NPR.
In a lot of ways, the economy of Syracuse, New York, is your classic Rust Belt story.
A city that was once a thriving hub of manufacturing.
But the past few decades has seen employers leave, population decline, and growing poverty.
But in 2022, something happened that many think could reverse those decades of decline.
Micron, a huge manufacturer of semiconductor chips,
announced plans to build one of the country's largest memory chip plants just outside the city.
Micron estimates that it will invest up to $100 billion.
Massive, massive impact.
And you're doing this in a community that has not meaningfully grown in the past 60 years.
Ben Sayo is a longtime Syracuse resident and president of the Center State Corporation for Economic Opportunity,
which is an organization that helped land the Micron deal.
How does it feel to see this project underway?
It feels fantastic.
It's also scary as hell, to be honest.
We're no longer a Rust Belt community.
We're a new growth community.
And we're beginning to deal with all of the...
Positive and negative implications that come along with being in a new growth space.
And the project has especially big implications for the region's housing market.