Heartland Cities Are Stuck. Washington Can Help Them.
As America’s big “superstar” cities pull away from the rest of the country, the former industrial hubs and rural towns left behind in today’s tech-driven economy are doing whatever they can to compete—and it isn’t always healthy. The contest to host Amazon’s second headquarters epitomized their problem. Desperate for tech cachet and tens of thousands of jobs, cities from Albany to Fresno stepped forward, in many cases by offering subsidies and tax breaks they could barely afford. Even then, Amazon anointed the thriving Washington, D.C., suburbs and (initially) New York City as its winners.
As I and my Brookings Institution colleagues Mark Muro and Bill Galston noted in a recent , the U.S. economy suffers from a stark geographic divide. America’s largest cities—places such as
