Yes, Indianapolis Can Compete With the Sunbelt
When we look at the statistics comparing Indy to other similar sized regions, we see that Indy ends up at or near the top of heap vs. other regions in the Midwest, but lags those in the Sunbelt like Nashville, Austin, or Charlotte.
The natural question is to ask why Indy isn’t at the level of some of those Sunbelt cities. The natural response is to suggest that the places that are outperforming us have some sort of special advantage that we don’t have.
But is that true?
Every place has some advantages over others. In this case, one big advantage that Sunbelt cities have is, well, the sun. It is true that average January temperature has been a big predictor of population growth in the United States recently. There’s not much we can do about that.
On the other hand, there are cold weather cities that have found success. New York and Boston have lousy winters that include not infrequent Nor’easter blizzards. They aren’t rapidly growing but have found incredible success in building their high-end knowledge economies, at least pre-coronavirus.
More recently, cities in Idaho like Boise, Coeur d’Alene, and Idaho Falls have been among the absolute fastest growing regions in America. These places have winter temperatures comparable to Indy. They do have mountains, but until recently no one thought of Idaho as a talent destination. It actually had a reputation for farming (potatoes) and as a place full of survivalist compounds. These are also much, much smaller regions than Indy with much less to do, much less impressive cultural institutions, etc.
There are always tradeoffs between places. We tend to focus on the positives of higher performing cities, but much less on their negatives. This is especially reinforced in places we’ve actually visited, because we usually go see the best of a city when we visit it and avoid the not so nice parts.
But if we look more holistically, the differences between Indy and some of these other places is not as big as it might seem.
I often like to compare Indy and Nashville, because I’ve been a regular visitor to Nashville for a decade or more. Nashville’s a great city with a great vibe. But it’s not a perfect city, or one that’s clearly intrinsically better than Indy.
Obviously Nashville is famous for country music while Indy is not. However, Indy does have its own globally significant brand from auto racing. Country music might seem sexier, and there are probably more country music fans than racing fans in America today, but country music is hardly something with an elite vibe. You don’t hear many people listening to or talking about country music in superstar cities like New York, that’s for sure. I think it’s also telling that country stars who get big often crossover to pop — Taylor Swift is the best example — but rarely the reverse.
Nashville has the highly regarded Vanderbilt University. But they don’t have the Lilly Endowment or nearly the philanthropic resources of Indianapolis. They did win the Amazon operations HQ, but Nashville is not nearly the tech center you might think. In fact, Indianapolis has more tech jobs than Nashville. Visit their downtown and compare it to downtown Indy. They’ve got one very busy street, Broadway, lined with honky-tonks. The rest of it is arguably inferior to our downtown.
Nashville also faces serious infrastructure challenges, ones far worse than Indy does. Their freeway and arterial street system has a bad design, resulting in terrible traffic congestion and long commutes. The average person in Nashville can only reach 35.5% of the region’s jobs in a 30-minute commute. In Indianapolis you can reach 57% of the region’s jobs in that time. Both Indy and Nashville have similar transit ridership, but Indy’s voters approved a plan to invest in transit here. Nashville’s voters shot down an extremely expensive plan there, sending local leaders back to the drawing board. And only 37% of streets in the city of Nashville have sidewalks. Realistically, Nashville will never be able to fix its infrastructure problems.
My point is not to slam Nashville. I think it’s a great town. I just don’t think they’ve got some magic set of assets that sets them apart from us such that we can’t be as attractive to national talent and companies as they presently are. For every asset they have that we don’t, we’ve got something they don’t have. We have our problems to overcome, but they are a community with serious challenges too. And don’t forget that 30 years ago, they were just a small, backwoods state capital few people in America could imagine themselves moving to.
Nashville doesn’t have to lose for us to win. America is a big country where many more places can join the ranks of the winners. But if we don’t believe we can compete at the top level, we’re never going to try to compete. I for one think we can, so let’s start taking the attitude of “Why not us?”
