Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Talent Economy Charlotte

Charlotte has weathered the economic storm. The city has embraced urbanist principles. Yes, I got the memo. Things are looking up. But Charlotte has a long way to go:

The momentum that fueled the city's boom years was essentially about large companies in established, old-line industries becoming larger. The industries of tomorrow -- in medicine, biotechnology, and the web -- so far haven't made Charlotte the next great place to land. And in this city of relentless self-improvement, the focus is on how to change that. Cheryl Richards is the dean of Northeastern University's new Charlotte campus, its first outside Boston, which opened last year as part of the scramble among universities to serve middle managers. She was part of a city delegation that visited Seattle to learn about development strategies for the new economy. The difference between the two cities, she says, is that "Seattle positions itself as growing talent. Charlotte positions itself as welcoming talent. We're importers of that talent."

Growing talent isn't easy or quick. Charlotte lacks an academic medical center, and the tech community is still oriented toward the needs of the big companies. The city and region's latest hopes for biotech are at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte's well-regarded bioinformatics department and in the next county over, at the North Carolina Research Campus, which was the brainchild of billionaire David Murdock. He has poured more than $500 million of his own money into the center, which focuses on nutrition and is built on the footprint of the sprawling textile company he once owned in Kannapolis. There's still a lot of empty space, but the goal is to create a research infrastructure -- a critical mass -- where none existed.

Emphasis added. Seattle imported a lot of its talent. It still does. The region is a national draw. In the Talent Economy, a metro can't rely on only attraction. The new winners will be the places that produce talent, such as Pittsburgh.

Charlotte has long symbolized all that is wrong with Pittsburgh and other Rust Belt cities. It boomed while Pittsburgh busted. Now Charlotte is chasing Pittsburgh's tail. Given the comments posted on my blog, I gather most people don't appreciate the irony. If the trend of Rust Belt talent moving back home accelerates, where does that leave Charlotte's nascent recovery? There are more questions for Charlotte than there are Fortune 500 company headquarters. At least the city is trying to answer them and is heading in the right direction. Right now, that strikes me as faint praise.

8 comments:

pete-rock said...

Quote:

"If the trend of Rust Belt talent moving back home accelerates, where does that leave Charlotte's nascent recovery?"

A little bit unrelated to your post, but I wanted to get your thoughts on this: do you think global climate change and/or water availability in the Sun Belt will play a role in accelerating Rust Belt return migration?

Jim Russell said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jim Russell said...

I think water scarcity will be a Sun Belt push factor for all types of migrants.

My first stint in Boulder, CO was during the recession of the early 1990s. There was a lot of guilt about living in a beautiful but semi-arid part of the world. My roommates moved to Portland, ME out of sheer respect for water as a resource. The sustainability narrative can drive a lot of migration. DIY Detroit, urban gardening, etc ... all fit well within this migration tale. Recycled cities are hot commodities.

More economically, abundant water will attract more industry. Jobs will flow from Sun Belt to Water Belt. People will follow.

I'm very pessimistic about the prospects for Sun Belt boomtowns. The best places for growth in the South are found in that region's Rust Belt. (e.g. Chattanooga)

Ryan Champlin said...

I've been around this blog off and on and have been trying to square your thesis - "Places don't develop; people do" - with what I know. I think I've come to the conclusion that both people and places develop, but people can only develop so far without highly developed places. We see this all throughout history. For example, when the Roman Empire fell, the most highly developed people in the world eventually lost pretty much all of their knowledge because they lived in undeveloped places (there were no cities). If it were people, and not places, that develop, then the people's skills would have translated into developed places instead of what actually happened.

I think people migrate because they are looking for developed places that will, in turn, help themselves and their families develop. In other words, people cannot develop themselves without interacting with a developed place. If they could, then centuries-old cities wouldn't exist and our best economies would be in the places with the best weather (where everyone wants to be), but this isn't true. Can you convince me otherwise?

Jim Russell said...

I think people migrate because they are looking for developed places that will, in turn, help themselves and their families develop. In other words, people cannot develop themselves without interacting with a developed place. If they could, then centuries-old cities wouldn't exist and our best economies would be in the places with the best weather (where everyone wants to be), but this isn't true. Can you convince me otherwise?

I have no idea if I can convince you otherwise. But I'll try.

Space + people = Place

I don't see how a space, a bit of territory, or a cleverly designed landscape or building can develop people. People develop people.

In your model, people migrate to meet with other people who "will, in turn, help themselves and their families develop." It doesn't matter where Yoda lives, only that you meet him.

Anonymous said...

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20120516/CITYPEOPLE/305160007/Pittsburgh-native-finds-Greenville-perfect-fit?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7C%7Cs

Ryan Champlin said...

Granted... people do develop people. But then why did the highly developed Roman farmers not continue the already developed technologies after the fall of Rome? Isn't it because they lost access to a place that was capable of demanding and maintaining old technologies and exporting new technologies? It seems that if only people develop, that demand and ingenuity still would have been there. Maybe I'm getting caught up in semantics, but it seems to me that places allow people to develop and not the other way around. If people could develop places, then we would have many more highly developed cities and people than we actually do.

Jim Russell said...

But then why did the highly developed Roman farmers not continue the already developed technologies after the fall of Rome? Isn't it because they lost access to a place that was capable of demanding and maintaining old technologies and exporting new technologies?

I think the reason is that geographic mobility declined. Inter-regional trade collapsed. Places became more isolated and autarkic. Migrants, not placemakers, make a place great. A beautifully designed city dense with people in North Korea will lag far behind a disaster of sprawl filled with people from elsewhere.