How we got to where we are
“If you have a daring new idea,” Aaron Renn argues, “you don’t take it to someone who’s living fat off something which has worked for decades. You take it to someone who is hungry.”
And that’s how the exodus from the Rust Belt began:
Many of the Sunbelt boom towns which have sprung up over the past half century grew at the start by accepting what investment they could. I’m reminded of my hometown, where leaders were anxious to attract high-tech investments to their new Research Triangle Park. It was lack of better options that gave them the idea in the first place — something which might not have occurred to leaders in a city where hundreds of thousands of people earned good union wages in manufacturing plants. And while leaders definitely wanted to craft a research environment, they took the investments they could get. Not having recently been on top of the world, they had the benefit of not suffering from wounded pride when less-than-glamorous operations came to invest.
We know from that sort of thing in Oklahoma. And the bottom line is this:
I think there’s something to the idea that new growth cities aren’t inherently superior to older, richer metropolitan areas. Rather, their advantages are fairly mundane — they’re cheap, accommodating, and ready to please.
Not inconsiderable virtues, those.
Half a century from now, perhaps the new new growth cities will be somewhere else entirely. This is, after all, the way things work: it’s either constant reinvention, or eventual extinction. In the meantime, you do what you can to keep the welcome mat in place.
