At Bloomberg Businessweek, Craig Torres and Catarina Saraiva describe how Greenville, South Carolina has managed to attract highly skilled workers and revive its downtown by building its tech economy. Greenville has a network of investors, a culture of risk-taking, proximity to a research university, and has long made itself attractive to educated college graduates. They have to in order to compete with big tech employers in big cities on both coasts. The question other small Southern cities are asking is whether they can replicate Greenville’s success. Bloomberg Businessweek article – The New Startup South
This city of 670,000, a onetime hub for textile and apparel production, seems to have found the answer to the question confounding the U.S. right now: How do you revive postindustrial towns and make them part of the knowledge economy?
Displaced factory workers were receptive to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” message during the 2016 election campaign. Yet the president’s policy prescription of lower taxes, higher tariffs, and fewer immigrants is untested, while Greenville’s leaders can rightly claim they have a success on their hands. In per capita terms, the city’s rate of new business creation approaches that of Boston, one of the country’s hotbeds of innovation. Here’s another marker of economic dynamism: Greenville’s population grew almost 20 percent from 2000 to 2016.