Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 20, 1993 TAG: 9309200145
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Big Lick may have been perfectly situated to become a railroad boom town in the 1880s.
The mountains just east of town dictated much of that: The Blue Ridge are at their lowest point, making them a natural crossing place for any rail line hauling coal from Appalachia to the ports.
But some economists and geographers - whose fields overlap in a specialty called "economic geography" - say Roanoke may be in the wrong place to share in the waves of high-wage growth washing over other big cities in Virginia and North Carolina in the late 20th century.
Roanoke's problem isn't the mountains, although they do complicate the search for flat, developable land. Instead, these economists and geographers cite a tangle of other factors: Roanoke's road network; its mix of industries; its lack of a major university; and, well, just its general location, period.
These academics speak of "tradesheds," the economic equivalent of watersheds, in which products, services - and money - flow along predictable, definable geographic lines.
"Traditional patterns die very hard," says Joseph Persky, an economist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied income distribution in Virginia and other Southern states. "History really is important. Unless you have something special going on, you'll move with the places you're traditionally allied with."
And traditionally, says Joe Wood, a geographer at George Mason University in Fairfax, Roanoke was part of the "Appalachian plateau natural resource economy."
That's a fancy way of saying Roanoke's early affluence depended on moving coal out of the coalfields. But the importance of coal and railroads have diminished.
Roanoke also serves as a regional center - for shopping, for medical services, for banking, for lots of things.
Trouble is, these economists and geographers point out, the region Roanoke serves is mostly rural, and suffering from slow growth when it's growing at all.
"A city serves its region, so if part of your region is in decline, that reflects badly on your city," says Jim Fonseca, another George Mason geographer who's working on a book about Virginia. "Part of your region is in great economic trouble."
Or, as Persky, the Chicago economist, puts it: "It doesn't help that your hinterlands are in decline. That acts as a drag."
In other words, Roanoke is too close to the slowest-growth and no-growth parts of the region - Southside and Southwest Virginia, eastern West Virginia. Any city close to them would suffer some economic drag, these academics say.
But that alone isn't enough to explain why the growth in Roanoke's median family income has failed to keep pace with the national average, while neighboring cities' have exceeded it.
Instead, these scholars who have studied Virginia's economy say the most curious thing about Roanoke is why it doesn't have stronger economic ties with the fast-growing cities closest to it - namely, the ones in North Carolina.
The state line isn't the barrier, Wood says. Economically speaking, state lines are even more porous than national boundaries, which are rapidly being erased in a global economy.
Instead, they say, the problem is we're not in the "tradeshed" with the North Carolina cities.
"You just don't have the business connections," Persky says. "The lack of a North Carolina connection is the most interesting problem."
Here's how they assess it:
In the "resource" economy, Roanoke's great strength was proximity. It was close to the coalfields. But today's economy is an information economy. "Now proximity is measured in milliseconds," Wood says. With satellite uplinks and downlinks, "you can literally be anywhere."
So Roanoke's proximity to North Carolina - or even Virginia's "golden crescent" from Northern Virginia to Richmond to Hampton Roads - doesn't mean a thing. "The fact that growth is happening there doesn't mean it should be happening in Roanoke," Wood says.
If Roanoke wants to share in the growth of its neighboring cities, Persky says, it needs more companies whose fortunes are tied to growth elsewhere in Virginia and North Carolina.
That, in a way, was Warner Dalhouse's strategy with Dominion Bank. By expanding into high-growth regions such as Northern Virginia, Dominion could grow far beyond what a Roanoke-based bank might otherwise expect. The trouble came when the real estate markets in Northern Virginia and other far-flung cities collapsed, pulling Dominion down with them.
But the economic ties Persky has in mind don't have to involve glamorous companies, or even companies headquartered in Roanoke. Take Kroger's warehouse in Salem, which distributes food to Kroger stores in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. That means the faster North Carolina grows, the more groceries Kroger is likely to sell there. If Kroger's volume in North Carolina increases enough, the Salem distribution center may need to hire more workers.
If Roanoke had more wholesale distributors serving Virginia and the Carolinas that way, "the whole region would move together," Persky says.
And if Roanoke had more companies tied into fast-growing global markets, their growth would create more high-wage jobs here.
As it is, Persky says, too many of Roanoke's largest employers - such as General Electric and ITT Corp. - are tied not to a fast-growing regional market, but to slow-growing national and international ones.
In effect, he says, if Roanoke had more businesses with ties to North Carolina, the businesses could help move Roanoke into the fast-growing North Carolina tradeshed. "You need to reposition yourself geographically."
That's why, he says, First Union's takeover of Dominion Bank may not be such a bad thing for Roanoke. Sure, it costs the city a corporate headquarters. But it also draws Roanoke closer into Charlotte's financial orbit, Persky says. "They may be able to put people in Roanoke in closer contact with people in Charlotte."
But Roanoke, in trying to "reposition itself geographically," faces obstacles, these scholars say, and the mountains are the least of them.
First, Persky says, Roanoke may be too well off to serve as a convenient source of cheap labor for a company's spinoff operations. Its median family income, while lower than that of the other big cities in the region, is still above the national average.
But the bigger problem is the same one that real estate agents cite as the key in trying to market a house - location, location, location.
"The problem revolves around A, being in the wrong place, and B, being in the wrong place relative to something," Wood says.
Being "in the wrong place" is a refrain that those who study urban economies repeat again and again when they talk about Roanoke.
The fast-growing cities of Virginia and North Carolina tend to be clustered around Interstates 95 and 85. Furthermore, some of them are so close that they've economically grown together - into the "Research Triangle" of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, and the "Triad" of Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. And even these clusters of cities are fairly close to one another.
"It's these large economic regions that are the engines of growth, and I think the geographic isolation of Roanoke is certainly a factor," says David Rusk, a Washington urban consultant and author of a What Roanoke needs, urban policy experts say, are interstate-quality roads that connect it directly with the Interstate 95 and 85 cities. much-discussed new book about urban growth.
Geographic isolation? Roanoke is only two to three hours' drive away.
The catch is, these urban policy analysts say, it's two to three hours in the wrong direction. We're a western city in a north-south economic zone.
"There's a system of cities and, in many respects, Roanoke is out of that system," Wood says. "Roanoke is really removed from the megalopolis [which economists say stretches from Boston to Charlotte] and the I-95 corridor. Because you're removed from that I-95 corridor, you're not in the tradeshed. You're not in the shadow of those major cities."
True, Roanoke sits beside Interstate 81, which seems busy enough. "But where's I-81 going?" Wood asks. "It's not the most direct route to Atlanta. You're not going to the places where the market demands."
What Roanoke needs, these experts say, are interstate-quality roads that connect it directly with the I-95 and I-85 cities.
"If you want to increase trade with North Carolina, what you need is a better road," Fonseca says. "But U.S. 220 is not an interstate-quality road." It twists and turns through Franklin and Henry counties, then turns to two lanes at the state line.
There is an interstate running from Western Virginia to Charlotte - I-77, which takes off from Wytheville. But it's too far west to benefit Roanoke much, says Susan Brooker-Gross, a geographer at Virginia Tech.
To compensate, she wonders whether Roanoke leaders will try to latch on to another interstate that's proposed for the region - Interstate 73, a 21st century project that would run from Detroit to Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Current plans call for it to enter Virginia near Bluefield, not far from I-77. Already some Southwest Virginia localities are clamoring to get a piece of the road action; the Giles County Board of Supervisors recently passed a resolution asking highway planners to route I-73 through their county instead.
Roanoke might argue that the road should come through here and Lynchburg instead, Brooker-Gross speculates.
There's another road connection that Roanoke is missing, the geographers say - a direct link to Richmond. In the 1960s, a group of Roanoke business leaders fought to have I-64 routed through Farmville, Lynchburg and Roanoke. Instead, that route lost out to the current Charlottesville-Staunton alignment.
Brooker-Gross and Fonseca say that's cost Roanoke critical economic ties with the state capital. Fonseca says Virginia legislators recently compounded the mistake when they voted to upgrade U.S. 58 along the state's southern border.
"What the state needs is an interstate-quality highway through Roanoke to Lynchburg to Richmond," Fonseca says. "When the state decided to do 58 [because the road was a pet project of then-House Speaker A.L. Philpott], that made sense politically but doesn't make any sense geographically or economically."
Of course, there is one thing that would help Roanoke render its geography moot, the academics say: A major university.
"A lot of companies otherwise footloose, if they're not going to locate in a really large city, will look for a university community," says Ann Fender, an economist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania who grew up in Roanoke. "That's where the growth in income has come from; it's not manufacturing."
The Roanoke area is the largest metro area in Virginia and North Carolina without a four-year state university. It's talked of trying to "adopt" Virginia Tech, a 45-minute drive away.
But Tech is too far away to do what Roanoke needs a university to do, Fonseca says. "The typical student in the nation today is part-time," he says. Often, that student is an adult, seeking more education to advance in the job market. High-tech firms seek out university towns so their workers can easily receive advanced training.
Tech, by Roanoke standards, is too far away for an easy commute, Fonseca says. What Roanoke needs is a university in Roanoke. He even thinks it should be on Roanoke's eastern edge so it can attract a few brave commuters from Lynchburg, another city that needs a state university to help it attract better jobs, he says.
Without a university, without better road links, without a fast-growing industry to drive the economy, Roanoke's prospects for attracting high-wage jobs are limited, these experts say.
"The economy today is providing services and creating transactions," Wood says. "If you want to measure a city's importance, instead of measuring the things it produces, you measure Federal Express generations, Internet transactions on the electronic highway, banking transactions, WATS line calls. What Roanoke needs to do is find a niche in that evolving system."
Alfred Stuart, a Roanoke native who did his dissertation on Roanoke and now teaches geography at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, sees it this way:
"Initially, Roanoke had a superior location. But nothing has happened to further build on that location." With the advent of an information economy, "Roanoke has become more inaccessible, Charlotte more accessible. Charlotte has tapped into that international information economy.
"Small metro areas don't compete very well in that economy. The small metro areas are being left out and are going to be left out. It raises a real question of what Roanoke's future is. I'm tempted to say it's not great."
The best avenue, he says, is to follow the lead of another mountain city without a university and without the right interstate connections: Asheville, N.C., which has promoted itself as a tourist and retirement center.
"You have to sell quality of life," Stuart says.
by CNB