Why Didn't Grand Rapids Decline? (Detroit, Monroe: 2014, apartment, unemployment rate)

[cjoseph]

Originally Posted by usroute10

Big city amenities include:

-A subway/LRT line. Information is below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Metro_Rail

-A park and boulevard system consisting of 6 large parks connected by a new concept in park-planning, parkways. The system was developed from the 1860's - 1890's by Frederick Law Olmsted, the foremost landscape architect and park planner in American History, who designed New York's Central Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace, and Detroit's Belle Isle, among others. Information below:

Olmsted's Buffalo Park System and Its Stewards | Frederick Law Olmsted | PBS

-Have you seen the Buffalo's city hall. The most awesome city hall in the United States:


-2 Professional sports teams, Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres; also a MAC School with Division 1 athletics, the University of Buffalo, within the city limits

-A couple of very dense, vibrant neighborhoods outside of downtown, like Elmwood Village and Allentown.
Allentown

Elmwood Village

The city of Buffalo is on a river (Niagara River) and a Great Lake, Lake Erie. It is 20 miles from one of the great natural wonders of the western hemisphere - Niagara Falls. It's location on an international border and its proximity to the 6-million people Greater Toronto Area (1 hour away) also raises its profile.

Plus Buffalo has cultural attractions like the BPO and the Albright Knox art gallery.

[Indentured Servant]

The median age in the Buffalo metro area is nearly 39 while the median age in the Grand Rapids area is 33. A high median age, for an area, means that there are not enough young workers to replace retiring workers and you cannot get economic expansion if you do not have the new workers entering the workforce to not only offset retiring workers, but for net job growth.

Census Data: Metropolitan Area Age & Sex

A metro area has to become attractive to young people in order to be viable, unless it is a retirement community or the like. Young people follow trends. They tend to move to where people are already moving and move away from places where people are already moving from. Growth perpetuates growth and decline perpetuates decline unless energies are spent or the laws of supply and demand change the direction of trends. Eventually boom towns become a victim of their own success, via the law of supply and demand.

I think a lot of energy (wealth) has been spent that last few decades in Grand Rapids to make it attractive to young people. If you cannot attract young people and the best and brightest among them, then your local companies are going to be at a disadvantage with their competitors located in places that young people find attractive.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y4fPIYlMMo

[magellan]

Originally Posted by usroute10

Big city amenities include:

-A subway/LRT line. Information is below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Metro_Rail

-A park and boulevard system consisting of 6 large parks connected by a new concept in park-planning, parkways. The system was developed from the 1860's - 1890's by Frederick Law Olmsted, the foremost landscape architect and park planner in American History, who designed New York's Central Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace, and Detroit's Belle Isle, among others. Information below:

Olmsted's Buffalo Park System and Its Stewards | Frederick Law Olmsted | PBS

-Have you seen the Buffalo's city hall. The most awesome city hall in the United States:


-2 Professional sports teams, Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres; also a MAC School with Division 1 athletics, the University of Buffalo, within the city limits

-A couple of very dense, vibrant neighborhoods outside of downtown, like Elmwood Village and Allentown.
Allentown

Elmwood Village

The city of Buffalo is on a river (Niagara River) and a Great Lake, Lake Erie. It is 20 miles from one of the great natural wonders of the western hemisphere - Niagara Falls. It's location on an international border and its proximity to the 6-million people Greater Toronto Area (1 hour away) also raises its profile.

Well with all of that you'd think they'd be doing better. I do wish Grand Rapids had some of the larger boulevards and plazas of larger cities, but it grew so rapidly in the early 1900's they never got around to laying out the city to accommodate those things.

I just finished Devil in the White City that covers Olmsted's work on the World Fair in Chicago.

[magellan]

Originally Posted by cjoseph

Plus Buffalo has cultural attractions like the BPO and the Albright Knox art gallery.

Grand Rapids has quite a few cultural attractions, including the fairly new art museum (GRAM), public museum, Gerald R Ford museum, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (UICA), Frederik Meijer Gardens, the symphony, and the only ballet and opera companies in the State (Detroit doesn't have either, strangely). Edit: someone messaged me and said that Detroit does have an opera company.

[RegalTDP]

Originally Posted by magellan

Grand Rapids has quite a few cultural attractions, including the fairly new art museum (GRAM), public museum, Gerald R Ford museum, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (UICA), Frederik Meijer Gardens, the symphony, and the only ballet and opera companies in the State (Detroit doesn't have either, strangely). Edit: someone messaged me and said that Detroit does have an opera company.

Yes, the Michigan Opera Theatre is in Detroit. But surprisingly, Opera GR was actually established first.

[cjoseph]

The largest difference between Grand Rapids and Buffalo is urban area size. Buffalo is the nation's 46th largest urban area, with 936,000 people. Grand Rapids is all the way down at 70 with 570,000. Buffalo's unlucky geography forces it to have a smaller metro than Grand Rapids.

[jackmichigan]

Originally Posted by cjoseph

The largest difference between Grand Rapids and Buffalo is urban area size. Buffalo is the nation's 46th largest urban area, with 936,000 people. Grand Rapids is all the way down at 70 with 570,000. Buffalo's unlucky geography forces it to have a smaller metro than Grand Rapids.

People need to get away from the notion that a large population has anything to do with quality of life. Also, being more spread out is not necessarily a good thing, either. In fact, it rarely is.

You may not have been implying either, but it's worth repeating.

[cjoseph]

Originally Posted by jackmichigan

People need to get away from the notion that a large population has anything to do with quality of life. Also, being more spread out is not necessarily a good thing, either. In fact, it rarely is.

You may not have been implying either, but it's worth repeating.

I was not implying anything concerning quality of life, but Grand Rapids is more spread out than Buffalo. The Buffalo MSA has a density of 718 people per square mile, whereas Grand Rapids has a density of 150 people per square mile. The urban area of Grand Rapids is also less dense than Buffalo's. How that plays into quality of life in this case, I'm not sure.

[magellan]

Originally Posted by cjoseph

I was not implying anything concerning quality of life, but Grand Rapids is more spread out than Buffalo. The Buffalo MSA has a density of 718 people per square mile, whereas Grand Rapids has a density of 150 people per square mile. The urban area of Grand Rapids is also less dense than Buffalo's. How that plays into quality of life in this case, I'm not sure.

I don't think density has much of anything to do with quality of life, per se'. If density lends itself to some other amenities that increase quality of life, then maybe. As in, if more density supports more parks, better schools, better mass transit, vibrant retail, etc..

But other than downtown areas and the few hip neighborhoods that just about every city has, most urban areas are declining in population and suburban and exurban areas are still gaining in population. The trend in the US still seems to be that "most' people want to spread out.

[sheena12]

Originally Posted by magellan

What do you define as "big city amenities?"

These two charts of metro area population might be a clue?

https://www.recenter.tamu.edu/data/p...ra_Falls%2C_NY

https://www.recenter.tamu.edu/data/p...-Wyoming%2C_MI

There are a lot of strange similarities: similar climate, lake effect snow in the winter, two grocery store chains as your major employers (Wegmans and Tops Markets there, Meijer and SpartanNash here).

The Grand Rapids area has done an outstanding job growing and retaining manufacturing companies. As much as people like to bash manufacturers, the economic/jobs multipliers for mfg are much, much higher than service jobs (4 1/2 jobs for mfg vs 1.5 - 2 for service), even white collar professional service jobs. GR's manufacturing economy bottomed out around 80,000 jobs in 2009 and is back up to above peak at 110,000 or so. Buffalo bottomed out at 50,000 mfg workers and has stayed there.

This is just the manufacturing sector:

Bureau of Labor Statistics Data

Bureau of Labor Statistics Data

My opinion is that if manufacturing jobs don't matter anymore, why is so much focus being put on NAFTA in this election?

GR has a history of not being heavily unionized, so labor costs have stayed lower. The manufacturers here have also done a lot to grow their customer base to export goods, outside of the U.S.. There are also over 120 international companies here now, many of them manufacturers supplying the auto, office furniture and defense/aerospace industries. There's also huge growth in food manufacturing here. Kellogg's, even though they're based in Battle Creek, now has over 3000 workers here.

I'd be interested in hearing more about Buffalo.

Here are the largest employers in the Grand Rapids Metro:

Advancing The West Michigan Economy | The Right Place

Spectrum Health now dominates the scene. I keep joking that we'll all work for Spectrum some day.

Compare to Buffalo. Seems pretty similar actually.

Buffalo Niagara - Major Employers

Grand Rapids is only 20 - 30 minutes from Lake Michigan, which looks like this for about 100 miles in each direction:



I've never been to Buffalo so I don't know what the lakefront looks like.

The Buffalo lake front looks at least as nice. There are bed and breakfast places, tons of wineries, restaurants and other tourist attractions.