Blue Sky Views offers commentary by experts on issues related to innovation and entrepreneurship in Chicago.
In fall 2012, Mayor Emanuel traveled to Champaign-Urbana to do what so many Silicon Valley investors have done on their visits to Chicago: steal the city’s talent.
Emanuel argued to University of Illinois students that Chicago’s size matters. The city offers far more opportunities than Champaign, he said. It can even compete with the Valley as a destination for the tech-savvy grads from one of the leading computer-science programs in the nation.
Livability.com, which covers small and mid-sized cities, just rated Palo Alto as the Best Place to Live in the United States. Nearby Santa Clara wasn’t far behind. What does Palo Alto have that Chicago doesn’t? Sure, it brims with venture capital to fund innovation. We have some, too. It’s got Stanford; we have Northwestern, University of Chicago and a host of other great universities. Sure, it has access to oceans and mountains. We have Lake Michigan and … snow.
Palo Alto also has a fantastic public school system. According to GreatSchools.org, the city of just 64,000 has almost as many 10-rated elementary schools, the top ranking, as Chicago, a city 40 times its size. The Millennial generation is turning 30 at a rate of 12,000 per day. As today’s 20-something entrepreneurs become tomorrow’s parents, great schools are a huge competitive advantage.
But not all the competition for innovative talent is coming from the Valley. Nearly 30 percent of Americans live in cities and towns with populations between 25,000 and 200,000. Some stand alone; others are suburbs of larger cities. These areas grew more than twice as fast in the last Census as larger cities, and almost three times as fast as the top 50 cities.
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Mayors in these markets tend to be laser-focused on fostering their own innovation communities and enhancing the livability of their towns. They want to retain homegrown talent, especially the younger, well-educated and highly skilled workers that make up the so-called Creative Class. They’re doing it by trying to attract people as well as businesses. Livability, innovation and talent retention are often intertwined.
So how can Chicago compete with smaller cities as well as with the likes of New York, Dallas and Houston? Schools aren’t easy to fix. Maybe we learn some other big ideas from smaller places.
Think outside the border box. Big-city life isn’t for everyone, but Chicago’s broader metro region offers just about everything (except mountains) you could want in terms of living space and recreation. Regions around Northwest Ohio, the North Carolina Research Triangle and Salt Lake City are working together on new projects to strengthen their metropolitan areas with cooperative efforts. Chicago should lead the way on a similar effort, not by encouraging more Uniteds and Motorolae to leave neighboring towns for our city limits, but by fostering 1871-like incubators throughout the region. Having an entrepreneur leave Chicago for Northbrook is better for Chicago than having them leave for Nashville or Asheville, N.C.
Work on our neighborhoods. Emanuel has prioritized expanding the technology corridor beyond River North. I’d encourage him to think of Chicago’s neighborhoods as small towns. There are 77 of them, and each has the population of a small to mid-size city. Rogers Park is about the same size as Redmond, Wash. The troubled Austin neighborhood is more populated than Albany, N.Y. Humboldt Park is the size of Chapel Hill, N.C. Identify the “Main Street” in each “town” and invest in its revitalization in a mixed-use commercial and residential model favored by today’s 20something innovators. Getting innovative businesses dispersed is part of it, but you have to improve amenities as well.
Focus on smaller spending. The new arena that will host DePaul basketball will require an expected $100 million in public funding, $70 million of it coming from a city-state agency and $33 million from city property taxes earmarked for economic development. That sum could fund nearly 3,000 years of tuition at said university’s business school. Or it could be invested in smaller projects. York, Ala. (pop. 3,000) created a public art project/theater for less than $50,000 that makes it a better place to live.
Learn that building jobs is easier and cheaper than luring them. The top three graduates of a small business incubator in Tyler, Texas (pop. 100,000) generated more jobs there than Boeing’s relocation brought Chicago – without the $63 million incentive package that Boeing required.
The overarching lesson from America’s most appealing smaller cities: Innovation is iterative. Make lots of little plans, and design them to benefit individual residents and small businesses. Then the big pieces will fall into place.
Matt Carmichael is the Chicago-based editor of Livability.com. He is also the author of the forthcoming “Buyographics, How Demographic and Economic Changes will Reinvent the Way Marketers Reach Customers.”