{"id":322,"date":"2006-06-16T11:21:57","date_gmt":"2006-06-16T11:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/16\/the-plight-of-upstate\/"},"modified":"2006-06-16T11:21:57","modified_gmt":"2006-06-16T11:21:57","slug":"the-plight-of-upstate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/16\/the-plight-of-upstate\/","title":{"rendered":"The Plight of Upstate"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dean Dad has some interesting comments<\/a> regarding this depressing New York Times<\/cite> article<\/a> about the departure of young adults from Upstate New York:<\/p>\n

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From 1990 to 2004, the number of 25-to-34-year-old residents in the 52 counties north of Rockland and Putnam declined by more than 25 percent. In 13 counties that include cities like Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton, the population of young adults fell by more than 30 percent. In Tioga County, part of Appalachia in New York’s Southern Tier, 42 percent fewer young adults were counted in 2004 than in 1990.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This echoes the article about the emptying of the Great Plains<\/a> from a while back (via Making Light).<\/p>\n

The Dean Dad contrasts this with the predictions of Thoms Friedman’s The World Is Flat<\/cite> (continued below the fold):<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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If Friedman is right, this region should be doing quite well. It has urban centers, surprisingly strong public schools, educated populations, and broadband. The housing is cheap, the cultural institutions stronger than you’d expect, and the infrastructure generally is already in place. If the world is flat, this place should be ready to boom. Yet the free-fall is, if anything, accelerating. (The article mentions that the exodus over the last five years is even greater than it was in the 1990’s, and that’s saying something.) The area is providing good educations to its young, then exporting them. The ones who stay behind are, with exceptions, the ones with nowhere to go.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a topic that hits close to home, literally. I grew up in Whitney Point, NY,<\/a> a small town just north of Binghamton, and I currently live and work in Schenectady, one of the run-down cities on the Albany-Buffalo route of the old Erie Canal (as previously noted, I defy generational trends<\/a>…). This is my part of the country.<\/p>\n

I don’t really have a solid idea what the cause is, here, but the commenters over at Dean Dad’s have some interesting suggestions, ranging from outsourcing, to a slow variation of individual desires, to the natural concentration of single industries when the cost of transporting products becomes very low. I suspect it’s a combination of a lot of these factors.<\/p>\n

As to what can be done, the usual approach seems to be to try to find some sort of niche. The Albany area has been attempting to position itself as a center for nanotechnology research, with the local institutions of higher education teaming up with the government to offer special programs and attract investment (part of the overall Tech Valley<\/a> program). It’s hard to say how successful this approach will be, long-term, but there are some signs of success– there are lots of new houses being built, the food situation is improving<\/a> and lots of homes going up for sale in our neighborhood that don’t stay on the market long.<\/p>\n

Schenectady has taken a somewhat different approach, making a concerted effort to import new residents<\/a>, with some success<\/a>. I suppose in some sense, this is the tried-and-true approach– it was immigration that built the Binghamton area, back in my grandparents’ day (immigrants from Eastern Europe were taught to say “Which way E-J?”<\/a> on the boats, and after getting through Ellis Island would be directed to the Endicott-Johnson shoe company, based in the “Triple Cities” of Binghmaton, Endicott, and Johnson City, NY).<\/p>\n

The situation doesn’t actually look as bleak as that article makes it sound, from where I sit. But the statistics quoted are awfully disturbing. It’ll be interesting, in the Chinese curse sense of the word, to see where things go from here.<\/p>\n

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The Dean Dad has some interesting comments regarding this depressing New York Times article about the departure of young adults from Upstate New York: From 1990 to 2004, the number of 25-to-34-year-old residents in the 52 counties north of Rockland and Putnam declined by more than 25 percent. In 13 counties that include cities like… Continue reading The Plight of Upstate<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}