Deindustrialization and Economic Shift

First, the population. The city of Akron counted 190,469 people in the 2020 census, and the Census Bureau's estimate for July 2025 is 189,691, a slow decline. The metro area around it, Summit and Portage counties, counted about 702,000 in 2020, roughly flat since 2010.

Now the employers. These are among the largest, and deliberately in no particular order, because no ranking is verified: Summa Health at about 8,000 people, Cleveland Clinic Akron General, FirstEnergy (headquartered in Akron, with about 11,200 employees company-wide at the end of 2025), Akron Children's Hospital, InfoCision, and GOJO Industries, the maker of Purell and itself a spinoff of the rubber industry.

GOJO carries rubber's DNA rather than its product. So does the University of Akron, which enrolls about 14,800 students and runs a nationally ranked polymer science program, a direct institutional legacy of rubber. The tire manufacturing left the city. The chemistry did not.

One sentence holds the whole transition. Goodyear is still headquartered in Akron, and the only tires it still makes there are racing tires, among them the hand-built tires for NASCAR.

The industry's name outlived its plants in odd places too. The Black Keys formed in Akron in 2001. Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney are both graduates of Firestone High School, named after the tire company. The same corner of Ohio produced Devo, which formed in 1973 out of Kent State, thirty minutes from Akron, with members who grew up in the city. Its de-evolution thesis is tied to the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970, which killed two friends of member Gerald Casale.