Flint and Rochester: A Tale of Two Cities

With the decline of Kodak, Rochester, New York could have become another Flint, but it has fared far better than the Vehicle City. Peter Applebome of The New York Times reports:

It feels like the wrenching culmination of a slide over decades, during which Kodak’s employment in Rochester plummeted from 62,000 in the 1980s to less than 7,000 now. Still, for this city in western New York, the picture that emerges, like a predigital photograph coming to life in a darkroom, is not a simple tale of Rust Belt decay.

Rochester has been a job-growth leader in the state in recent years. In 1980, total employment in the Rochester metropolitan area was 414,400. In 2010, it was 503,200. New businesses have been seeded by Kodak’s skilled work force, a reminder that a corporation’s fall can leave behind not just scars but also things to build upon.

Flint's block-busting history

William A. Johnson, Jr., the former mayor of Rochester, New York, remembers his days in Flint:

"After graduation, I took a job as a political science professor at Mott Community College. Flint was my first venture out of the South. I arrived in 1967, just after the Detroit riots. My wife and I got an apartment in the city east of Saginaw Street.

"In 1968, Flint became the first city in the country to have an open housing ordinance. The law prohibited discrimination in housing. It was a tough struggle to get it passed. City Council at first voted it down, the mayor threatened to resign, Martin Luther King was assassinated, the political winds shifted, and fi-
nally it passed.

"This was an historic moment for the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and I was immensely proud of Flint.

"Then I began to see the for-sale signs popping up in the white neighborhoods west of Saginaw. It looked like a political campaign with all the lawn signs.

"What was happening was block busting at its most furious. Homes in white neighborhoods were being re-sold to Blacks at inflated prices — prices they really couldn't afford — which lead to massive foreclosures and vacancies. The whites, of course, fled to the suburbs. The open housing ordinance, something intended to do good, boomeranged and ate Flint like a cancer."

In Search of a Cure

Flint may turn to casinos to cure its economic ills, but the The Economist points out that hospitals might be just what the doctor ordered. (Sorry for that tortured healthcare metaphor.)

All this is an extreme example of a growing phenomenon. After the 20th-century factory town, such as Flint, Michigan, comes the 21st-century hospital town. Rural hospitals are often the main employers in their communities. Even Flint is trying to re-position itself as a medical hub. But a select few cities have entered the era of the mega-hospital. The most dramatic are Rochester, a medium-sized city where Mayo has long been a star business, and Cleveland, Ohio, a rustbelt city that has seen its hospitals boom and one, the Cleveland Clinic, become a new economic force. Each hospital is a behemoth: Mayo's revenues in 2006 totalled $6.3 billion, Cleveland's $4.4 billion.