Global Youngstown

Next month is dedicated to global themes and international migration. I'm helping my friend Richard Herman promote his new book, "Immigrant, Inc." I share Richard's passion for immigration issues and I'm a strong believer in what foreign born talent can do for local economic development. I also advocate taking advantage of globalization forces, as opposed to merely weathering the storm. That's why I am delighted to see this story in today's Business Journal:

Officials with the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber are heading to the Far East this weekend for a two-week trip to establish business ties in China and Taiwan.

The trip is part of a strategic plan to forge a “global footprint for the Mahoning Valley,” chamber officials report.

Comprising the local delegation for what chamber officials describe as an “unprecedented trip” are Tom Humphries, Regional Chamber president and CEO, Eric Planey, vice president, international/national business attraction; and Florence Wang, a member of the chamber’s board of directors and its senior advisor for Asian markets.

“This is the beginning of a coherent international strategy for the chamber and the Mahoning Valley,” said Planey, who was hired by the chamber in July. The goal of the two-week trip is to put the Youngstown-Warren area on the radar of Chinese corporations looking to expand into overseas markets “as a logical destination for their American operations,” he said.

Coherent international strategies are few and far between in the Rust Belt, particularly at this scale. Much of this development is catalyzed at the state level, mostly as a result of the dominant political geography. However, globalization opens up new avenues for dialog and metro-to-metro exchanges make more sense. In other words, don't wait for Ohio or your folks in DC to get the conversation started.

There are plenty of grassroots opportunities for international relationships. Audrea Cika sent out an e-mail that nicely illustrates this point:

The Kosciuszko Foundation is seeking area teachers and university students to participate in its Arts Enriched English Camp in Poland in July 2010.

The innovative three-week program brings together American teachers with Polish youth to enhance their knowledge of conversational English through instrumental, performance and visual arts experiences. College and high school students who are at least 18 years of age may apply as Teaching Assistants in this unique cultural exchange program. Last summer 44 elementary and 48 high school Polish students participated.

Polish ancestry and knowledge of the Polish language are not required, but participants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Selected participants receive FREE room, board, a weeklong follow-up tour and a modest stipend. Airfare is discounted because group flights are arranged by the Foundation. Teachers who are parents of teenagers can bring their children to serve as Peer Tutors to the Polish students.

Rev. Joseph Rudjak, pastor of Youngstown’s Sts. Peter & Paul and Our Lady of Hungary served as dance and performance arts instructor at the camp last year. He will be joined by Mary Kay Pieski, the program's creator, when the Polish Arts Club of Youngstown hosts an informational session on the program and the opportunities on Sunday, November 15th at 1:30 PM on the 6th Floor of the Maag Library on the campus of Youngstown State University.

The public is invited.

I studied and taught in Poland during a three-week intensive course on transnationalism a few years ago. Poland was set to join the European Union and we were looking at how the border region between Poland and Germany might change. Poland is a country on the come with a number of great investment opportunities. Really, the exchange described above is no different than the Regional Chamber touring China and Taiwan. Business moves along the paths of relationships and Polish cities are strong partners for a revitalized Youngstown. You needn't be Eric Planey or Tom Humphries to engage in your own coherent international strategy.

V&M Star Rising in Youngstown

Imagine Youngstown as a destination for a number of people conducting business globally. What would they see during their visit? V&M Star has already thought this through:

Earlier this year, V&M officials approached representatives of Lien Forward Ohio Regional Council of Governments, an organization that takes tax-delinquent land and matches it up with new owners who can redevelop or landscape the property, and asked if they would help organize a cleanup effort.

“Our intent is to work with Lien Forward in the demolition of vacant housing, making green space and taking areas that are blighted and turning them into areas similar to what you see on Market Street,” Johnson said, where landscaping efforts have cleaned up some of the entranceways into downtown.

Among the first blighted items to go was an unsightly chain-link fence that ran along a portion of the Route 422 thoroughfare. The city recently removed the fence. The city is also planning to raze a former office building of Youngstown Sheet & Tube by the end of the year. The dilapidated building is located at the entrance to the V&M Star plant.

V&M Star attracts visitors from all over the country and the world who do business with the Youngstown plant, and the company wants to clean up one of the city’s most visible gateways, said Debra Flora, Lien Forward’s executive director.

I'll make a wild guess and suppose that the above is one of the reasons V&M Star is so keen to have its expansion within the Youngstown city limits. I'm reminded of the cozy relationship between Big Finance and politicians in Charlotte that sparked a boom in the foothills of the Carolina Piedmont. I don't mean that as a critique, although there is a risk of over-dependence on one industry. It is indicative of the business friendly mindset of the Jay Williams administration and the forward thinking of the Regional Chamber. Things get done.

Youngstown has gone from brownfield backwater to an abundance of greenfield opportunities. Outside of Texas, there aren't many cities like it. In the Rust Belt, Youngstown may have no peers. In fact, I can think of only two cities in the United States that sport Youngstown-like assets: Tornado-ravaged Greensburg, KS and hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. I see New Orleans and Youngstown as kindred spirits. At least, the respective economic revitalization programs seem to be on a similar trajectory. Again, I'll remind you of the lessons from urban China:

Being near the coast is a help in China, because of access to external ideas and because coastal areas were permitted to experiment with reform first. An intriguing pattern is that governance is best in coastal cities that had very little industry when reform began in 1978. Shenzhen now has the highest per capita GDP in China. The same holds in Jiangmen, Dongguan, Suzhou--all were industrial backwaters in 1978, and responded to China's opening by creating good environments for private investment and learning from outsiders. Cities that already had industry tended to protect what they had and reform less aggressively.

In a nutshell, that's the urban frontier paradigm and what makes Youngstown so attractive to V&M Star. The missing piece might be the learning from outsiders, but the Phil Kidd story indicates otherwise. Youngstown leaders are remarkably open to new ideas.

Cleveland Envy in Pittsburgh

The greatest beneficiary of increased connectivity between Cleveland and Pittsburgh is the Mahoning Valley. That's why the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber is promoting high-speed rail between the two big cities. That's why the driving force behind the Tech Belt Initiative is Congressman Tim Ryan. Youngstown is the capital of Cleveburgh.

But I would caution against highlighting all the similarities of the cities in this urban corridor as a way to breathe life into this economic region. Better to think of how they compliment each other:

I have a confession to make: I like Cleveland. Take it back, I love Cleveland. Maybe it's the New Girl in me and the inherent immunity to old rivalries with Pittsburgh, but I find the city by the lake to be charming and happening at the same time. Granted, some of Cleveland's assets do meet their equals in Pittsburgh: they have the Rock Hall, a terrific single-subject museum, but we have the Warhol, arguably one of the best single-artist museums in the world. While the Cleveland Botanical Garden has more colorful butterflies than we can shake a stick at, our butterflies at the Phipps flitted about the G-20 heads of state just last month and whereas the Ritz-Carlton Cleveland has received an impressive face-lift and is loveliness defined, we will debut a sleek Fairmont in a glass-walled tower come springtime. And while we best them in many areas, they have the Cavs with LeBron and Shaq, not to menton a Great Lake. Nothing we can do about that. So where is Cleveland really eating our lunch?

The point of the article is for Pittsburgh to learn from what Cleveland does well. I say just drive north and sample the delights. There is a lot of talk about emulating Pittsburgh's renaissance. But Cleveland must reinvent itself in its own way, leveraging its unique assets. I appreciate that I can get a different flavor in each of the Tech Belt cities.

What is the Cleveland model of revitalization?

Return to Cleveburgh

We're in the last week of the Greater Youngstown 2.0 project. One of the unintended consequences of the effort is a better understanding of how to lure talented expatriates back home. Israel is struggling with these logistics:

"What we need is a kind of a vacuum cleaner, to suck back all those Israeli brains from foreign universities," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last week. One detailed plan proposed by the Immigrant Absorption Ministry was recently shot down by the Finance Ministry, citing financial concerns, amidst competing proposals to save Israeli academia.

"We've heard plenty of statements but I've yet to see a cabinet resolution to bring back the scientists," said Omri Ingbar, coordinator of the interministerial committee for absorption in science. "The brain drain problem is rooted in the lack of employment opportunities. The cabinet must spearhead a move to create new jobs, but it's trying to avoid the responsibility. The treasury wants solutions that don't cost money," said Ingbar, who heads the returning scientists unit in the Immigrant Absorption Ministry.

You can't call out to your wayward favorite sons and daughters if you don't have positions that need filling. Even if you do have jobs at the ready, interested members of the diaspora may not have the right experience. Youngstown is strategically located between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, which considerably expands the employment market. Cleveburgh makes for a compelling value proposition for boomerang migrants from all along the Tech Belt.

But expanding the geography of the labor-shed isn't a solution, particularly when unemployment is high throughout the country. In fact, migration during the Great Recession is making a curious pattern. Charlotte (NC) and Portland (OR) are two metros hit harder than most cities. Despite the lack of jobs, people kept coming. I moved to the DC area under similar circumstances. While sleeping on the couches of friends, I pounded the pavement looking for a good internship. I would do whatever it took to make a go of it in Washington.

That happens all the time in global cities such as New York. Talent innovates in order to stick in place of high opportunity. Migration is a matter of motivation. So is entrepreneurship. In fact, the two often go hand in hand. Ironically, many regions see the incubation of a thriving startup culture as a good talent retention strategy. These policies are misguided: Great idea, wrong demographic.

Don't get me wrong. Natives still living in the area can make great entrepreneurs. But identifying the right people is an inexact science, to say the least. But finding small-business-owners-in-waiting is easy when you target the diaspora. Do you want to move home badly enough that you would be willing to create your own job? This is a pool of potential entrepreneurs yet to be tapped.

Auto Industry Diaspora

If you are interested in urban policy, then you should be reading the Brookings blog at The New Republic. By way of introduction, a post published today concerns all the communities with strong ties to the auto industry. This group shares common economic struggles, particularly now:

Last week’s Conference on Automotive Communities and Workforce Adjustment, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and held at the bank’s Detroit branch, understandably focused a lot on Detroit and southeastern Michigan. In my talk at that conference, though, I pointed out that the metropolitan areas that depend most heavily on the auto industry (including assembly and parts, foreign companies as well as the Detroit Three) aren’t just in Michigan, and most aren’t anywhere near the size of Detroit.

The implication for the Mahoning Valley is obvious given the dependence on the auto industry in Lordstown. The point I want to make is that we tend to paint with the broad brush of a state or, a bit finer, a large region within a state. The economic geography is a lot more complicated than that. Worse is the stereotypical landscape of "Rust Belt" and "Sun Belt". There are many Rust Belt cities within the Sun Belt megaregion.

In this sense, our attempts at better policy are doomed from the start. Federal initiatives are funneled through the states. That is the legacy of our political geography. We try to work around this handicap by grouping states together that seem to share some common traits. (See the Great Lakes Economic Initiative) The economic geography reveals that we live in a Metro Nation. Chattanooga, TN and Birmingham, AL have a lot in common with Youngstown. I think this suggests that there should be a network of cities with similar economic development issues. The best example I know about is the Shrinking Cities Network.

Instead of thinking in terms of Ohio or Northeast Ohio or even Cleveburgh, remember the shrinking cities diaspora.

Congressman Ryan Calls Diaspora Home

As the Mahoning Valley quickly moves on from the spat between Youngstown and Girard over the V&M Star expansion, Congressman Tim Ryan shares his vision with the public:

“This is the beginning of a new era,” said U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-17, as he addressed a crowd filled with elected officials and staff representing Youngstown and Girard’s city councils, Mahoning County and the office of Gov. Ted Strickland.

“We’re ready,” Ryan vowed. “We’re going to do business and have people come back to this community to raise their families.”

Congressman Ryan, we here at Greater Youngstown 2.0 are ready to help those people move back.

Disruptive Youngstown

I've got a big backlog of blog fodder. If I don't write now, then I'll likely never do it. Aaron Renn does a good job of framing the urban frontier hypothesis here and here. I'd like to add to this burgeoning narrative the thinking of Ryan Avent:

I think Lee’s disruptive technology post offers us a glimpse at an explanation. When a metropolitan area has an old, successful, established industry as its economic driver, that area builds its infrastructure and institutions around that industry. These institutions are likely to be unwilling and unable to accomodate and support growth industries. We can think about legislators in a Rust Belt state who fight to protect old industries even when the protections they seek would undermine growth industries. Or banks in old manufacturing centers that are reluctant to invest in start-ups with sharply different practices from the old giants.

If you have a daring new idea, 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. 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 occured 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.

I emphasized the relevant part of the passage. Youngstown may be the hungriest city in the entire Rust Belt. That's another way of framing an urban frontier opportunity. You can do in Youngstown what you can't do in Cleveland, a city "suffering from wounded pride".

When I imagine Richard Longworth's Midwest, I envision a landscape of wounded pride. We need a good psychiatrist. The collective psyche of Youngstown has moved beyond historical stature. That's why the Mahoning Valley is a good place for a daring idea.