workforce to meet modern industry demands Community development, which entails improving the quality of life for citizens through affordable housing initiatives, infrastructure improvements and beautification efforts and then business development, which is incentivizing private sector growth with programs like tax breaks to bolster local business or recruit new ones foreign.

We'll be right back after this quick break.

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[Isaac Saul]

Revitalization efforts can take decades to complete, so most strategies are broken down into phases that build on one pillar before moving on to the next pillar. 1 Workforce Development Dayton, Ohio provides a great example of a small to mid sized city that is working to address its most acute workforce needs while staying true to an overall strategic vision. Around 1999, the city government adopted a 2020 vision plan to reverse the population and industry loss it experienced in the 80s. Part of the city's strategy is to become a hub for science, technology, engineering and mathematics employment, also known as stem, by leaning into its industrial history. For Dayton, this has meant meeting potential workers where they are through a collection of small programs. In 2023, local community college Sinclair College partnered with machine manufacturer United Grinding to create a four year apprenticeship program. The first cohort consisted of four apprentices who will soon graduate with hands on training and an associate's degree in automation and control technology from Sinclair. Four graduates is of course a drop in the bucket. But apprenticeship programs similar to Sinclair's partnership are gaining popularity all over the country. In Washington, D.C. the U.S. department of labor just introduced an $85 million grant program to promote apprenticeships as a way to strengthen the workforce and meet labor shortages. The United Grinding program is not Dayton's only apprenticeship program. In December 2024, the city launched the Employers Workforce Coalition to fill labor gaps through workforce development, and it has set ambitious goals for growing the pipeline for STEM based education programs. The coalition produced new partnerships, including one between the University of Dayton and Sinclair College that offers low tuition, in demand training and some career guidance. The program's already begun to help retain talent in the Dayton area. Almost 80% of the 250 people that have graduated are still in the region. Workforce development programs aren't only focused on higher education. Sinclair College created a Re Entry program to prepare incarcerated adults for in demand jobs after their release from prison. The program boasts a 92% completion rate and uses government funds from an unexpected source, the Department of Education's Pell Grant program. One graduate of the Re Entry program, Mary Evans, served a 10 year prison sentence before becoming a founding member of the Journalism Lab, which is an organization that encourages people to become more involved in their community while highlighting career paths in journalism. She also created and hosted the podcast Re Entry, which was broadcast on Dayton's NPR affiliate station as a way to give voice to others attempting to readjust after incarceration. These programs are all focused on small sectors of the workforce, but they combine to have a large effect. The city reported a 4.6 increase in job growth from 2011 to 2018, accompanied by an over 10% increase in monthly earnings. And while workforce programs aren't the sole source of that growth, they likely contributed to the overall success. Workforce development initiatives can offer more than just training. Together in partnership with the state, Kalamazoo, Michigan launched the Edison ECE Career Pathway. The program serves two expanding child care programs for working parents and offering an apprentice style program for individuals who want to pursue a career in early childhood development. The program has already filled more than 30 vacancies in child care services, which is no easy feat. None of these programs are transforming the workforce in large numbers by themselves. However, they provide a framework for how to effectively connect potential workers with local businesses that are hiring something that larger government backed initiatives often get wrong. According to Northwestern Professor David Bosenko, who is an expert on public economics. Successful workforce development programs require collaboration between the city, local industry, and academic institutions to ensure that workers land in jobs that match their skills and and align with their interests. And, of course, they still have decades of economic stagnation to work against. But when they work, workforce development programs often look like Dayton's and Kalamazoos, a mosaic of narrowly defined programs funded by private donors, the city itself, statewide budget initiatives, federal funds, or just some mix of all of these sources.

[John Lowell]

Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription. Or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription, which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. I will join you again for the daily podcast. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'.

[Isaac Saul]

All.

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[Isaac Saul]

Our Executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our Executive producer is John Lowell. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsey Knuth and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at Link.

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