The General Motors Corp. plant in the Dayton suburb of Moraine, Ohio, is a forest of smokestacks that form the nerve center of this industrial community built along the banks of the Great Miami River. Each day, about 2,400 workers file inside to assemble various GMC sport utility vehicles. But some time before the summer of 2010, the Moraine plant will be no more: It is one of four that GM announced Tuesday it will close. And there are fears here that the people ? and the city's fortunes ? will disappear with it. The loss of the SUV plant will leave behind a bleak landscape for the surrounding community, an area scarred by a dwindling population, high poverty rates and one of the nation's hardest-hit pockets of the housing slump. "It's going to be a ghost town," said Debbie Miller, 52, who owns The Upper Deck, a restaurant and bar next to the plant. "There are no jobs here. I don't know what they're going to do."
See "In Ohio suburb once thought of as a smaller Detroit, loss of GM plant only adds to the pain", James Hannah, Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 3, 2008