Major Industry out, Colleges In

[Wendell_Wagner]

That depends on what the transportation system in the metropolitan system is like. Also, the amount of taxes the city and the suburbs get often doesn’t depend on how good that system is. Frequently the city or the suburb gets the taxes (corporate or individual) of just the people who work in that city or suburb.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Wendell_Wagner

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.

As I said, in colloquial speech, City=Metropolitan Area. There’s no need to make the distinction.

It’s technically true that “on average slightly more people moving from the suburbs to the city than moving from the city to the suburbs.” “Technically true” is a term meaning that one uses facts to disguise the truth rather than reveal it. The truth truth is that suburbs continue to grow more overall. This should be obvious. If both were growing at the same rate, then suburbs would be adding 4 times as many people as the central city. But in Upstate New York, central cities are not growing at all: they are shrinking.

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.

Again, this is technically true but irrelevant to the particular issue at hand. Large employers can site their buildings anywhere, draw people from city, suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas, and have economic impact across the entire region. Even in Rochester’s heyday, much of Kodak was sited in the suburb of Greece and the Xerox compound was almost entirely in the town of Webster. Many car assembly plants started in Detroit proper, but the larger ones then moved to the separate enclaves of Highland Park and Hamtramck and to smaller cities like Flint, Pontiac, Ypsilanti, and Dearborn. Manufacturing has been a metro area phenomenon for almost a century.

The increasing amount of gentrification in recent years has meant that some cities have recovered from that bad financial shape.

No they haven’t. Name one. Even New York is not an exception because New York never collapsed the way Detroit or Rochester or Buffalo or Cleveland did.

[Wendell_Wagner]

Start a thread elsewhere about this, since the subject of this thread has changed.

[Jackmannii]

@CalMeacham

Do any other cities (especially in other states, particularly those in the Rust Belt) have the same experience? I’m not talking about places in which the colleges and universities have always been the big players, like Princeton NJ or Cambridge MA, but places where one or two manufacturing industries dominated, but where the overall decline in manufacturing since WWII combined with more recent outsourcing have essentially removed the big industries, leaving the educational institutions as the big employers?

Columbus, Ohio has had a modified version of this experience, where Ohio State University and government (state and federal) are far and away the biggest employers, and there are only two manufacturers in the list of top 20 employers. I don’t readily see figures for how O.S.U.'s hiring has ramped up over the years, but I’d bet that its labor impact was dwarfed by industrial employers prior to 1950.

*Little known fact: Columbus used to be known (in the 19th century) as the Buggy Capital Of The World, and it wasn’t because of swarms of mosquitoes along the Scioto River.