I have seen America’s future prosperity. It is downtown, and it gets to work by public transit.
That’s why companies like Coca-Cola, Panasonic, Athenahealth, ExactTarget and Asurion Insurance Services are moving jobs into Atlanta. Like smart companies in most U.S. cities, they are voting with their feet for a winning urban future.
There’s no stampede yet back to the city. The long-term thinning of jobs continues. However, a recent Brookings Institution study found that “job sprawl” slowed during the Great Recession, if only because job loss was greatest in outlying areas. That was more true in the metro Atlanta area than nationally.
I’m betting on the back-to-the-city crowd. Why? Because employers on the transit grid have fuller access to regional labor markets. Because tech-savvy Millennials are giving up car ownership in record numbers. Because locating on transit says a company favors energy-efficiency, workforce diversity and quality of life — winning corporate traits.
I’m also convinced that urban density and transit-oriented development create far more jobs than sprawl. Recovery Act data revealed that building transit creates far more jobs per each billion dollars spent than highway construction. Federal highway data reveals that “fix it first”— spending to maintain and improve existing roads, including “complete streets” for pedestrians and cyclists — produces more work-hours than new roads.
It’s not just the jobs building infrastructure. Transit spending stimulates private investment in half-mile radii around stations, creating jobs and wealth as higher land values drive greater density, rehabilitation and mixed uses. When buildings are taller and more complex, they are more labor-intensive to build.
Finally, there’s the tragic history of job sprawl. Visionary William H. Whyte chronicled the flight of corporate headquarters from New York City in “City: Rediscovering the Center,” which was famous for showing that companies followed executives’ home addresses (and golf courses). He tracked 38 such moves. “Companies don’t have to … compare area A with area B and area C. All they have to do is look in the phone directory. Where does the boss live? That is where the company is going.” Thirty-one of the 38 companies moved close to the CEO’s home.
Whyte wrote about how isolating such places could be, and how executives no longer got much face time with colleagues. In other words, he suggested the companies were losing touch and losing their edges. Indeed, 10 years later, he checked back, comparing the companies that moved with36 similar firms that stayed downtown. Seventeen of the 38 footloose firms had been taken over. Companies that stayed in New York had twice the growth rates and had increases in their stock valuations of more than 2 1/2 times those that had fled.
As a former Chicagoan, I watched storied urban retailer Sears suffer catastrophic setbacks since 1989, when it fled the transit-rich Loop to a distant suburb that then lacked even bus connections.
The future of prosperity is in dense, transit-oriented cities and suburbs. It’s where the creative class thrives, where start-ups get started, and where mature companies keep their edge.
Greg LeRoy is executive director of Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C.-based policy resource center.
