Talton: Phoenix failing at netting tech innovation | Rogue columnist
For example, fewer than 28 percent of adults
have bachelor’s degrees or higher in Phoenix (and 29.7 percent in Arizona).
That compares with 43.6 percent in Seattle (36.7 percent in Washington state) and
52.9 percent in Silicon Valley (34.2 percent in California). These educated people,
especially in STEM, are foundational to building tech hubs. In Arizona,
paying for tax cuts has meant repeatedly slashing funding for higher
education, including the worst reductions since the Great Recession.
The most coveted tech talent
gravitates to cities with real downtowns, cool urban neighborhoods,
tolerance, and welcoming immigrants (this goes back to Richard Florida’s
seminal book The Rise of the Creative Class).
Arizona is known for SB 1070 and
suburban sprawl. Coastal “winners” invested in the amenities,
infrastructure, quality of life, and dense urban innovation centers
(e.g. South Lake Union in Seattle) to draw and retain the best advanced
industry jobs. Density draws talent, sparks “creative friction” where
the best ideas are generated. Arizona continued to position itself as a
cheap destination for retirees; those who care for the retirees; call
centers, data centers, and back-office operations; and people from
inland California cashing out their properties.
To be fair, the city of Phoenix itself
is different, with blue islands in the central core, a reviving
downtown and Midtown, and light rail (WBIYB). But it was enough to take
advantage of the tectonic “back to the city movement,” where top talent
and companies moved into authentic downtowns. This phenomenon has
especially benefited places such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston.
Two of Big Tech’s five giants are headquartered in the Seattle area,
including Amazon downtown, along with Starbucks, F5 Networks, Nordstrom,
and Expeditors International. Phoenix has no major companies
headquartered downtown beside Freeport-McMoRan, a mining giant.
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ASU is among the largest universities
in the nation and continues to rise in stature under Michael Crow. But
it leaves metro Phoenix facing a problem akin to Pittsburgh’s with
Carnegie Mellon University, where top graduates don’t stay. Phoenix is
the largest city with only one real university (and branches of UA and
NAU). Nor has the Downtown Biomedical Campus fulfilled its potential
compared with the world-class biosciences cluster in Seattle with the
University of Washington, Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center, Seattle
Cancer Care Alliance, and Allen Institute.
Also, the “Superstar Cities” are
unusually outward looking, with an emphasis on trade and welcoming
highly skilled immigrants. Phoenix is inward looking. “It’s a blank
slate! You can do anything! (as long as it’s connected to real-estate
development) Cheap — and sunshine and championship golf — can’t make up
for this. As Edwardo Porter wrote in the New York Times:
Even skyrocketing housing costs have
not stopped the concentration of talent in a few superstar cities.
High-tech companies that seek cheaper places to set up beyond their
hubs often go to Bangalore, India, rather than Birmingham, Ala.
“They keep the core team in Silicon
Valley or Seattle but put the other stuff in Shenzhen or Vancouver or
Bangalore,” (a study author) said. Shenzhen, China, may not be much
cheaper than Indianapolis, he added, but Shenzhen is already a tech hub
in its own right.
The same problem could be said for Phoenix.
Again, this is not the result of bad
luck — Phoenix had long had the wind at its back, at least in population
growth. It’s not the result of the historic racial polarization that
hobbles such cities as Detroit, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. It
is the consequence of deliberate policies focused on adding people at
all costs and sprawl real-estate development, while putting the
accelerator to the floor on right-wing ideology at the state level.
Read the Brookings report by all
means. It’s recommendations are worth consideration and to my mind
implementing. But they can’t overcome the local and state policies and
mindsets that hobbled these cities further as their fortunes changed —
or in Phoenix’s case, crippled its ability to compete at the highest
level when it had every opportunity.