United States | A tale of two cities

What Buckeye and Youngstown say about America’s economy

A boom town and a bust town show surprising signs of convergence

Buckeye’s master planning in action
|Buckeye, Arizona and Youngstown, Ohio

“WHEN I WAS born, the population here was 1,200, and that included every dog, chicken and cat in the community,” Jackie Meck says with a soft chuckle. Mr Meck is now in his 80s, and his city, Buckeye, has come a long way. A whiff of manure from nearby dairy farms still hangs over the main street, but giant new housing developments sprawl out for miles into the scrubby Arizona desert, making it one of America’s fastest-growing cities. Buckeye today has a population of 100,000, up 15-fold over the past two decades. Its planners want at least 1m.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “A tale of two cities”

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