Census Losers Market Cities to Newcomers
Aug. 19, 2003 -- — For years, Buffalo, N.Y., has suffered all manner of jokes and jabs. It's been called another "Mistake on the Lake." Home of the Buffalo Nils. A weather victim. And a deserted post-industrial town where generations of residents have run for the exits.
But like many cities routinely on the losing side of the Census, Buffalo is fighting back with a promotional campaign to revamp the city's reputation and lure people and jobs to the area.
The message: The steel mills may have closed, but there is other work here. The living is easy and affordable. And — perhaps the sorest point for Buffalo's promoters — don't believe the hype about the weather.
"People think it snows here 10 months a year, and it doesn't," says Leslie Hornung, marketing director of Buffalo-Niagara Enterprise, a public-private initiative charged with promoting the region. "We get, like, one big storm here every two years, and the Weather Channel shows up for that. But they're not here when it's summer and 75 degrees and sunny, and we're sailing on the lake."
Buffalo-Niagara has run ads on CNN, gotten its message out on public radio stations and publishes a Web site for job seekers and employers that gets 1.5 million hits a month, Hornung says. Many of the job seekers are 30-something Buffalo natives who would like to return but spent years elsewhere because they didn't think their hometown had anything to offer.
"What we find is when people are in their 30s, starting a family and wanting to buy a house, they find San Diego wasn't so great after all," she said.
When the latest Census figures were released last month, they told a story all-too-familiar to Buffalo and many other older industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest. People just keep leaving, mainly for the suburbs and to the warmer, more promising lands of the American South and West, and newcomers aren't replacing them.
Buffalo has lost 5,000 people since 2000, putting the city's population at 287,698 — not as bad as in the late '90s, when the city lost almost that many each year. Faring worse was Detroit, with 2.8 percent of its population — or 26,000 — disappearing in two years. St. Louis lost nearly 10,000, or 2.8 percent. And Savannah, Ga., the fastest-shrinking city, according to the data, lost almost 4,000, or 2.9 percent.
Savannah's leaders are contesting the Census figures, saying there had to be some mistake.
Population loss is bad news for cities because the federal government uses Census data to determine grant money. Business and industry also see population as an indicator of a city's health when considering a move.
Even for those cities with an exodus of residents, things aren't as bad as they were in the 1970s and '80s. The 1990s were kinder, thanks to the economic boom and an influx of immigrants. But not every city benefited, and some see their only hope for a burgeoning future in repackaging their region.
Cities Finding Their Niches
Marketing a city is really like selling a product, it turns out, and civic leaders must think like businessmen, says urban sociologist Robert E. Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech.
"They need to take stock of themselves to get a strategy and a niche they fall into," he said. "They have to say, this is what we have going for us."
While some factors in demographic shifts, like federal immigration policy, are out of the control of local leaders, they can do things such as attract employers, adjust the tax structure, fight crime, and reduce urban annoyances like litter, Lang says.
Indeed, several "shrinking" cities are making aggressive marketing moves in efforts to boost their ranks.
Pittsburgh is advertising itself as a welcoming, friendly place for foreign immigrants to relocate.
Washington, D.C., seeks 100,000 new residents by building affordable housing and improving city schools.
Baltimore recently placed ads in Washington's Spanish-language publications trying to lure the city's Latinos 40 miles to the north.
The mayor of Cleveland wants the Ohio city's population to exceed the 500,000 mark by 2010, and is focusing on jobs, education and public safety.
And the mayor of Schenectady, N.Y., has garnered attention recently by traveling to New York City and personally asking Guyanese immigrants to move upstate into vacant houses in his depressed city.
In Philadelphia, which in 50 years has dropped from the nation's third- to sixth-largest city, civic and business leaders are teaming up to promote the city and renovate its dilapidated urban core. The goal is to attract 75,000 new residents and build more than 2,000 new apartments and homes.
Philadelphia's marketing pitch, "One Big Campus," is not exactly a call to suburbanites or senior citizens. Civic leaders say it's not just how many people they attract — it's who they attract that will shore up the city's future.
Size Isn’t Everything
"Conventional wisdom of the last 20 years is that we could convince people to move back from the suburbs. That ain't going to happen," says David Thornburgh, executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League. "The numbers aren't going to be enough to replace people who left. The big powerful forces are immigrants and well-educated young people."
A "welcoming center" for new Pennsylvanians aims to ease the move to Philadelphia for foreign immigrants. And civic leaders work with colleges and universities in the region and elsewhere to recruit college students to Philadelphia and eventually get them hooked on the place.
"What we found is when they find out more about the city, they swing very positive," Thornburgh said. "Students who get off-campus and experience the city, active recreation, nightlife, and employment opportunities have a more positive feel than those who don't."
For all the clamoring for more residents, demographers say size isn't everything when it comes to population.
Washington, D.C., for example, may be a smaller city than it once was, but it is a richer city, Lang says, thanks to the professional singles, young couples without kids and gays who pay taxes but don't use government programs like schools.
"It's one thing to have people abandoning properties and fleeing neighborhoods," Lang said. "But if you don't gain 100,000 people and end up not declining, that's a success. If you still have 525,000 people but all the residents are happier, that's OK."