City’s Culture Brings Talent, Then Companies

When Prashanth Boccasam started a small software company last fall, he could have stayed in Houston, where he lived at the time. Instead, he packed up and brought Approva Corp. to Tysons Corner.

By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer

(Thanks to Mark Martin of the Missoula Cultural Council for sending this- Russ)

One reason: The young, talented employees he was trying to hire all wanted to live in a place with a vibrant cultural life.
"We just attracted a whole bunch of interns from Harvard and Yale for internships because they wanted to come to Washington," Boccasam said. "Culturally, there’s a tremendous amount Washington offers. It’s not like Houston where it’s a bunch of strip malls and McDonald’s."
Such sentiments are exactly what the area’s economic development officials want to hear as they market the region’s cultural and quality-of-life offerings to lure employers. Here and nationwide, experts are concluding that many of the most important factors in bringing jobs to a city are far removed from bottom-line considerations such as taxes and office availability. For models they cite economic success stories such as Austin and Seattle, metro regions that have attracted companies and thousands of high-wage educated workers in the past decade largely on the strength of what people do outside work: live and play.
Today, the Greater Washington Initiative, a coalition of business and government executives who market the region to outside employers, will release a study that underscores the growing consensus that culture is a potent attraction. The organization’s 2002 Regional Report has plenty of data on employment and the like in the Washington area. But the group’s real emphasis is on research showing that area arts organizations are enjoying $2.5 billion in new investment.
"Interesting forms of art and culture and entertainment and recreation are increasingly important parts of the mix that companies are looking for," explained Tom Morr, managing partner of the Greater Washington Initiative.

Officials nationwide are coming to the same conclusion, said Rick Weddle, president of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council and incoming chairman of the International Economic Development Council.

"There’s a shift to emphasizing talent as your best attribute," he said, adding that it takes a robust city life to attract talent that in turn attracts companies. "We thought it was due to the labor shortage in the late 1990s. In reality it was due to the value of talent, which hasn’t gone away."
His organization has done some recruiting on university campuses, trying to persuade the best and the brightest to move to Phoenix — the sort of effort that was unheard of a few years ago.
Richard Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, argues for just that sort of approach in his book "The Rise of the Creative Class," recently excerpted in a magazine under the headline "Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race."
In the book, he analyzed cities for factors that make them attractive to smart young people. His studies show a correlation with the presence of artistic options, highly educated people and a large gay population, and he ranked the Washington area eighth, behind such places as San Francisco, Austin and Seattle.

Prodding economic development used to be simple: Send representatives out to a cajole a few big companies, point out the cheap labor, low taxes and convenient airport of your burg, and watch the investment dollars flow in. In the new language of economic development, the keys to attracting the most desirable sort of growth are things like funky coffeehouses, a rambunctious local music scene, large immigrant populations and bustling urban parks.

Bruce Katz, director of the center on urban and metropolitan policy at the Brookings Institution, points out that the nation’s outer suburbs, complete with the strip malls and tract housing that young, creative people tend to shun, have grown more quickly than many more quirky urban environs. But that doesn’t discount the potential of a diverse, lively city attracting a highly educated, upwardly mobile workforce.
"What cities have to do is play to their strengths and develop the assets that make them distinct," Katz said. "Those things are their amenities and their lifestyle, like nightlife and cultural institutions."

As president of Cognetics Inc., David Birch advises companies on where to locate. Firms once tended to pick a location for a new office or factory based on where doing business is cheapest. No more.
"The cities growing fastest right now have the highest taxes, most expensive workers, most expensive land," Birch said. "To say you just want the cheapest worker is an old way of thinking. What you really want is a talented labor force, not the least expensive labor force."
"Part of the reason that the District is seeing inward migration of residents for the first time in years is because it has a very vibrant downtown," said Morr, of the Greater Washington Initiative. "Whether it’s the nightlife of a place like Adams Morgan or Georgetown or the Ballston Corridor, we have to make sure companies know about that side of the region."