nufacturing is making a comeback — at least inside an incubator on the city’s Near West Side.
The Fulton-Carroll Center notched a sizable jump in the number of industrial startups that moved in last year, and enough manufacturing entrepreneurs are knocking on its doors this year that the center is considering buying another building.
“We are turning people away,” said Steve DeBretto, executive director of the Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago, which runs the center, a few blocks north of the United Center.
Howard Wial, executive director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said data show a small increase in the number of manufacturing companies since the recession, and Illinois is part of that trend.
The incubator’s growth is welcomed in a state that has hemorrhaged more than 330,000 manufacturing jobs since the late 1990s.
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