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Longtime readers know that I grew up around Rochester, N.Y., back in the '70s and '80s. It was never an especially glamorous city, but for a while it had a pretty solid industrial base, mostly in the form of Kodak and Xerox. I’ve since followed its fortunes from afar, moving through the various emotional stages that adults go through when they leave where they grew up: first relief at getting out, followed by a kind of emotional distancing; then a vague sort of curiosity; and now an appreciation for what it had, and has. There’s no shame in a Red Wings game or a garbage plate.
I’m not spilling any secrets when I say that Kodak fell on hard times as film photography was supplanted by digital. Kodak’s story was specific to Rochester, but variations on that story hit small and medium-size cities all over. When we lived near Springfield, Mass., one of my coworkers said in all seriousness that Springfield never recovered after Indian Motorcycles closed in the 1950s. The decline of the Syracuses or Daytons of the world matters to those who live or lived there, of course, but it has been part of a larger trend of prosperity concentrating in a smallish number of places. As the top dozen or so cities in the country have pulled away from the rest economically, young people starting out have faced a frustrating choice: either go where the jobs are and pay far too much to live there, or stay where housing is cheap and try, desperately, to put together a career. Boston has great salaries and silly rents; Rochester has great rents, but good salaries aren’t so common.
Richard Florida has made a career of noting that even as communications technology has offered the prospect of working from anywhere, wealth has concentrated geographically into a very few places. Where Tom Friedman claimed that the world is flat, Florida countered that it’s actually spiky and getting spikier. And for the last few decades, Florida has won the argument.
As someone who has spent most of his life living in places that the rest of the country treats as afterthoughts, I’ve found the accuracy of Florida’s diagnosis puzzling. Why do businesses keep going where office space is so expensive? Florida’s answer has been the concentration of talent. If you’re starting a company that needs lots of good software people, you go where the good software people are. Those places become magnets -- Silicon Valley leaps to mind -- drawing generations of talent away from Terre Haute or Utica. Advantages compound, and places that export talent fall farther behind.
That’s probably why this piece from The New York Times struck me as hard as it did. Now that so many businesses have been forced by COVID-19 to allow people to work from home, they’re discovering that many people can, and it’s fine. In some cases, it’s better. Suddenly, office space in Manhattan doesn’t seem quite as crucial as it once did.
To the extent that production changes to allow more working from home, it suddenly becomes possible for someone living in Harrisburg or Lansing to work for a company in New York City. It becomes possible to avoid the devil’s bargain of punishingly high rent for a high salary. If you only have to show up at HQ once in a while, otherwise Zooming in from wherever, then you can live, well, wherever. Suddenly the smaller cities of the world stand a chance. The incentive for the company is saving the cost and hassle of expensive office space, and possibly of saving some on salaries. The same salary goes a lot farther in Buffalo than in Brooklyn. If Zooming (or its equivalent) starts to become more normal, then places with amenities and charm, but little industry, could start to revive.
Admittedly, changes that seem inevitable sometimes fade quickly. As the article notes, some people made similar predictions of companies leaving the city after Sept. 11. The difference, though, is that this time the technology exists to make it workable. You might not need to be physically in the same place as the clusters of workers you want.
From a community college perspective, this could change the “workforce development” part of the mission considerably. Right now, most successful workforce development programs are focused tightly on local needs. But what if living locally didn’t have to involve working locally? As long as folks have good internet access, they can be wherever. The world can start to flatten, finally.
It’s early days. American culture has a gift for amnesia; a few years from now, this period may be remembered as a brief hiccup in the continued polarization of wealth. But it might not. On the consumption side, there has long been an argument for escaping from Palo Alto. Now, for the first time, there’s an argument on the production side. It’s overdue.
I miss Red Wings games. The next generation shouldn’t have to.
