Kontextmaschine

19th September 2016

Question with 10 notes

paleglanceaustereface asked: My impression was that the Eastern corridor/ area around Philadelphia was mostly doing fine and also Pittsburgh and maybe a little bit around it was. And that p much all the other cities were kind of rustbelty and doing bad, and the rest of the state not so good as well. How much do you know about other Rust Belt places, like, could you tell me about Buffalo? Any others that spring to mind/you'd think it'd be good to talk about?

You strip out my tone of elegaic cynicism, that’s more or less right.

Once Philadelphia, and then middle-class professional NY and DC started decanting into the Philly suburbs you ended up with a big enough educated work pool to start building corporate offices right there. Allentown is about 90 minutes to Manhattan competitive with some of the Hudson Valley towns that are seeing interest, with a lower cost of living. So it’s hoping to follow the same path though who knows whether all the vacant office space will make up for the fact you can’t catch a convenient flight to anywhere.

Legacy of a heavy industrial economy, Pittsburgh has a bunch of educational institutions with a specialization in technical fields, plus the barons left a pretty strong high-cultural infrastructure and with everyone remembering why they liked cities that relatively cheap one isn’t too hard to recruit skilled workers to.

Philly in some ways is becoming a sort of overflow valve for New York - artists, professional services who want a city, like the cheaper cost of living, and could always take Amtrak up to an art opening or deal closing anyway. As corporate law firms merge into national conglomerates they’re putting more stuff there for similar reasons. A decade or so ago the state picked up the Philly school district (which, like DC’s, had been run as kind of a jobs program for the black middle class, underperforming on student metrics, and a big barrier to expanding the tax base by drawing affluent professional families back to the city), smashed it against the wall and set it on a glide path to be replaced by chains of charters. The state’s currently in the middle of a fight over school funding that honestly I don’t understand, that might mess with that.

The “medicalization” of the economy isn’t *just* going to community college to change bedpans (though it is definitely that). Teaching and research hospitals, a lot hooking into the Pittsburgh chemical/educational institutions I mentioned.

One subtle thing there is that between Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements for services; HHS and HRSA grants for training and working institutions; and students with federal grants, (potentially forgiveable or dischargeable) loans, scholarships, the NHSC, etc., cranking up medical intensity is an effective way to draw federal funds into the state economy, not unlike Murtha’s military pork.

So it’s not a hellpit, but there’s still problems.

One, I mean, when the great working-class statewide economy left, they replaced it with a decent urban professional economy, which I guess is nice if you’re an urban-based professional or their service provider, anywhere else you’re still pretty much fucked.

Two, I don’t know how stable this stuff is long-term. A big chunk of the Philadelphia economy is basically Comcast, which tried to merge with Time Warner two years ago, and Pittsburgh counts on pharmaceutical companies that are always merging and streamlining and what what. And all the corporate expansion is underlain by tax rebates, “enterprise zones”, etc., etc. where governments underbid each other to host or retain the tax base.

I mean, not like the old industrial behemoths didn’t hold or misuse the whip hand - the Coal and Iron Police, for fuck’s sake - but the mines were there, the mills were there, it’s not like they were leaving in a snit.

I’ve been around upstate New York when I was at Cornell, but it’s not really something I know that well.

Tagged: pennsylvania