Pride under Prejudice, Finding Factory Workers, & Startup Migration
Small Cities Weekly | 06.28.2024
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The Pride under the Prejudice
‘Gentlemen, how we doing?”
We walk through a door that darkens us more than we darken it. The room opens up into what the bartender would later describe as “your dad’s basement”. A low drop ceiling, photos and paraphernalia used as wallpaper, and a dedication to exclusively using a CD player. The question and tone tells you all you need to know about this place. It’s a regulars bar. It’s quite literally closer to walking into someone’s basement than a restaurant found on the riverfront just blocks away.
We respond with our Midwest niceties and explain we are in town for a few days, just exploring the city.
“What brings ya here, though?”
Here weighs down the sentence. A shoulder drops, an eyebrow lifts, lips curl, and confusion creates genuine curiosity. The answers given are less than helpful, eliciting more confusion.
“So you are just interested in small cities then? That’s kinda cool, I guess. This is definitely one of those.”
Some rapport is built when it’s mentioned that we hail from South Bend. A form of kinship is recognized. ‘At least they understand what they’re getting into…” is what I imagine him thinking as he shrugs his shoulders and turns to grab himself a can of Lipton Iced Tea.
After being the only ones for a bit, the first regulars wander in. The coasters barely hit the bar top before the bartender gestures toward us across the wraparound bar.
“These boys are in from South Bend. They want to know what’s good to see ‘round here. Whatya think?”
Free popcorn, cash, and a Tito’s and soda change hands as a moment of silence takes hold. We’ve already added some intrigue to the evening’s regularly scheduled programming.
“Well I s’pose it depends what you wanna see. I just don’t know that we have all that interesting stuff here. Some old churches, maybe?”
We go on to describe some of our interests - old buildings, cool neighborhoods, great bars, and remnants of industries past. The opinions are rather muted but a few things are tossed out as suggestions. The lack of conviction isn’t a practice in withholding, just a practice in pondering.
No real conclusions arrive. The conversation meanders to regular bar fare, in which we are now included. We ride the fine line of jumping in and knowing our place in the hierarchy.
The next few patrons arrive. Drinks appear before butts hit seats. We’re introduced once again, our interests broadcast to all, and suggestions solicited on our behalf. Once again, the answers are in short supply, crowded out by far more questions.
“Where else have ya been? Where else are ya going? What are ya trying to see?”
We explain a bit further. As they digest, we move on to hearing how one becomes a card-carrying professional dart player, the dynamics of being a union president, and lighthearted conspiracy theories.
A round of drinks appears without us asking or paying. Shot glasses follow with a nod and a cheers from a woman across the way.
“If you find yourself back in town, I come here Thursdays at 4:30. Would love to hear what you end up finding.”
A few more regulars come and go. Each time the door opens, it’s followed by a wave from new friends or a look of surprise in seeing new faces.
We decide it’s time to be on our way. The act of leaving takes much longer than what we deserve after only a few short hours spent there. New questions are rapidly fired. New landmarks and neighborhoods are mentioned, the words barely escaping the bar as the door closes and our feet hit the sidewalk outside.
The doors of the truck close and smiles and laughter fill the cab.
We start talking about how these kind of spaces allow you to uncover a pride that is often masked in self-deprecation. Pride in a place that can feel non-transferable. Meeting someone that enjoys that type of place you live in, rather than the specific place, is emboldening and even validating. But it takes a certain environment to find and share that.
You can’t buy that experience. It’s not for sale. But it is available. Enrollment is open. You too can become a card carrying member of the small city lovers. You won’t believe some of the clubs it gets you into.
It may not be flashy. It may not translate into a commercial. It may not be for everyone.
But at least for now, it seems to be for me.
Links
You can find links from this and all previous editions here.
A Small Town With a Big Factory Goes South in Search of Workers, Lauren Weber, WSJ
“The company, the family, we’re always supportive of anything that’s good for the town,” said Chief Executive Paul Marvin, who is 49. “If we really just wanted to be more profitable, there’s better towns than this.”
Marvin has factories in 10 other cities and towns across North America, but it doesn’t want to move jobs away from its biggest factory because the company and its hometown are inextricably linked. Paul Marvin’s grandmother Margaret donated the money for a library and heritage center filled with local artifacts, including a birch bark wigwam and fur jackets that hark back to the area’s once-robust mink ranching industry. It sits across the street from the old train depot that now serves as city hall. The Marvin family paid to restore the depot and the electrified Warroad sign at the top of the building.
Bob Marvin, Paul’s uncle, has been Warroad’s mayor for 30 years, and ran unopposed in all but two of the biennial elections. He owns around 100 vintage cars, a world-class collection displayed in a custom building known as the Shed, one of Warroad’s few attractions for outsiders. Asked what he’d like to see in Warroad, he said, “More people, for obvious reasons.”
Go West Young Firm: The Impact of Startup Migration on the Performance of Migrants, Jorge Guzman, Columbia Business School
This paper studied how migration affects the performance of startups and presented evidence that migration leads to higher performance by improving a startup’s ecosystem and its access to locally agglomerated resources. Within a few potential mechanisms, the role of the local innovation ecosystem appears more critical than local financing or the incidence of local startup peers. One region in the U.S., Silicon Valley, is an outlier in the strength of its ecosystem, independent of the measure used. Accordingly, migrations to Silicon Valley lead to a substantially higher treatment effect than migrations to other destinations, particularly for migrants that leave low-performing ecosystems. In contrast, there is no evidence for additional benefits related to taxes, weather, or the act of moving, on the performance of migrants.
When Hospital Prices Go Up, Local Economies Take a Hit, Melanie Evans, Andrew Mollica, Josh Ulick, WSJ
The new study tracked price changes after roughly 300 mergers of nearby hospitals between 2010 and 2015, using data from three of the nation’s largest health insurers.
To measure what happened next to local jobs, the researchers analyzed corporate filings with the Labor Department on fully insured premiums and employee tax records of earnings and unemployment.
The findings: As hospital prices went up 1%, so did the percentage of people who ended up out of a job. The layoffs dealt a blow to their communities. Income-tax revenue dropped and payments for tax-funded unemployment insurance increased 2.5%.
Some local economies got hit harder than others. Where mergers gave hospitals hefty market power as defined by economists and federal antitrust enforcers, hospital prices—and unemployment—increased more sharply.
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