General Electric, unhappy with a recent corporate tax increase in Connecticut, has now announced that it is relocating to Boston’s south waterfront. Indeed Connecticut’s tax climate is bad, ranking 44th according to the Tax Foundation, but GE’s move points to much bigger problems in the state. I examine this in my new piece over at City Journal. Here’s an excerpt:
For decades, nearby New York City’s pain was Connecticut’s gain. New York was a grim, dangerous, failing city that almost went bankrupt in the 1970s. More than 100 Fortune 500 companies fled during that era, many heading to suburban New Jersey and Connecticut—including GE, which moved in 1974 from 570 Lexington Avenue to Fairfield, Connecticut. The same story played out in cities across America, with corporations fleeing dying downtowns for the safety of the suburban office campus.
Today, cities are back. The policing revolution—helped by the waning of the crack epidemic—made cities safe again. Core public services were slowly restored, parks were rebuilt, and transit systems were cleaned up and refurbished. Investment started returning. The structure of the economy changed, too. Starting in the 1990s, technology radically transformed the business world and is now a major industry in its own right. The financial industry was deregulated. Globalization drove demand for new types of business services, reinforcing the need to stay on top of a constantly shifting landscape. People with advanced, specialized knowledge are the ones who help companies innovate now. These employees work in highly interactive ways that benefit from clustering together—disproportionately in urban areas like New York, Chicago, and Boston.
Click through to read the whole thing.
Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor at City Journal. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.
Photo: The former General Electric/Remington facility in Bridgeport, CT. The buildings have been demolished in recent years.
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