Even though small towns and communities don’t have enough job opportunities for everyone living there:
I’ve always wondered why they don’t build more industrial parks around those areas (warehouses, factories, manufacturers, etc)?
Despite how people feel about working these types of jobs, I don’t see an issue with companies creating more job opportunities around those areas, since I can’t imagine living in a small town with limited job opportunities, which is why people tend to move out of their hometowns for that reason
Because it’d cost money to do so that the companies don’t want to spend. Sure, the town might benefit, but it’s not the town making the decision. Why does the company want to do this?
Warehouses, factories, and manufacturers need to be located near transportation. Railways, the Interstate freeway system, ports, or all three are key in getting raw materials into the facility and finished products out to wholesalers/retailers/consumers. The harder it is to get stuff in and out, the less attractive those industrial parks are going to be. “Build it and they will come”? Not if they can’t get there easily and cheaply.
Industrial parks are located near small towns all across Upstate New York.
Siting a complex depends on a huge number of factors.
Cheapness of land is a major one, but cheap land is found pretty much everywhere. Access is nearly as important: industrial parks are typically located near major interstates or airports. Availability of suitable workers also matters; Amazon may just want warm bodies for warehouse jobs but many industrial sites call for skilled workers that small communities can’t supply.
The opposite side is that, like data centers, industrial parks tend to eat up large amounts of water and electricity. Truck traffic is often heavy and clog the local roads leading to the interstates. Communities have learned that they bring noise and pollution and they attend town meetings to protest any new development.
State and federal environmental laws play a big part. So do local taxes. And the demands that the developers make on small communities for tax relief can sink any amount of jobs that are created, especially in a modern automated world.
It’s sometimes surprising that any ever get built.
Why do data centers proliferate? Bribery, covert or overt, masked in various ways, and the ambitions of local politicians who want to seem big. Not to mention that having tens of billions of dollars helps them not sweat the small stuff the way that a warehouse has to.
Neither people nor jobs are interchangeable; there may not be a good fit between the local community and the jobs at the industrial estate. For that reason this plan might not work.
You can drive through Missouri on historic Route 66 and see small towns along the old Frisco railroad line that thrived with shoe factories, small engine plants, clothing mills, regional dairies, and other businesses. Pretty much everything that isn’t health care or education closed up in the 1970s-80s. The shoe factories moved offshore, the small engine plants moved to non-union states (or countries), the dairies consolidated into big dairies near big cities, and so it goes.
As the businesses dried up, the railroads sent fewer trains down the line, which meant shipping and distribution got slower and more expensive, making the small towns evern less attractive. Then the young people started moving out, depleting the available workforce.
The small town where my grandparents lived is trying to market itself as a tourist attraction on old US 66. Other towns in the area are trying to attract data centers. But they’re getting strong pushback from residents, and the data centers have a set of requirements not every town can match.
When I moved to Plano, Texas in 1988, there were some fairly significant areas on the east side of town with roads that didn’t go anywhere and empty fields everywhere. I thought it was silly at the time, but over the next few years that area got built up with a lot of commercial property. I ended up getting a job at one of those commercial properties after I graduated from high school.
Given the growth of Plano and other suburbs in the D/FW area at the time, I suspect the city planners had good reason to build those roads to nowhere. i.e. They planned for the growth and wanted to make sure the city got its revenue. Here’s the rub though, this isn’t going to work for a lot of towns here in the United States. “If you build it they will come,” is not a sound business strategy.
You can see a similar story throughout Arkansas as well. Mrs. Odesio is a native, and when we travel around the state, especially the part she grew up in, she’ll point out that this town used to have a factory that made shoes, this other one made seats for fishing boats, and still another one that made parts railroad cars. Most of those places closed down in the 70s and 80s though a few are still chugging along today.
My town is a smaller farming community near Rochester NY. My dad was on the town and county Chambers of Commerce for years. He spent 5 years trying to convince the area to allow a cellulisic alcohol plant to come in, buy the wasted farm product left after harvest [bean plants, pea plants, corn stalks, anything not normally able to be sold] to be turned into industrial alcohol [not the drinking kind] and no go. It would have bought waste green compost [for lack of better description] turned it into a sellable product, and provided IIRC 150 jobs [not bad for a town community of under 5000 people]
What is the line about leading a horse to water? You can try to get a community to improve the local jobs, add to the tax base, but nope.Bad case of NIMBY [not in my back yard] no matter how beneficial it would be.
I’ll springboard off all that to point out something for folks not real up on Dallas area geography and history.
The straight line distance from downtown Dallas to downtown Plano is 20 miles. Dallas was founded in 1841, and Plano a couple years later. The distance between them has not changed since. What has changed is everything else.
In 1988 the Dallas area metroblob was a bunch smaller and less populous than it is today. The Dallas metroblob now is ~8.5M people and the fastest-growing metroblob in the USA. This boom has been going on with only minor blips since the1980s
Plano had been a sleepy crossroads in 1940, home to barely 1000 people. And 40 years later (1980s) was just inside the outer perimeter of suburbia. And has now 40 more years later, been fully engulfed by urban / suburban growth. The closest edge of open land today that is not constrained by reservoirs or the surrounding public-owned watershed is another 20-ish miles away, and in some cases more like 30. And that’s measuring the closest edges.
Plano is not, and never has been a small town in the boonies. It has always been a small town near a bustling city by the standards of the day. Now it’s fully enclosed within Greater Dallas and has been for 2 generations of workers. It is a bustling city.
And that’s the other side of the equation. A small town immediately adjacent to a growing metroblob has a bright future if they can (ref @aruvqan_myers just above) embrace the transition from once-rural village to metroblob member.
But the same rural village 50 or 100 miles further away? Fuggeddaboudit! At least until the edge of the metroblob has grown to within 20 miles of them too. And the aging residents are willing to embrace that transition.
They did. Just about every town in Ohio large enough to be an actual place has either a pre-planned industrial park or an area where the relatively modern light-industrial facilities have clustered by default. And they usually have plenty of empty space, indicating that a new industrial park is not necessary to satisfy the demand.
The sad truth about my town is from the 60s til I moved out in 1980 [roughly] it had 3 main employers. Chemical factory I worked at [as did my dad and brother] an industrial battery manufactory, and a printing shop [the industrial kind, like tags, manilla stuff, not resumes and photo stuff] It isn’t like it was just an Agway, an IGA and a bowling alley [though it did have all those]
Just stupidly short sighted. Though it did function as a bedroom community for Rochester.
Plano is a textbook case of planning for future expansion. Gets written up a lot as a model for the Southwest.
The good articles also mention the problems that resulted from enormous quick expansion, but to be fair, the giant booms of Chicago, New York, and Detroit at the turn of the 20th century had both pluses and minuses as well and all anyone remembers these days is the numeric growth.
I have a friend who lives in a small town in Connecticut. Amazon wanted to build a large facility there, and the townsfolk debated. It was more tax revenue, and a source of jobs. But it also needed a lot of resources. For instance, the small town has no police department, and volunteer fire fighters. They would need actual police, fire, and EMT services. They would need to build roads and other infrastructure (water, sewer, electric). The jobs wouldn’t be great jobs, and probably wouldn’t actually keep a lot of the younger generation in town.
Now if Amazon had said that instead of a gift of no property taxes forever, we instead agree to fund the police and fire department forever, as long as the townies pitch in a little, they might have gotten a better reception.
The problem of course is that each town only has one town to give up, whereas Amazon can go shopping across dozens of towns to find the lowest bidder.
Safety and environmental regulations, for one. You do see that a lot in places with loose regulations like Texas, leading to news stories about “town flattened by industrial accident”.