Heartland Cities Are Stuck. Washington Can Help Them.

As America’s big “superstar” cities pull away from the rest of the country, the former industrial hubs and rural towns left behind in today’s tech-driven economy are doing whatever they can to compete—and it isn’t always healthy. The contest to host Amazon’s second headquarters epitomized their problem. As I and my Brookings Institution colleagues Mark Muro and Bill Galston noted in a recent report, the U.S. economy suffers from a stark geographic divide.