John Austin is a man with a mission: to revive the Rust Belt. The former president of the Michigan State Board of Education, he is also a researcher at the Brookings Institution and has been the director of multiple nonprofit organizations and government commissions. In 2006 he produced a plan for Rust Belt regional revitalization. Now, in a series of blog posts for Brookings, Austin has been evaluating which local development strategies have worked, and which have failed.
