Warning: Small Midwestern cities are dying, speaker says

By Seth Slabaugh, Star Press

seths@muncie.gannett.com

MUNCIE -- Not all of the Midwest's small cities will survive globalization, according to the keynote speaker at the sixth annual Small Cities Conference late last week.

They won't exactly disappear, said Richard Longworth, a former foreign correspondent for The Chicago Tribune and United Press International.

"But a lot of them will decline into backwaters, cut out of the global conversation, lived in by people who are too poor, too uneducated to afford anything better," Longworth said. Some will become ghettos, he added.