My new place of residence, La Crosse in Wisconsin, is another case in point. It grew as a lumber town around 140 years ago, and then as a manufacturing city into maybe the 1970s – air conditioners (Trane) and beer being the main products toward the end of that period. Air conditioners and beer are still produced, but less than before, such that the two biggest employers today are – drum roll – COLLEGES and HOSPITALS.
It does seem odd that an economy can sustain itself basically on people either being sick or being students, but that’s how it sort of feels. Not quite the dead-end economic trope of “everyone doing each other’s laundry,” but pretty darned close.
OK, I shouldn’t have said boring. Sorry. I consider the larger trend of manufacturing economies to service economies one of the handful of most important social/political/economic stories of my lifetime and it’s more interesting to me to look at the whole picture.
The specific question does have answers and they’re pretty much what I already gave. The UPMC Health System is the largest employer in Pittsburgh, with the UofP third. Cleveland Clinics is largest in Cleveland. Massachusetts General Hospital is the largest in Boston, so I don’t understand why you don’t think Boston fits. Brown University is largest in Providence. Yale University is largest in New Haven with Yale-New Haven Hospital third. Philadelphia’s top four are Jefferson Health System Inc, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Health System, and Temple University. As I said earlier, all these cities once had manufacturing economies.
This is the expected answer, part of a much larger trend. I’m still confident that even with your limit the answer is *almost *everywhere in the Rust Belt.
Troy, NY. Manufacturing city at the head of navigable Hudson river and port on the Erie canal. Shirt/clothing manufacturing at its heart. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RPI, is now the major player in town driving tech innovation incubators. You’ll also find a shrinking population correlating with the loss of manufacturing. Under the current president, RPI has greatly expanded it’s reach in the area.
Philadelphia used to have some large manufacturing plants. Budd comes to mind, but probably wasn’t the largest. I was astonished to discover some years ago that the largest single employer in Philadelphia is University of Pennsylvania. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Temple is second.
When I was growing up, Philadelphia was the third largest city in the US. I don’t know where it is now, but it has lost 25% of its 1950 population. It is not Detroit, but does have lots of abandoned housing.
> “X in, Y out” is common parlance for X taking over or becoming more important
> while Y becomes less important.
No, it isn’t. And in any case, there has been no influx of colleges into Rochester, Binghamton, and Syracuse. There has been no increase in the amount of people associated with colleges in those cities. The total population in them has decreased. The reason that it has decreased in each case is because industries have moved out of those cities and nothing has moved in.
I don’t see how you say that. These schools are not stagnant. They have increased the number of students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. They’ve added departments and whole schools, so their employment has increased over time.
Here, here.Re my reference to RPI above. The school expanded not just in students and programs, but in neighborhood development, job incubators and startups, and downtown rejuvenation.
I couldn’t find stats on how the number of students at SUNY Binghamton, SUNY Buffalo or the University of Rochester have grown over time, but Wikipedia has this for RPI:
1945: 1,604 students
1950: 3,987 students
1965: 5,232 students
2013: 6,995 students
The University of Rochester in particular had a totally standoffish relationship with the outside community in the 1960s, except that their endowment was getting fat on Xerox and Kodak stock.
When those stocks cratered and they started building up the medical college in the 1980s they started cautiously looking outward. I was part of their original meetings with city government when they were talking about building ties (and a literal bridge) across the river. Except that the fears of crime and invaders (gasp black people lived there) quashed that.
It took another 20 years and their emergence as the largest employer in the area and some different leadership to finally get their attention off campus. They finally developed some of the area across the river, built a collegetown (only took 80 years) that has revived an important neighborhood, and are getting involved with local education. None of that would or could have happened when Kodak ran the city.
Colleges everywhere have realized that separating town and gown will no longer work when they are targets at the top.
Just anecdotally…and we know what that’s worth…my father was chairman of an academic department at UB from 2007–2014. The number of faculty in his department almost doubled in that time. Aside from his amazing empire building (kidding), the school had gone through a major infrastructure expansion in the 70s-80s, the number of students had increased, increased alumni meant an increasing fundraising base as well as prominent alumni from his department bringing greater renown to the school…it’s a virtuous circle. And my dad’s in the pure sciences. I’m assuming/hoping it’s the same in the fields that can have more of a direct impact on the community.
I think Waterville, Maine followed this pattern as well. In 2003, the C F Hathaway factory closed. They still have Colby College, Thomas College, and Inland Hospital.
Rochester and Syracuse have grown in population since the 1950s. They’ve just grown outside of their arbitrary municipal boundaries. Monroe County has 250,000 more people than it did in 1950.
Or if you’re a part of reality. In 1950 the city was 90% of the metro areas. In 2015, the city is 20% of the metro areas.* [City Name] today is equal to its metro area for all matters economic. No possible meaningful discussion of industry or employment can take place by limiting the numbers to cities proper rather than the larger economic sphere (except for exceptional limited circumstances not present here).
Then use that term “metropolitan area” in our discussion here. (All the following discussion is intended to apply just to the U.S. and on average.) Yes, since at least the 1930’s, and in some cases as far back as the 1890’s, there have been people moving from the city to suburbs. This trend (suburbanization) was fairly fast from the late 1940’s to the mid-1970’s. It started to slow down in the 1970’s. Since then there has been a slowly increasing trend for people to move from the suburbs to the city (gentrification). Since 2010, in fact, there have been on average slightly more people moving from the suburbs to the city than moving from the city to the suburbs.
It’s important to distinguish between the city and the metropolitan area. One reason is the differing financial shape of cities and suburbs from the 1950’s to at least the 1990’s (and still to some extent). The people leaving the city during the height of suburbanization were richer than the people staying in or moving into the city. This meant that a lot of American cities were in desperate financial shape by the 1990’s. The standard example is Detroit. The suburbs are in great shape, but the city is a mess. The increasing amount of gentrification in recent years has meant that some cities have recovered from that bad financial shape.
Arguing that the decline in Rochester’s population shows that fewer people work there today is extremely flawed because the population of people who could easily work in Rochester if they wished is actually much higher than it was in the mid-20th century. The population of a municipal corporation can be important, but its decrease is not good evidence of a loss of jobs in the same area.