The Rust Belt Reckoning: When the Tires Stopped Rolling

In the nineteen seventies, the radial tire finally arrived in the American market in force, and the companies based in Akron were caught on the wrong side of the technology. They had billions of dollars invested in factories, equipment, and supply chains built around the bias-ply tire. Switching would require abandoning most of that investment. Competitors who had already switched could undercut their prices and outlast their tires.

One by one, the plants began to close. Not all at once, which might have allowed for organized response. Slowly, quietly, a few hundred jobs here, a plant announcement there. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen ninety, Akron lost approximately thirty-five thousand manufacturing jobs. The city's population, which had reached two hundred ninety thousand in nineteen sixty, began shrinking. By two thousand twenty, it stood at roughly one hundred ninety-seven thousand.

In the late nineteen eighties, the acquisitions came: Continental, a German company, bought General Tire in nineteen eighty-seven. Japan's Bridgestone acquired Firestone in nineteen eighty-eight. France's Michelin absorbed B.F. Goodrich's tire operations in nineteen ninety. The companies that had defined Akron for a century were now headquartered in Tokyo, Paris, and Hanover.

Goodyear survived as an American company, but it too shed workers and shifted production elsewhere. The headquarters remained on East Market Street, but the sprawling plant floors that had once employed tens of thousands were largely gone.

What followed was a decades-long reinvention. Akron shifted toward polymer research, healthcare technology, and university-linked industry. The Polymer Science building at the University of Akron became a hub for materials research connected to the rubber industry's deep institutional knowledge. A city that had known how to make tires learned, slowly and unevenly, to make other things instead.