¶ Intro / Opening
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
¶ Allentown's Deindustrialization Symbol
Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe.
Why isn't Joe?
Do you ever discover little cultural blind spots that you had in your life?
I'm like, where are you going with this?
So I discovered one recently and it kind of led to a minor epiphany for me. But I had heard the Billy Joel song Alan Town. I had never watched the video, and in preparation for this episode, I watched the video and suddenly a bunch of Simpsons references made sense to me.
Interesting.
And I don't mean to be I don't mean to be very grand millennial by making Simpsons references.
Simpsons reference to like someone younger in the office, they look at the blank stare. I know, it's reallyressed. I just don't do it anymore because it's so depressing.
I know, and here I am doing it on the podcast.
But I actually, you know, we're the same generation, so we could do it.
We can do it.
This is a safe listeners might not get it.
So the reason I bring it up, though, is for kind of a serious point, not just to talk about Billy Joel music, although now that I think about it, he has a lot of songs about like the political economy of America. But it is because Allentown, Pennsylvania basically became a poster child for de industrialization and the hollowing out of American manufacturing in the nineteen eighties.
¶ The Reindustrialization Imperative
It was a great intro and thank you and of course, right, so we know, and obviously over the years on odd lots, we've talked a lot about industrialization, de industrialization, reindustrialization, great, all very interesting themes. Everyone maybe like feels in their gut somehow that they're like pro reindustrialization, whatever that means. Right, But then the gap between like somehow like we feel good about producing physical things, we want more of that,
What does that actually look like in practice? What are these jobs? What are these potential industries? Then it suddenly gets much more hazy. Right, people don't know what that actually looks.
Like in practice? Right, how do you actually go about implementing industrial policy on a local scale. And I have to say, the other thing I found out in researching for this podcast. I had no idea, but Allentown, Pennsylvania was also the site of the first some of the first mass produced transistors, yeah, which are like the precursor to semiconductors of today.
Can I say what random thinking about Billy Joel before we go further, you know, because obviously you mentioned he talks about, you know, a lot of political economy things and including of course, and we didn't start the fire. The final line of that song is like something about the Cola wars, and he's like, I can't take it anymore, and I just think it's really funny that the Cola wars coke vers pepsi is the thing that tip to
over edge like a Vietnam War. All these things happened, and finally the thing that tipped them over the edge was the cold anyway sidechrick, but I just had to.
Get that out.
We should do a whole episode on Billy Joels songs at some point, including my favorite karaoke standard, which is down Easter Alexa, all about the decline of the fishing industry. But anyway, Allentown, Pennsylvania, let's focus. We do, in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with the Mayor of Allentown, Matt Turk. So thank you so much for coming on all thoughts place.
It's a huge pleasure to be here.
It actually helps because we are we are at the conference in Madrid, right and.
We just saw you have a medal from me from the marathon over the weekend. Tell us about that.
I landed on Saturday, went right to the marathon expo, picked up my bib. Twenty four hours later I was starting the Madrid forty two k not twenty six miles, forty two kilometers marathon. It was hot, it was hilly, it was beautiful, great crowd support, phenomenal marathon fun finished the marathon and then went right to a reception for Bloomberg City Lab and I've been NonStop since then.
¶ Billy Joel Song Controversy
That is dedication to both Cardio and city Bustling. So congrats on that. I mentioned Allantown the song and the video in the intro, and I discovered there's some controversy about this because apparently the steelmaking was more in Bethlehem rather than in Allantown. So should Billy Joel have been talking about semiconductors instead of steel?
I mean, there's he could have been talking about Max trucks. He could have been talking about silk manufacturing. That's like the local controversy is that like he's talking about you know, Bethleem but he didn't rhyme as well with shutting factories down. But then there's you know, I was surprised.
I thought that.
Everyone in the country felt like not great about the song Allentown. Then I met the mayor of Toledo and
he was like, that's a great song. It's about the working man and blah blah blah blah blah, And I was like, what are you talking about, Like this is the song that like everybody in our region and the Lehigh Alley just like dreads hearing because it's about this like different era that maybe was like felt right in the moment in eighteen eighty two, like that maybe kind of captured the moment, But in twenty twenty six, it's like it doesn't sound further from it couldn't sound further
from the truth.
¶ Allentown's Historical Industries
Give us like a little Allentown history, Like what is the timeline when we talk about these sort of key industries that were once associated with the city of Allentown. What was the sort of peak of it and when was the sort of trough.
Maan, Yeah, I mean so, I mean the city was founded back in seventeen sixty two. It had its revolutionary moment. We hid the liberty bell there, but it really picked up and incorporated in eighteen sixty seven for the kind of reconstruction, and that's when the industry really started to It started to industrialize. Like many American cities, early industry was cigar manufacturing, so tobacco that was growing in Lancaster was shipped to Allentown for production into cigars. Silk manufacturing
became a pretty big deal in that area. It was a place where silk could be brought in and then processed. In the early kind of nineteen ten, sort of around the First World War, mac truck moved to Allentown from Brooklyn. This was like nineteen fifteen, and industrial production of those vehicles started. We manufactured volty bombers, a particular type of bomber for World War Two. This is all coincident with
¶ From Transistors to Plant Closures
Bethlehem's steel industry rising up. The industrial work continued through I think you guys must mentioned the transistor in Western Electric. That was kind of a big story. But then, like a lot of places, manufacturing started to decline, not as strongly in Allentown as other parts of the country. But the Western Electric plant eventually shut down. The year were we talked about with that Western Electric was.
In the seventies.
It actually it morphed into something else that eventually became Broadcom. So there's still some manufacturing. It didn't necessarily exist in the city. It spread out into suburban parts of the region. There's still some chip manufacturing occurring or wafer polishing occurring in the area. We still have the kind of muscle memory of semiconductor manufacturing. But again, the industry evolved and changed. The Volta aircraft shut down when there's no need to
produce bombers anymore. MAC Trucks continued operations in Allentown, but in the eighties shifted most of its production to a plant in Mcunjie that still operates today. A lot of those old MAC plants were acquired by an organization that I used to work for, the Allentown Economic twelve in Corporation, and repurposed. Initially repurposed for this is the eighties. The thought at the time was that it could be an incubator facility, a business incubator. It did become that, but
it is more of a manufacturing incubator. These were old sawtooth roof buildings with twelve to eighteen foot ceilings, so some big spaces but not a lot of clearance. They weren't suited for modern manufacturing. And that's what a lot of the building stock in all the time looked like.
¶ Diversifying Post-Industrial Economy
But the production was still occurring in some capacity in the city, definitely in the region. When the steel shut down in Bethalem in eighteen ninety eight, I think was when they did their last cast. That's when leading up to that, the region had already started to think about how to diversify, how to build on the Western electric The semiconductor manufacturer Lehigh University was a source of engineering talent.
They started to diversify out into life sciences. So there's some precursor drugs that are manufactured there, some medical supplies that are still manufactured there bibraun Another one that I didn't meant was air products. So it's an industrial gas manufacturer. I know you guys were recently talking about helium. Air products is like, it's.
So fun talking to a listener. That makes it so easy.
It's like a helium.
Yeah, the helium.
So helium was something that air products manufacturers. It's one of those head scratchers when you're talking about a region's industrial output to say, like we make like an element, like an elemental element like the low Yeah, it's hard to describe how that happens. But that was founded in Allentown, actually was founded in Tennessee and moved Downlandtown in the fifties,
but a lot of that production was still occurring. The kind of civic leaders of the time in the early nineties as they could foresee the end of Bethelm Steel when it was acquired I think it was acquired by our store, Midal, But they could see the end in sight, and so they made a conscious effort to diversify, working with a commonalth of Pennsylvania to stand up some tech led economic development, which had its It was successful in
a few places. The biggest sess in attracting investment or the biggest kind of economic development story for the region was in two thousand and six when the region convinced Olympus, which is the manufacturer of surgical devices, to relocate its North American headquarters too.
They were out in suburban Bethlehem.
But that's been the character right, there's it's a very diverse fide economy today, it's still about seventeen percent of the jobs or manufacturing jobs, so it's much higher than many other parts of the country and it's held pretty steady.
So that's.
¶ Strategic Manufacturing Reinvestment
Well, that was a fantastic summary. But on that note, I mean, I think a lot of cities and towns in America, whether they're in the russ Belt or Pennsylvania or the South or wherever, who have gone through this de industrialization phase. They all say they want to build
back their manufacturing sector in some way. But it feels like Allentown has kind of gone about it in a slightly different way in that you've had to sort of grand strategy or vision for how to do that rather than try to attract just like individual businesses in a piecemeal way. Can you talk about how you actually formulated that plant.
Yeah, So I started working for the Economic Development Corporation in two thousand and eight, and we had the manufacturing incubator it's called the Bridgeworks and Manufacturing Incubator that was in place at that time. It was trying to pivot away from manufacturing.
When I got there.
We also had an industrial building that sort of funded our existence, where we had a T shirt manufacturer an industrial valvevest manufacturer and somebody who is building large scale tents as tenants, and they were kind of keeping the organization alive. There was this, you know, in two thousand and eight. It was right kind of in the early
days of the global financial crisis. There is some concern about how we would recover economically, what we would do, but these early investments in manufacturing were, from what I could see looking ahead, something we shouldn't turn our backs on. There was this healthy manufacturing, seemingly healthy manufacturing economy in place in the Lehigh Valley, and it felt like it felt like there was an opportunity to build for the future.
¶ Leveraging Smaller Footprint Buildings
I worked with our CEO or executive director at that time to start thinking about how we might position the area as a place where you could bring smaller footprint manufacturing. We knew we had this building stock of buildings that were smaller than one hundred thousand square feet, sometimes on
multiple stories. There was a kind of gravity flow model of manufacturing where you would load in raw material at the top of the building and as it gained weight, it would drop down the building for a final finishing on the ground floor and then shipping. We felt like there was an opportunity to kind of leverage the existing
industrial inventory to attract manufacturers that were more boutique. I remember reading an article in the Wall Street Journal in maybe two thousand and nine or twenty ten about a bag manufacturer in San Francisco who was like very proud of being in San Francisco. I was like, this is I think there's something here for us. I reached out to the manufacturer. At the time, this was kind of around the same time as the rise of like maker spaces and three to printing was kind.
Of coming online.
It looked like you could do some stuff in a smaller form factor, and we kept thinking like, this is a chance for us, with these strong roots in manufacturing to bring some of it back. And we got deep into.
It and really explored.
We formed something called the Urban Manufacturing Alliance and collaboration with San Francisco and the Pratt Institute in New York and our friends in the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation and in Detroit to just kind of bring cities who were interested in manufacturing together. We started talking about reshoring or on shoring at that time, but it felt distant.
¶ Maker Movement to E-commerce Hub
I'm glad you brought up the sort of maker of three D printing phenomenon, because.
Such a thing around that.
Yeah, it was, but it's forgotten, isn't it. Because when we talk generally about the tailwind or the growth of the twenty tens, it's almost entirely people talk about tech, right, software et cetera, the Internet and all that, and then we talk about post COVID, this re you know, this
new enthusiasm for reshoring. But it was like this forgotten chapter that within particularly the first half of the twenty tens, the various maker spaces and the three D printers and people were really excited about that kind of fizzled out like that, like that mini movement.
You don't hear that.
It fizzled out for sure.
But so we did a reindustrialization strategy in twenty fourteen. We worked with somebody to evaluate our total industrial stock. I had at that point moved on to work for the Regional Economic Development Corporation, but was still involved with the Serban Manufacturing Alliance at the region. We could see that manufacturing was still important. I had a better sense of what other types of manufacturing was occurring in the area.
We developed a strategy kept thinking what I kept seeing at the region was that there is real demand to be in the Lehigh Valley and in these smaller footprint buildings. So we saw inquiries all the time for buildings between forty and eighty thousand square feet. But this is a time when we have ALLYS pivoting its economy toward transportation and warehousing, building million square foot buildings with twenty four
to thirty six foot ceilings. Really, as this other technological trend of the e comms started to show up, this was the high demand for industrial space. So we had lots of interest from small manufacturers, particularly coming out of places like Brooklyn where it was like not quite the place to be, who wanted to spread their arms a little bit and maybe have access to to talent they were trying to be in that we have ally, but we didn't have a ton of building space to meet their needs.
So when we.
Built that reindustrialization strategy, a big part of it was how do we position the built environment for this demand. And some of that is, you know, rehabbing existing industrial buildings as surprise surprise industrial buildings, so it's it's continued on from there.
¶ The Weight-Gaining Industries
Yeah, So this is another thing I learned about Allentown. I'm full of Allentown facts at the moment. But apparently Allentown is within a day's drive of forty percent of the population in the US. Is that true?
Yeah, it's it's over on many more than one hundred million people, and that's what made it such a strong destination for some of the e comm But it's also like that, you know, you go back to, like why it is a vibrant economic region is that it's a great place for weight gaining industries.
Right.
So the other big thing we worked on the Regional Economic Development Corporation was we recruited Ocean Spray to make most of its great cranberry juice in the weih Have Alley. Sam Adams was brewing most of its beer in the High Valley.
Was it weight gaining industry anything.
You add water to basically, right, So you when you have the cranberries come into the plant like to become cranberry juice, you add a ton of water. It doesn't make sense to produce that far away and then ship all that water. So because you're not just you know, within a day's drive of forty percent of this population, you're also close in New York so a lot of like Curraig Doctor Pepper has a big production plant, there's a lot of food manufacturing that occurs there as well.
And then on the manufacturing side, you also because of the e COMM because of the food manufacturing, you saw a lot of packaging and bottling UH manufacturing show up. So one of our most recent in Allentown successes was recruiting a company called Schless Bottle that manufacturers bottles for beverages and they wanted to be close to the production point. So the manufacturing bottles in Allentown, filling it with beverages and serving it back to New York.
This is so core like Ricardo Houseman coded stuff, like Okay, you have this one industry and then you have innovation in an adjacent industry. Super monkey swinging from China. So yeah, I'm also just like learning all these terms. You know, gravity based manufacturing I hadn't or weight gaining. This is all fantastic stuff.
Weight gain industry is I think what we're both doing in.
Maderia, That's what we're both doing in Madrid. Yeah, we should have run a marathon and then and then we could have compensated for all that. What are like you know, obviously this is all against the backdrop of this vortex of manufacturing going to China largely, et cetera. When people think, you know, you're at a conference like this and probably a lot of mayors are interested in reindustrialization, et cetera.
What types of industries are good candidates generally for thinking of like what should be built locally, Like it's something like plastic bags or bags. It's like, well, I don't know, maybe that could be offshore. What are like strong candidates for what is durable here?
It's that you mentioned plastic bags because one of the things we recruited as was kind of leaving the.
World of economic development and going into politics.
¶ De-risking Supply Chains Locally
Yeah, it was a Turkish plastic bag manufacturer, So that was kind of interesting. So one of the things that distinguished the region. And I think it's good for onshoing and I want to go back on the onshore for a second. When we developed this strategy, when we're talking about onshoing and reshoring, back in the early twenty tens, there was no like we didn't know a global pandemic was going to come and disrupt supply chains. We were thinking about like the logistics of making things in close
to the customer. And and I was I was thinking a lot about the theft of IP in China and how it was kind of like those components of globalism didn't make a ton of sense. You're like kind of giving away your most precious resource. So a lot of it was driven by like, how do you kind of capture the spirit of a manufacturer of American manufacturing? Now COVID hit and all of a sudden, That's what brought into stark relief. That's what made it make sense. So one of the things that I think makes a ton
of sense. And we still see a lot of in Allentown, whether it's the transistors, or it's the bag manufacturing or Westport axle manufacturers axles for Mac trucks in Allentown area, it's components, right, It's how do how do you de
risk the supply chain by diversifying your component manufacturing? That makes a lot of sense in cities because you're not building the whole truck there, right, And to build the whole truck you need something like Lordtown or Lordstown, you need River Rouge, you need the enormous factories when you're building the components whatever those components might look like you can exist in a much smaller form factor, something as small as forty thousand square feet, but even like to
get down to what we were calling craft manufacturing at the time, you might be able to exist in a much smaller space and perhaps the ground floor of a mixed use building. And that's what the next step for us was and what more cities should be doing, I think is making sure that your zoning allows for light industrial to take place in residential neighborhoods, so that you're not kind of you have to make sure that you allow this stuff to happen in your city and the
¶ Rezoning for Modern Manufacturing
new manufacturing. We think about Pittsburgh in the early part of the twentieth century as being so thick with smog that you couldn't even see across the river. You know, you still see pictures of I remember being in tangent and China in two thousand and seven teen, and like you couldn't see as you're going across the bridge. That's not what manufacturing really looks like anymore. So you can
kind of do that in cities. So as cities are thinking about what type of manufacturing you might try to attract, I think high value component manufacturer, light touch, but high tech. Again taking advantage of the resources that we have in American cities and taking advantage of the fact that people now are choosing where they're going to be first and
then what they're going to do second. And the cities that have a vocational advantage on cost of quality of life can attract those industries if they set themselves up to do it.
I say more about the rezoning process because if there's one thing I remember from playing some city for hours, you know, in the late nineteen nineties, it was that if you zone industry next to residential, your population is not going to be happy. So I'm very curious like how much that has actually changed and what the rezoning part is like now versus say, ten years ago.
So a lot of cities, because of the housing crisis, are exploring more aggressive zoning policy that allows for denser housing, allows for different types of housing. We just passed in the beginning of twenty twenty six reform to our zoning code and a reform to our zoning map that is a form based code, so it's really focused less on what's happening inside the building and more on what the buildings will look like interesting, so that can allow that's
the type of thing that can allow. For now in some city, when you built, when you zoned industrial, you were going to get like the tire manufacturing plant. Not a great idea for cities to have tire manufacturing plants in their downtowns, but great idea to have like craft brewing or like small garment assembly, something that is kind
of like bespoke manufacturing. I think what cities can do as they're investigating the limitations of their zoning code to build towards the cities that they want to be is dig in and understand exactly what you might allow. I mean, in zoning, you have to allow for all uses somewhere in in the jurisdiction. So if you can allow for certain types of manufacturing uses, you create flexibility that can
add some vibrancy to the neighborhood. I go back to like one of my big points when I was in the Urban Manufacturing Alliance that I don't know what it looks like now, but we talked about the lack of interest in young people working in manufacturing, and that's always been one of the challenges and one thing that occurred to me is that when Mac Trucks moved to Allantown in nineteen twenty three, they built a plant right next to well, they built the plant and then they built
the worker housing right next door to the plant, and people would walk to work all day. And what we knew then is that it sounds amazing, and that's people would like to do that whatever they're doing for work. When young, when children saw people walking to work with the lunch box and knew that that person was going to work on in the silk plant or in the truck plant, they saw a person working and a person
who was like connected to manufacturing. When we moved all of the production out to the suburbs and people were getting in a car to drive to work, the like rando kid on the street who's just you know, hula hooping or whatever, doesn't get a chance to see workers and doesn't get a chance to see the dignity of
work in manufacturing and lose his interest in it. And so we're so far removed now, and we've tried to do things, whether it was to three D printing or like kind of get kids excited about manufacturing, but fundamentally it's still the work is removed from everyday life, and so if you can get back to that point where you can add manufacturing back to everyday life, I think there's an opportunity to rekindle the interest in the careers.
¶ Federal Aid and Local Innovation
We need to do an episode how sim City?
Right, Like we were internalizing all these lessons from a video game and then oh, then suddenly all of the main factoring goes out into the exerbs, and then no one sees the workers, and then suddenly how City ruined?
Sim City ruined?
I would love that.
I would have loved to see that, honestly, Like the I think the mayor, like any mayor who has played some city, like the minute you sit down at the desk, you're like, oh my god.
This is totally this amazing.
Were now I really actually want to do this episode. Post COVID, you get this re enthusiasm for manufacturing just supply chain reasons, also national security reasons. We get the Chips Act, we get the Inflation Reduction Act. What did that look like from the perspective of these big programs, these sort of the Biden euro programs.
What did that look like from your perspective?
So for us, one thing was it was like a return to an industrial policy right like previously the United States is like the industrial policy didn't make a lot of sense for an economic development professional. Now we saw like this the federal government was pushing in a particular direction, right,
and it was like, let's start making stuff again. When I became mayor in twenty twenty two, when you were sworn in as mayor, you come in with a bunch of campaign promises, you sit in the seat and you realize, like all of a sudden, there's a completely new set of challenges.
That you have to unlock.
Right, So all this stuff you wanted into do in the campaign, it's nice, but there's more pressing needs. Among the things that I could see in the city was that we were well, we didn't know what we didn't know, so we had a lot to learning. We had to dig in and understand the city a little better and understand what was going on.
We also didn't like.
We had to let some relationships fail, and so we needed to get back and make sure that our partners were on the same page as us, and we kind of lost the capacity to innovate, to get creative and do new things. So I was great that I entered into the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative at just the right moment when when I was feeling desperate, and they
kind of invested in that capacity. Through doing that, I was able to attack one of the things that was clearly an issue, which was road safety.
We had.
There was a federal grant, the Safe Streets for All program that was helping cities plan for safer streets. I'm going to get to the point, I promised, so we I was a bicycling and running guy, so I wanted to like and I felt like we could do better for our city if we had safer streets. Bloomberg stood up with some partners, the Local Infrastructure Hub.
It helped me.
Teach my team how to use data to apply for federal funds. It helped us think about how we could work with partners to accomplish good outcomes for residents and try some new things.
We're lucky. I also got right in Secretary Boudajes his face and said.
I need help, and we're lucky to get a planning grant through that program. That experience helped us understand how to as a city returned to federal grants at the State.
¶ Bridging Allentown's Employment Gap
About right after we were awarded that Safe Streets grant, the Economic Development Administration announced its Recompete Pilot project and it was focused on areas that were I think it was this June of twenty twenty three. It was focused on areas that had a high prime age employment gap, and so prime age employment gap is people between the ages of twenty five to fifty four. Prime age employment gap as people who are either unemployed at higher than average rates.
Or out of the labor force.
We looked and saw that Allentown, in fact had a high prime age employment gap. Ours was like at six percent. We dialed into a particular neighborhood and saw that in that area is about twelve percent the region of about our neighborhood of about twenty three thousand people that were
just disproportionately out of the labor force or unemployed. And we started to dig in on that group of people and how could we at the same time prepare as we're thinking about like these changes and the changes to the demands of the workforce, how can we make sure
that our people could work right? And that was where these two things came together, is we knew that through working with our partners that we have Valley Economic Development Corporation, there's still a high demand for manufacturing labor as well as healthcare. We knew that the barriers to getting people to good jobs sometimes were a lack of available resources,
things like flexible and affordable childcare. We knew that people were sometimes challenged by transportation, that if those jobs are out in the suburbs and they didn't have a car, it's hard to get to them. And we also knew that if we wanted to make sure that people without cars could get to work, went to build industrial sites
in the city. So we put together an application and submitted it to EDA, and again, because of the work that we had done in the past, we're successful and we're able to So we landed a strategic development grant in December of twenty three and then we got a twenty million dollar investment for implementation. So our team right now is working to make sure that as we work to bring these manufacturing jobs to not just the city but to the entire region, that Allentonians are well positioned
to get to those jobs. And that's that is, you know, a big piece where cities have to be able to play a role is making sure that people have the tools they need to access the good things that are happening in the economy.
Have you got all the grant money, the Biden aer grant money, that all of it so okay, So there's no make.
Sure or like.
As soon as the November fifth, twenty twenty four, like, we went into overdrive to just make sure that we weren't at risk of losing anything. And that came through the Chips and Science Act, and it was a relatively small programs so and you know, practically speaking, our region is intensely political, so it would not make sense to.
Go back some of that.
I had to fight for some other stuff to make sure that we got it, including us I wrote a letter to Secretary Rawlins and the USDA about how important trees were two cities across America. We've worked to make sure we didn't lose the street funding. But you know, we're for some of the funding for things that you
do in cities. It's like very practical, it's it's good for residents, it's it should be nonpartisan as long as you like, are not exclusively focused on the various different things the administration is focused on.
¶ DC vs. Local Industrial Policy
So speaking of practicality. I sometimes get the sense that there's like a bit of a disconnect between how people in DC are thinking about industrial policy, whether it's Trump or the Biden administration, versus like mayors such as yourself, you actually have to implement the stuff and figure out exactly how to spend the money. Like what's the biggest area of I guess, like tension that you see or what could DC actually do to make using those federal funds easier for you?
Oh?
Wow, so there is tension for sure, right, And I think that a recognition like the biggest thing that DC could do is make sure that people are not worried about their healthcare or not worried about putting food on the table, or not worried about a thousand other things, and can worry about just like being part of this American dream, like and building towards something, and that they
could you be part of the dignity of work. And so there's some things that they could just focus less on or like trying to cut us of I think that cities probably don't think as much about immigration from that perspective as an economic driver, but I think that we have to continue to bring new people in bring new ideas in make American cities places that can receive investment, and knowing that somewhat that investment is like it's intellectual capital, right,
So we want people to come in and feel comfortable making stuff and making new technology in our cities. I would to say, I think it's not uncommon for mayors to be pretty bipartisan in Allentown, where one of my senators is Senator Dave McCormick, who's on the the He's a Republican. I'm a Democrat, but I appreciate Senat McCormick's interest in competitiveness and trying to attract industry and particular manufacturing to Pennsylvania. And I think my conversation with Senat McCormick,
he is somewhat agnostic about where that happens. I think he's he'd be happy if the manufacturing investments happened in the suburbs or in the cities. It doesn't matter to
him as much as Pennsylvania remaining competitive. I know he was involved with one of the big kind of future thinking or future looking manufacturing investments that occurred in our area is Eli Lilly announced the three and a half billion dollar investment that is just outside of the city limits, but their three and a half billion dollar investment will create like eight hundred and fifty jobs. I want to make sure that all of the residents of the city
of Allentown are capable of accessing those jobs. I also want to make sure that any of the supply chain that goes into that Lily golp one manufacturing can be produced in the city. If it can be, we want to make sure that that we're capable of.
Connecting to that.
¶ Defense Manufacturing and State Strategy
So that's one thing I think continuing to make sure that the country is head of The other thing is and this is one that we're kind of going back and forth with we you know, Governor Shapiro has launched a very aggressive economic development strategy that wants to attract
more investment and lots of different types of investment. I think there's and I've spoken with Bruce Katz formula of Brooking is about this, is that Pennsylvania seems like it's well situated to be a center of defense manufacturing in this new world. Clearly, like there's based on what's happening in Iran, there is like there's still need for munitions, right and how we can play a role in that
is I think part of our future. That was what we proudly tell the story of how Bethlem Steel helped win the war in World War two by building the the ships that helped us when the war. I talked about VOLTI bomber is helping us when the war. I think that there is we have. We're home to mac Defense in Allentown. Mac Defense makes giant like heavy duty trucks for the US military. We can compete in that
area as well, and that is manufacturing. So I think there's as if the federal government focuses on creating opportunities in cities and the states to host manufacturing and it makes it easy for that to happen and makes it easy to hire people and train people to be ready for that work. I think that's that's where we need them to play.
You're already sort of alluded to this, but does it feel good to be in a state where it's like every national election is just geared towards making the citizens of Pennsylvania happy? Like all like that is You're you're talking to some mayor from another you know, from Florida. It's like try being a swing state. Try being the most important state for the electoral college.
It must be nice. It can be.
It also turns you into like, like I have given tours of my city to foreign press.
Every country borders that they get the diner in Pennsylvania.
Right, that's the classic.
Trop Yeah then, so I mean it's it's nice to be the center of attention for that way in the like in that politicians kind of want.
To make you happy.
But practically speaking, you know, there's like, as a mayor, your job is to just meet the needs of your residence, right, Like that's what you dial in on, and so whatever they're doing nationally, like you're just worried about residents.
One reason that people are very excited or that people are have an affinity towards manufacturing is the jobs, right, and you mentioned the jobs and people seeing.
People go to work.
Another reason, particularly over the last several years or the last post COVID, is for national security reasons, not wanting to rely on China or other countries for really critical things. However, some of these most advanced industries they're they're not particularly
going to be job heavy, right. There's a lot of robotics and increasing automation is there a disconnect between the sort of again maybe emotional maybe like the sort of romantic notions that people have about manufacturing versus the reality of the actual labor intensivity of some of these industries.
I think that from the mayor's perspective, I probably am more in that kind of romantic world, right like where we're just kind of like, yeah, you know, we envision a world in which people will always be putting their
hands on stuff right one way or another. And when you get into a higher technology where like we already have robots doing like precision surgery, presumably some of the precision manufacturing is going to be better done with a robotic hand than the steady hand or strong back of somebody on the line.
I do think that, as you like, there's.
Still and this is a vibe that I'm starting to get mayors tend to pick up, like because we're on the ground, Yeah, we start to hear the vibes before.
They become national vibes.
But I think that there's there's a very strong at least in in my city and some other cities that have visited, there's like a strong like handmade or like a rejection of the robots and AI, whether it's art or like the produced goods, I don't know if anybody, I don't know what the the logical end to that is, but I think there's on on the consumer side, there's there's still a desire. I think people romanticize some of the product, right, and they'd rather have something that that
people have made. On the jobs side of it, I think that there's there's still this belief that we need to preserve the dignity of work, that there's always going to be that we're going to have to find some way to allow people to continue to work. That maybe you don't need the robots running the whole warehouse, right, that maybe you need, you know, somebody to be involved.
And we've seen that, Like this is my first job out of grad school was working in the billboard industry and in Panama, and I remember vividly talking to somebody who has, you know, introduced myself. This is in my economic development days, and I was like, oh, you know, at first I started in billboards and the guy was in private equity and he was like, that's great, man,
billboards are awesome. The only thing better than billboards is coin up landromats, and I was like, I was like, dude, you're in the wrong business now, because like maybe in private equity, like that was a great idea, like the fear of your jobs, like down to self storage, which I think is the worse than the cities. But like weird job creators, like we have to find ways to create jobs, to create opportunities for people to be dignified
by their work. So while there may be some value to like squeezing out every single nickel of cost from some operation, there's a lot to benefit cities and to benefit society of having people, you know, actually putting their hands on things.
¶ The Data Center Dilemma
Can you talk specifically about how you're thinking about data centers, because this is like the example of what we're getting at, and in the theory, you know, Allentown, you got a bunch of big warehouses and things like that.
That presumably, yeah to that needed energy at one point.
Yeah, I have lots of sophisticated and unsophisticated thoughts about data centers we as a city and as a mayor. I'm thinking about them in a couple of ways. One like they're very clearly a political issue now, and they're a political issue for hate saying both sides, but for both sides, right.
Like we there really are.
It's kind of crazy.
There's legislation, so I think that.
So we amended our zoning Right after we amended our zoning ordinance, we then we made an amendment to the ordinance with reference to data centers. The reality for a city like Allentown, in most cities in the country, is that we don't really have any space for data centers. It's unlikely that a hyperscale one. It's not just unlikely a hyper scale er cannot locate in the city of Allentown unless they acquire a bunch of homes and demolish them.
But it is reality in place like Phoenix, right, So we amendedor zoning code to just set up certain requirements around the establishment of a data center, just to make sure that our backs are covered. The worst thing that happens in any municipality is like something shows up that people don't want and your hands are tied because your zoning allows for it. So we make sure that we are covered in that respect.
Sorry, just be clear.
Covered like you've data center proofed you're zoning is.
That we're in the process of review right now to make sure that any proposed data center has to demonstrate not just the highway use or the water use, but also like energy sources. So we're making sure that data centers have proposed for the city have can demonstrate their compliance basically.
So it's it's political as.
I understand the technology, and this is probably the less sophisticated side of the thought. It's getting smaller and smaller, right. The data centers do not have to exist at this incredible you know, to take up lots and lots of land. They can exist perhaps in downtowns. I don't know what their energy needs are going to be. I know that most mayors are concerned about data centers, not because they're worried about land use or a lack of jobs, but
because utility bills are significantly rising. At the same time that food bills are rising and gas bills are rising and housing is getting more expensive. Now people are also seeing their utility bills rise, so that that's been driving a lot of the concern for mayors.
I think, you know, I know someone I heard about it. There's a startup in New York City that is doing something that's like, I don't know exactly what it is. I was hearing about it from a friend. But they're like training some Nvidia chips or doing something and it's just with like a normal like sort of like residential connection to the electricity. It's fairly small scale. It's not mega, but like, yeah, to your point, like it does feel like the footprint there at least it's some potentially new
applications the footprints. You hear about the giant things, but the footprints are also potentially coming down.
That was what was what I was here. You know, I'm an AI skeptic as a mayor. I've been talked back.
I keep going back this.
Yeah, but I was talking to somebody at Hopkins, at Johns Hopkins who is like, hey, you shouldn't be so skeptical, because it's going to open It might result in some somewhat fewer human human react interactions, but it's going to open the door for humans and city government specifically to
participate more and more in helping people out. And she was the one who mentioned like, and it's also like all of the like the fear about data center might be misplaced, like there is we are I'm not necessarily a great believer in technology figuring out a way to get us to like save our bacon for forever. But it does seem like this is one that there's short term concern about and I don't know what what it really stems from, but whenever politicians are involved, you have to raise an eyebrow.
¶ The Infamous Yocco's Controversy
I have one more question, and it's a very important one. What's the deal with Yakos? If I google allanown controversy, Yakos comes up.
Yeah. I think there's probably a couple of Yako's controversies.
The very local one is like you got to pick a sort. You gotta choose between Yakos or Pots. Apparently they eat pots hot dogs, and Bethlehem. I guess we should say Yako's is a hot dog hot dog. Okay, Yeah, the folks in Bethlam like, I love my neighbor, but I would never eat a Pots dog.
Yakos.
There's one of the deals is like you have to know how to order it right. So the order is like you just get two dogs. I order two dogs with everything and a chocolate milk. Some people get perogies with it too. One of the there was a few years ago a guy named Gary Eyakoca, whose family owned Yako, has talked about how his Yako is on Seventh Street, which is in center city, Allentown couldn't exist anymore because
of the demographic changes that we've seen in Allentown. So Yako's I think is he and I went back and forth a little bit. We're very good friends now, but we were we struggled a little bit because I'm the first Latino mayor of Allentown. So the other thing that makes the Billy Joel song so wrong in twenty twenty six is that in nineteen eighty two, it was like it was a very homogenous. Basically everybody in Allentown was white European. Today we're fifty five percent Latino, like we
are a very different city. And his case was like, well, you know it isn't it ain't like it was, And you know it was kind of it felt to me like kind of a rejection of our new city that I just love. So we went back and forth a little bit on that. There's probably other Yako's controversies out there. There's like he has like a big hot dog statue that roves around a little bit, but it's a good hot dog. If you come to Alentine, I will treat you to Yaka is hot dog, and.
You'll teach us how to order it.
Teach you how to order like the politicians get a huge scandal they ordered it the wrong way, like you know, it is like John Carrey, like ordered whether you get like Swiss cheese instead of something else.
Yeah, it's our version of the cheese steak.
And there's a special like Lee Have Valley version of the cheese steak.
As well that the Philadelphians would want nothing to do with.
What makes America great.
Like these niche these niche loyalties towards certain orders and certain hot dog.
Yeah all right, Maryturk, thank you so much for coming on all thoughts.
That was great, Thank you. It really had a good time.
So that was super interesting. There are a lot of things to pick out from there. But one thing that stood out was that sort of twenty tens era of like made in America craft manufacturing. I remember that really, Yeah.
No totally. It's actually pretently kind of depressing because those maker bought festival or the maker body. I think it's different than the maker festivals. But there was that culture of people doing tinkering and.
The printing story.
Remember that.
Yeah, yeah, it was like a thing, and it's like all sort of fizzled out, but there was just like a forgotten part of post GFC artistical manufacturing, cynical manufacturing and people just building weird stuff.
Things aren't weird enough anymore.
But yeah, I might get weird with AI.
No, they're gonna get weird.
But I'm glad he brought that up because I I it doesn't get discussed enough. Yeah, just generally though, like I thought it was great and like, first of all, just learning a bunch of new things. You know, I hadn't heard of weight gaining manufacturing, but that makes a lot of sense, right, Like if there's some process that adds a lot of weight, such as water to a product, you want that to be at the last mile of
the supply chain rather than early on. Also fascinating to think about, like, okay, what a strategic advantage it is to be within a day's drive of one hundred million people. So therefore it makes a less sense to put various you know, e commerce warehouses in so much interesting stuff there.
Also the mixed zoning I found really interesting, but because it is true if you think about industry, you know, even ten or twenty years ago, it was much more polluting and noisy and disturbing than it is now. And so you can have in an era of high tech manufacturing, you absolutely could have mixed use neighborhoods and buildings.
Why not, right, So you just have to update the zoning to reflect the reality that it's not going to be automatically repellent to the neighbors.
And then everyone can walk to work with their lunch boxes.
Yeah, all right?
Shall we leave it there for the bike to work?
Yeah?
Or bike to work?
Yeah?
Okay.
This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
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