Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is beautiful, and practically a dead town during the weekends. At least that was my impression when I was there for a very short visit. And yet it shouldn’t be. The town center is historic and full of wonderful, if empty, pubs and restaurants. Some didn’t survive Covid, but most are still struggling along. The waterfront is a hub of safe real estate, a lot of them for sale. Housing is both extremely nice and affordable, especially for young new homeowners and couples planning on their first joint property together. I saw at least 13 empty commercial offices for lease in the two-mile town center. There are plenty more available for new tech start-ups. The city is relatively safe, no more dangerous than any other metropolitan urban centers in the U.S.
Something that always bothered me, both in the UK and now in the U.S., is the baffling question of concentrated jobs. There is no reason tech jobs, for example, should be concentrated in either London or San Francisco, with abysmal house prices, high crime, and terrible social policies. A tech startup doesn’t require any of the old requirements, such as ports, railway stations, or industrial parks. It usually requires funding (available from major seed-funders and donors across the country), a dedicated workforce of around a couple of dozens of smart people in one office, a few restaurants, bars, and other auxiliary businesses nearby, and affordable houses—that is to say, compatible with salaries. The salary of a tech engineer in Phoenix might be lower than one in San Francisco, because the house prices in Arizona are lower than those in California. This is basic economics; of course this is subject to change, with growth and rising demand for spaces, both commercial and personal. But, all else being equal, there are at least a dozen dried-up midsize towns that could host hundreds of such jobs at a moment’s notice.
“The younger generation don’t like to come out for social drinking like we used to,” an upmarket bar owner in Harrisburg’s Market Square told me. “Offices are also more hybrid post-Covid due to zoom and emails, which means the traditional after work crowd isn’t gathering in restaurants either.”
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Growth is, after all, a matter of mathematics. Off the top of my head, I started to make some calculations while patronizing the local business. Ten commercial properties of mixed sizes in the town center of Harrisburg cost around a total of $5 million; let’s say the payroll of around 50 tech guys totals around $6 million (about $120,000 each). Additional charges included, 10 such startups can exist for a cost of under $30 million. That in turn could fuel auxiliary establishments such as diners, cafes, pubs, and restaurants, providing hundreds of more jobs.
One hears the common refrain that younger generations are willing to do it all and are stifled only by lack of opportunities and DEI politics. Perhaps. But for a generation that worships Gilded-Age American aesthetics, it appears that a simple lesson from those times is all but forgotten: start new businesses and create new opportunities by moving within the country. Internal mobility from the 1860s to 1920s resulted in the unprecedented growth and the birth of the American superpower that we see today. Compared to now, the U.S. went from being overwhelmingly rural in 1860, with around 80 percent of the population living in villages, to urban and industrial, hovering around 51 percent urban by 1920. In 1860, the U.S. had nine cities with more than 100,000 people; by 1920, that number was 68. Most of them were funded by industrialists buying up town properties and establishing new industries that cyclically produced economic growth.
A simple Google search will show that the total net worth of the top five U.S. billionaires is approximately $1.19 trillion, and there are around 900 billionaires in the U.S. by some estimates. The amount of growth they could fuel in a dozen smaller towns with already-established infrastructure and businesses spread out across the country is mathematically astonishing to contemplate. It would dwarf any competition in the EU or China. The 19th century’s growth was fueled by Americans constantly moving and relocating for better opportunities, funded by new opportunities in cities. It is time to bring such work mobility back, and not let smaller American towns die from degrowth.
