Why NYC Thrived but Other Cities Died as Manufacturing Left

What can real estate learn from Rochester? More than you might think.

About what not to do, that is.

Upstate cities such as Rochester, Syracuse and Utica declined as industry retrenched or moved to the South or overseas. New York City’s large manufacturing base was also gutted, with employment in that sector plunging from 1 million jobs to about 55,000.

Yet New York City’s economy grew while its upstate counterparts withered away.

Why haven’t upstate cities been able to reinvent themselves as New York City did?

X user @PhilSustainable got me thinking that poor land-use policy is a big part of upstate cities’ problems.

Specifically, huge swaths of upstate cities are devoted to parking. These innumerable masses of macadam spread people apart and sap life from what should be urban centers.

“Syracuse has a world-class collection of parking spots. Sadly, they’re mostly empty space,” PhilSustainable tweeted. “Imagine if that sea of asphalt was a sea of tall multifamily homes with corner stores and retail. Syracuse can put its land back to work and be rich.”

He punctuated his point with four photos:

Then he turned his attention 90 miles west.

“It’s crazy seeing parking lots in Downtown Rochester. The city should be as rich as Brooklyn today, but chose pavement instead.”

The photos are just brutal:

For all the New York Post headlines about people fleeing New York City, its population has remained relatively high. Between the Great Financial Crisis and the pandemic, it surged by more than 700,000 people to just above 8.8 million. It’s upstate’s losses that have reduced the state’s number of House districts from 45 in the 1940s to 26 today.

I don’t want to give our city policymakers too much credit. The street grid and transit system were here long before they were. And the city has only recently begun to get rid of parking mandates; it has only avoided having lots of surface lots because land was too expensive to create them.

And although high demand to live in the city pushed our population count up, it would have risen by even more — and rents by less — if elected officials hadn’t preserved parking mandates and low-density zoning across 70 percent of the city.

But at least the city didn’t do what upstate cities did, embracing the notion that the local economy depends on people being able to park for free within 50 feet of their destination.

The photos above show what all that empty space produces: a whole lot of nothing.