Smaller cities lose out when it comes to business consolidation and headquarters relocation: WInston-Salem, North Carolina

Winston-Salem is a secondary city in North Carolina, second to Charlotte, the largest city in the state, and to Raleigh-Durham, home to universities and large research operations.  

 When US business was not so concentrated in major cities, it was home to a large number of firms including major corporate headquarters.  

These days, not unlike Caterpillar living Peoria for Chicago, and now to Texas, Winston-Salem is experiencing the loss of those corporations, especially as they further consolidate and relocate.  If firms stay in North Carolina, they are moving to Charlotte.

The Winston-Salem Journal has a really great article about this process, "Triad weathers corporate HQ departures with manufacturing revival."  It's super rare for a smaller newspaper to have such a thorough, detailed, well-argued piece.

I've written a few entries on this topic in the past year and over the years: 

-- "Next Level Clustering of Business away from the Midwest," 2022
-- "Boeing to move "headquarters" to Northern Virginia," 2022 
-- "How the closure of a Pfizer research center in Ann Arbor, Michigan led to the development of a biotech sector there," 2021
-- "Why do Rust Belt rivals Cleveland and Pittsburgh have diverging economies?," 2021 
-- "Crystal City Arlington as Amazon one-half of HQ2 | Part 1: General + Housing impact," 2017
-- "Part 2: Leveraging Amazon's entrance for complementary economic development improvements," 2017

Ten smaller businesses versus one big business: which is better?  And a point in the WSJ article dovetails with a point made in the article about Ann Arbor and biotechnology, that Winston-Salem needs to recognize its place in the business ecosystem and focus on smaller businesses, and that for example 10 businesses, with more of their functions handled locally, has more impact than one business with the same number of employees, and fewer locally-based business functions, and is less dependent on any one business.

R&D functions and manufacturing proximity.  It also illustrates another point although the author doesn't mention it per se, about "doing versus coordinating."  Corporate headquarters or at least research and development for manufacturers--with Boeing being a big exception--tend to stay proximate to major manufacturing clusters.

Airports.  A key point mentioned is airports and the number of destinations served.  International companies like Caterpillar can't rely on a local airport for simplified connections.  Same with firms in Winston-Salem.

--  "Do tax incentives pay off? : Illinois; Tennessee; Rosslyn + "The Airport Access Factor"," 2017

Education.  The article mentions the importance of higher education in particular technical education and engineering, something that Greensboro, a peer city, has been particular good at.

-- "Universities as elements of urban/downtown revitalization: the Portland State story and more," 2014

-- "Naturally occurring innovation districts | Technology districts and the tech sector," 2014

-- "Better leveraging higher education institutions in cities and counties: Greensboro; Spokane; Mesa; Phoenix; Montgomery County, Maryland; Washington, DC," 2016

-- "Revisiting past blog entries: College Park as a college town and economic development | PG County and Amazon,," 2018

-- "University President Freeman Hrabowski and an agenda for urban universities," 2021

-- "The other George Miller idea: creating multi-college innovation centers in (cities) Philadelphia | Creating public library-college education centers as revitalization initiatives," 2021

Technological change can redistribute business location.  And while I haven't written about it, how quantum technological change within an industry can change its location patterns.  

For example, now that the auto industry is moving from gasoline engines to electric motors, the new firms and their suppliers are increasingly located outside of the Midwest.  It's not that Michigan and other states aren't landing some of the business, but so are states like Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, etc., shifting supply chains and where added value is developed.

Interestingly, oil interests are fighting this in Republican-led states ("Georgia judge's incentives ruling threatens Rivian EV plant," Atlanta Journal-Constitution).  It's positioned as fighting corporate welfare, but it's really a different type of corporate welfare attempting to ward off competition.