After reading Richard Florida’s book, Who’s Your City and thinking about what he says through his research findings and trying to implement in Roanoke, I would offer some initial responses.
1. It’s obvious Roanoke’s competitive advantage across the 5 life-stages is cost of living as evidenced by our better rankings in Appendix C.
2. The older you get, the better Roanoke is for people. Our lowest ranking was 143 out of 167 for singles ages 20-29, yet it is 50 out of 72 for metros whose population is between 250-500k. Professionals (ages 29-44) it’s 37 out of 72. Therefore, this data confirms our focus should be on attracting and retaining the YP population.
3. Some cities Roanoke aspires to become actually overall rank worse than Roanoke. When you do a head-to-head comparison of Appendix C to cities such as Asheville and Chattanooga (which were cities visited by local economic development officials) Roanoke has better marks 6-4 and 8-2, respectively. Therefore, I think the data shows Roanoke is better than many think when compared to its peers.
4. One Roanoke and New River Valley MSA. Using this same overall head-to-head comparison, Roanoke is 18 of 72 cities in the 250-500k population category. The 17 ahead of Roanoke many have 4-year institutions (Ann Arbor, Boulder, Durham, Fayetteville, Green Bay, Lexington, Lincoln, Provo, Etc.) . Therefore, this proves an old assertion. Roanoke is disadvantaged without a 4-year research entity and the importance of relationships with our local colleges - supported by the new medical school. Further, the Blacksburg MSA was not in the list. There has been talk previously of working to combine the Roanoke-Blacksburg MSA into one MSA. Not sure what needs to be done to make it happen, but it is worth investigating. One combined MSA would not put the region into a higher population category, but instead would make it a total population of about 450,000 and perhaps in the top 5 of regions 250-500k. Doesn’t that sound a little better.
More to come in the future on Who’s Your City.