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Regarding Flexible cities, Seattle is a great example. Back in the day, Boeing was THE game in town. Now, if they left, or folded, it would hurt, but the city would survive thanks to Starbucks, Amazon, & Microsoft, and the hordes of other smaller firms that are here because of them.
How lucky was Seattle that Bill Gates wanted to return home? Otherwise, Albuquerque might be a tech hub.
More likely that MicroSoft would be a small, insignificant company.
Seattle is a great example.
I suspect that Seattle’s status as a big city in a no income tax state played a role. In my drunker moments, I subscribe a small bit of the more recent success to the sitcom Frasier leaving the impression of Seattle as a bourgeois city. Mind you, the lack of an income tax, the tolerable weather (no tornadoes, no hurricanes, no blizzards, no 105 degree summers), and low crime rates are probably better reasons.
Jes Howen McBride says that small homes make for better cities.
Even without the somewhat claptrapish nature of the article, apodments and other small apartments are a great way to provide a market for people who want urban living, but don’t want the hassle of dealing with a roommate. I’d wish that they’d become more viable concepts along with three bedroom apartments for those who want to have children in an urban area.
John Tammy argues that cities persevere not by keeping industry as much as through flexibility.
The problem with that argument is that while New York shed much of its industry, we still haven’t found a substitute for keeping lots of unskilled and lowly educated men good wages. The replacements for these firms employ people at high wages, but a sizable chunk of the employees are from out of town, and the services that many of these people use aren’t exactly paying high wages in certain cases.
OTOH, Detroit is a city that has shed much of it’s population, and the industry in question has shrunk in terms of overall capacity, yet sending what’s left of the plants away isn’t going to magically make a city with terrible winters, poor governance, and high crime more attractive. Philadelphia is basically New York without money, and they’ve lost considerable chunks of their industrial output. Their tax rates are lower, and the cost of living by East Coast standards is low, yet nobody talks about that city in the same way in terms of regeneration as New York, Boston, or even Pittsburgh.
I think the argument is that Detroit should have tried to diversify a long time ago, not that they should kiss off the car companies now. They got caught in a spiral that’s hard to get out of. People and employers who w as NT some place less expensive have other places they can go, without the baggage.
In contrast, NYC didn’t diversify per se, but merely doubled down on FIRE. As I like to note, the bailouts weren’t just a bailout of Wall Street, but a de facto bailout of the NYC Metro Area along with NYS government. The so-called tech sector here is basically limited biotech from our non-profits and online ads and app development.
FWIW, I don’t think it’s so much that Detroit didn’t diversify as the domestic auto industry shrunk and shifted to increased Mexican production, but that it didn’t diversify in the 1920s. Some have argued that Houston may face this problem if oil prices stay low, but the city has diversified enough from mere oil services that it can get by with a weaker corporate presence from these firms.
FIRE?
It’s an acronym for:
Finance
Insurance
Real Estate
Those three are basically where the real money is to be made in NYC…
Detroit’s history over the last 50 years looks more like a case of “resource curse” than anything else.