Smaller cities get hip to attact young professionals

In the staid Bankers Club, young men and women mix it up with powerbrokers over beer, wine and hors d’oeuvres. Establishment luminaries work the room to welcome the twentysomethings to their inner sanctum.

By Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY

It’s the hippest crowd this sedate, wood-paneled room has ever seen. Even the older CEOs are loosening up. There’s the head of consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, tieless, playing host. University and chamber presidents, the newspaper publisher, bankers and executives bounce from table to table for informal chats. (Related chart: Cities sport young, educated populations http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-10-10-cities-chart.htm )

What’s going on? Why would Cincinnati’s powers-that-be court people half their age? For the same reason Pittsburgh, Richmond, Memphis, Tampa, Indianapolis, Baton Rouge, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Tallahassee, Fla., and Fresno, Calif., are launching Web sites, organizing summits, staging arts and music festivals and investing in glitzy promotions: to lure young professionals.

"Be hip and they will come" is the motto of a new movement in second-tier cities that have lost their best and brightest to more urbane centers such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Atlanta, Washington and Boston. Wooing young people has never been high on cities’ economic development agendas. Until now.

Cities spent decades dangling tax breaks and other financial sweeteners to attract big business. They poured billions of dollars into new stadiums, convention centers and aquariums. But their populations continued to shrink and to age. Two-thirds of the 50 largest metropolitan areas had fewer young adults in 2000 than in 1990, according to the Census. These cities now realize that they’ve done little to appeal to the labor force that will shape their economic future: educated 25- to 34-year-olds.

"They’re going to go after young people the way cities went after IBM," says Carol Coletta, host of the public radio show Smart City and a Memphis consultant.

Coletta co-hosted the Memphis Manifesto, a summit that brought representatives from 40 cities to Tennessee’s largest city last spring to cook up youthful strategies.

"Chambers of commerce have traditionally focused on older men who make decisions about where businesses will be located," she says. "City governments are focused on homeowners, mom ‘n’ pop with two kids who have to send their kids to schools. The revelation is this young group."

Cities are suddenly convinced that without them, their brain drain will continue. Employers will flock to hipper cities to attract this young labor force. Even worse, the dynamic businesses that young people create will start elsewhere.

"Bill Gates is pushing 50," says Joe Cortright, head of Impresa Inc., an economic consulting firm in Portland, Ore. "The next big companies that get started will probably not get started by baby boomers."

Choice demographic shrinks

"We built the stadiums. We built the hotels. We built the convention center. We still lost people. And the ’90s were a phenomenal decade," says Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "There’s an implicit recognition that the big-ticket items didn’t quite do the trick."

In their hunger to find ways to revive their cities, urban leaders are embracing young professionals who have money to spend and time to spend it. Better yet, this generation does not strain public services such as public schools and health care because they’re largely childless and healthy. Research shows that these people will play an important role in the economic future of cities because of:

•Demographics. The nation’s 78 million baby boomers are aging. The youngest are 39, an age when even boomers begin to settle down and start families. The oldest, who turn 57 this year, are starting to retire.

Filling their slots are just 40 million people ages 25 to 34. Cities are competing for this smaller pool of people who are deciding where to live and work. They are especially going after the 23 million college-educated young, a group 10% smaller than 10 years ago. Less than a quarter of Americans live in nuclear families, and about 25% are single.

•Mobility. Young adults are twice as likely to move to other states as middle-age people. That’s why cities are rushing to get them now, before they establish roots somewhere else.

Young professionals have been leaving the cities that are now struggling to attract them. More than 7,200 people born between 1966 and 1975 left Cincinnati’s Hamilton County in the 1990s, a 6% loss, according to an analysis of Census data by The Cincinnati Enquirer. Hamilton lost more than any other urban county in the Midwest.

•Knowledge economy. In the technological age, the importance of the educated and creative to the economy is magnified. If they flock to only a handful of cities, other cities risk falling behind.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, struck a chord with his theory that thriving cities attract culturally and ethnically diverse people — artists, gays, people who are physically fit and open-minded and anyone who thinks and creates for a living.

"I didn’t invent this," says Florida, professor at the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "I’ve just become a spokesman."

The youth message is getting through in cities where women and younger people have broken through leadership ranks. Young professionals are finding that they can be a big fish in a small pond — especially now that the old establishment is starting to take them seriously. Examples:

•In Fresno, the heart of California’s agricultural Central Valley, the talk is shifting from crops to arts because of Councilman Henry Perea, 26. Perea flew to Memphis and Tampa this year to attend "creative class" summits.

"Fresno has a reputation that I certainly would like to change," he says. "Out of 10 friends in college, I’m the only one who stayed."

In the year since he was elected, the city has passed a public art ordinance and is considering changing zoning to allow artists to live and work in the same buildings.

In Cincinnati, five of the nine city council members are younger than 40, and four are under 35. Nicholas Spencer, 25 and a native, is running for the council. He’s the founder of Cincinnati Tomorrow, a non-profit group that wrote a plan to make the city cooler, including helping black musicians record their work. He wants to repeal a city ban on laws that forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation.

•Tampa was shaken up by new leadership this year. Pam Iorio, 44, was elected mayor. Deanne Roberts, 50, head of a Tampa ad agency, chairs the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce — the second woman to hold the post.

The chamber launched Emerge Tampa to engage young people. The campaign is backed by an unexpected constituency: Mothers whose kids have moved away.

"These are successful women saying, ‘I’ve made it. I’m happy with my career. But for me to have a really full life, I want my kids and grandkids back,’ " Roberts says.

The mayor even created a new city position: manager of creative industries. A musician and former journalist, Paul Wilborn, was hired. Among his goals: Make Tampa a film center (The Punisher, starring John Travolta, is being filmed there); and review city regulations that discourage creative businesses from opening.

Don’t call them Yuppies. That’s too ’80s. Too reminiscent of an obsession with upward mobility. They’re simply YPs — "young professionals." They care more about quality of life than the corporate rat race. They’re not into climbing the ladder because many of the companies they want to work for don’t have much of a ladder. They like start-ups, small consulting firms or research labs. They pick a city they like and then worry about finding a job.

Most don’t live to work but work to live. They play in bands and sports leagues. They like to go out but not just with people from the office. They’re more interested in parks and bike trails than fancy sports arenas.

They want fun neighborhoods, art galleries, coffeehouses, nightlife and diversity in everything from race and sexual orientation to music and hairstyles. They’re more likely to work for a company that offers benefits to same-sex partners, even if they’re not gay themselves. In short, they crave cities that are tolerant of all lifestyles.

Florida says participants in his focus groups "blanched at the very idea of a 9-to-5 schedule or a standard dress code."

Shaking off stodginess

Mark Twain is supposed to have said: "When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always 20 years behind the times."

It’s a tough reputation to overcome. The pig sculptures that adorn downtown recall Cincinnati’s golden era as a pork-processing center. Today, the city is more famous for its three-way chili, sports teams and Procter & Gamble.

Not bad, except for race riots in 2001, the arrest of a museum director for exhibiting photos by artist Robert Mapplethorpe, bigoted comments by former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott and the gambling scandals of baseball hero Pete Rose. "Cincinnati has not defined its image," says lawyer Sean Rhiney, 32. "It let others do it."

YPs such as Rhiney want to be part of the city’s makeover. He and Bill Donabedian, 36, who designs content for classes on the Web, play in bands. They hang out at Allyn’s, an eclectic Cajun-Mexican food and music joint, to hear local bands.

They know Cincinnati’s music is hot, but does anyone else?

They decided to showcase the city’s musical heritage by organizing the MidPoint Music Festival last year. About 10,000 people showed up. The chamber of commerce, which recently launched YPCincy, and the city helped fund it this year; 25,000 came.

"Five years ago, the chamber would never have sponsored a music festival," Rhiney says. "It’s a sizable leap of faith."

P&G and other businesses have joined the YP movement. Mayor Charlie Luken is making it a priority. Condos and townhouses are being built downtown. Give Back Cincinnati is tapping YP’s spirit of volunteerism and has garnered the support of 275 companies. The arts community is reaching out with discounts to people under 30. The Contemporary Arts Center, designed by renowned architect Zaha Hadid, opened this year. Its provocative exhibits appeal more to hipsters than dowagers.

City changed her mind

As a young black woman who grew up in Boston, Najoh Tita-Reid was mortified when P&G offered her a job at its Cincinnati headquarters. She was 25.

"The reputation was that it was conservative, not diverse, not progressive and that if you were single, you’d be single forever," she says. She agreed to try it for two years. She’s been here five.

Tita-Reid became a mentor and founded the Cincinnati Partnership to keep YPs of color in Cincinnati. Her fiancé moved from New York. His company, which recruits minority teachers, has gone national. They bought a house in a historic neighborhood.

"This generation is not consumed with money and power but quality of life," she says.

Experts caution that efforts to lure YP’s will fail if they’re too gimmicky. Vibrant neighborhoods like New York’s Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s North Beach were not marketed. They evolved naturally into bohemian enclaves.

"It’s not enough to hold a music festival on the waterfront three times a year," says Brookings’ Katz. Cities’ long-term survival depend on the basics, he says: "Quality of our educational system, quality of life, tax rates, poverty."

Joff Moine, 30, found quality of life in Cincinnati. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, went to the University of Cincinnati and lived in Chicago for five years. He came back and founded the Cincinnati Sports Leagues for young professionals.

"We don’t live next to the ocean, we don’t live next to the mountains, but there is a good homegrown community of people," Moine says.

"I’m in love with the town."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-10-10-cities-cover_x.htm