City: Rediscovering the Center

25 Return to the Agora

25 RETURN TO THE AGORA Will the center hold? What you see can make you doubt it. Ride the freeways and you see the consequence of a weakening center. You see a mishmash of separate centers, without focus or coherence. Taken by themselves, some of the components are well done, but it is still a mishmash that they add up to. And it is hard to see how it can do anything but worsen. The decentralization trend that is sending the back-office work of the center to the suburbs is strengthening. The computers have already made the move. Cities can argue that it would make much more sense to locate these functions within the city, with its services and its transit network—in low-cost Brooklyn, for example, rather than Manhattan. Few corporations are buying the argument: it's either the center or the suburbs. The cities of the northeastern and north-central states seem to [332] CITY have been hit particularly hard. A succession of demographic studies have argued that they have had it, that they are "aging" and functionally obsolete, being geared to a declining manufacturing economy and with an overpriced labor force—and that, in any event, they are in the wrong latitude. The message is clear. Go to the South and the Southwest . The cities in those regions, runs the argument, are expanding vigorously, offer lower taxes, lower-cost housing, a more tractable labor force, and a quality of life unmatched by the cold North. But the Sunbelt cities are having their problems too. One reason taxes have been relatively low is that they have been postponed, as has been investment in infrastructures. Oil revenues are no longer taking up the slack. The spectacular population growth of some of the cities has been due in large part to the annexation of neighboring communities , but cities are running out of places to annex. They have no mass transit to speak of and are as much hostage to the car and the freeway as they are their beneficiaries. Quality of life? Migrants from the rolling green landscapes of the North have some environmental surprises in store. Those mild winters have a price. But regional comparisons need not be invidious. The presumed decline of the aging cities of the North is belied by some significant countertrends. To a large extent, the movement to the Southwest has been a movement of maturing products and processes. Many of the Southwest's manufacturing plants will soon age too: a year there is as long as it is anywhere else. In the meantime, some presumably overthe -hill cities up North have been doing surprisingly well. But regional differences are not as important as regional similarities . As economist John Hekman has pointed out, it is not regions that grow old, but products. They have a life cycle of their own, and they go from innovation, through development, to maturity and standardization . At each stage the resources needed by the manufacturer change, and this can prompt him to make some large geographic moves. This is what has been happening in the moves to the Southwest. Hekman points to the computer industry as an example. "Highly sophisticated products and production processes tend to be located in the main centers of technology, like Boston, New York, Minneapolis, and, more recently, Dallas and Palo Alto." The manufacturing of peripheral items and knockoffs of systems tend to be scattered elsewhere . They do not need high technology so much as lower production costs. The Southwest has the edge on lower production costs of standardized items. New England, however, has a strong edge in its technical and research base for the development of new processes. In the birthrate of new firms, Massachusetts is second only to California. Return to the Agora [333] The Middle Atlantic states are not doing so well. State and local governments in such areas often concentrate on subsidy and restriction to keep old industries from moving out. Hekman thinks that this is the worst possible mistake and that what they ought to be concentrating on is the nurturing of new firms with a strong technological base. "The key to beating the product cycle and industrial migration," he says, "is not in keeping the industries at home, but in replacing them with new industries." The work of economist David L. Birch of MIT points to similar conclusions. Through detailed studies ofjob creation in a cross...