Many people are discouraged by what they hear and read about America, but the closer they are to the action at home, the better they like what they see.
.. A coast-to-coast drive across America has its tedious stretches, and the teeming interstate corridors, from I-95 in the east to I-5 in the west, can lead to the despairing conclusion that the country is made of gas stations, burger stands, and big-box malls. From only 2,500 feet higher up, the interstates look like ribbons that trace narrow paths across landscape that is mostly far beyond the reach of any road. From ground level, America is mainly road—after all, that’s where cars can take you. From the sky, America is mainly forest in the eastern third, farmland in the middle, then mountain and desert in the west, before the strip of intense development along the California coast.
.. A version of today’s hierarchical awareness is the concept of the “big sort.” This is the idea that if you have first-rate abilities and more than middling ambitions, you’ll need to end up in one of a handful of talent destinations. New York for finance; the San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle for tech; Washington, D.C., for politics and foreign policy.
.. A great, underappreciated advantage of “everywhere else” in America: The real estate is cheap. In New York, in San Francisco, in half a dozen other cities, everything about life is slave to hyper-expensive real estate. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota; in Allentown, Pennsylvania; in inland California; across the south, costs are comparatively low. This has an effect—on how much you have to work, on what you think you need, on the risks you can take. Every calculation—the cash flow you must maintain, the life balance you can work toward—is different when a very nice family house costs a few hundred thousand dollars rather than a few million.
.. A quarry and workshop in Columbus that supplied marble headstones for the military and that thrived during the Vietnam War closed.
.. When we first visited early last year, Joe Max Higgins took us to the most modern “mini-mill” for producing steel in North America, in the Golden Triangle industrial zone. This “mini” structure is what most lay observers would consider to be unimaginably vast.
.. This was the closest I have come in the United States to the experience of major factory life in China—and it was in rural Mississippi
.. Based on everything we could see, the problems of immigration that presidential candidates have seized on for political advantage were largely another “rest of America” problem. That is, people generally saw things as manageable or improving locally, but believed they were falling apart everyplace else.
.. One version of what happens next is familiar to anyone who’s ever read a newspaper. Richer, whiter people think that public schools, public places, center cities are no longer for “people like us” and withdraw themselves, their children, and their tax support to the suburbs or private schools.
.. Brian Davis, who grew up in a white farming family in Michigan, began a campaign to get major new bond funding for the schools. This was in the depth of the financial collapse, in a hard-hit state, in the same election cycle in which the Tea Party made its debut—and Davis was asking a mainly white electorate, most of whom did not have children in the public schools, to refinance the schools. And they did. The new programs and facilities paid for by the bond, according to Davis, helped reverse a decline in public confidence in the schools. “We have children who come from homes with $1 million–plus annual income, and ones who come from homes with incomes under $20,000,”
.. “Pittsburgh feels as vibrant as it does—museums, opera, restaurants, but not much traffic—because we’re living in an infrastructure built for twice as many people as live here now
.. It is known as the City of Asylum project, and its goal is to revive a run-down area of Pittsburgh and make it a haven for persecuted writers from the rest of the world.
.. “Fresno is the bohemia of California,” she told us when we visited. “That’s because you can afford to live here! And the pace of life is such that you can have a full-time job if you need to, but not be so stressed out or have the 90-minute commutes of L.A. You can afford the garage as your studio, if you need it, which you can’t do in San Jose anymore.”
The Cities Where People Shop Small
Overall, the cities with the greatest share of spending at small and medium-sized businesses are very large, wealthy ones, according to the data. They include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco.
In the New York metropolitan area, for example, consumers spent three-quarters of their money at small and medium-sized enterprises, (defined as businesses with less than 8 percent market share in their category and specific market). While New Yorkers were spending their money at independent bodegas and coffee shops, though, residents of Columbus, Ohio were spending much of their money at bigger businesses, like McDonald’s or Target, according to the report. Only 54 percent of money spent by Columbus consumers went to small and medium-sized shops.
.. Providing consumers with more diverse retail options may be good for the local economy, too. Every $100 spent at locally based business in Portland, Maine, contributes an additional $58 to the local economy, a2011 study showed. By contrast, every $100 spent at a chain store yields just $33 in local impact.
.. A separate study found that if consumers in Kent County, Michigan, redirected 10 percent of their spending to locally owned businesses rather than spending it at chain stores, they’d help create $53 million in additional payroll and 1,600 new jobs.
Tech Lancaster Meetup
TechLancaster started as a simple local meetup, a safe place for like-minded tech people to come together and geek out. We’ve strived to be open, welcoming, and supportive to everyone in the community, regardless of their interest or background.
The past year has seen amazing growth in Lancaster’s tech scene, and we believe this is only the beginning. As members of the tech community, we want to support this growth and ensure the community remains a healthy, open, and welcoming place for all its current and future members.