Origin Story
How a drive through New York got me thinking about small town urbanism
I took a long drive through New York State last summer. I’m in the state often enough. But I’d spent almost no time between Buffalo and the New York metro area. I had some time on my hands, and so did a friend of mine from Long Island. So we met in Buffalo and gradually made our way to LaGuardia. It was eye opening.
I had a hidden agenda: I wanted pizza. New Haven style pizza, to be specific. I spent lockdown binge watching food videos. I guess it made me feel like I was getting out of the house. The first thing I wanted to do when I got out was get my hands on a New Haven clam pie. Connecticut isn’t far from LaGuardia, so I figured I could persuade my driver to take a detour.
I’m not here to write about pizza though. Was it life alteringly good? Sure. Am I planning to drive right back to Wooster Street in New Haven to gorge my way through Sally’s and Frank Pepe’s again at the next opportunity? Hell yeah! But I’m not here to talk about food. I want to talk about American college towns.
Many US states are deeply divided between big cities and smaller, declining cities. Particularly in and around the Great Lakes. We can all name a few of those cities: Flint, Michigan; Youngstown, Ohio; Scranton, Pennsylvania. New York State is a bit of an exception in the region.
New York State has been at the heart of the American economy for as long as the country existed. New Amsterdam, now New York, has always been the gateway to America. That prosperity spread to much of the rest of the state as railways and canals were built out, allowing manufacturing to spread to Upstate and Western New York. At one point, Buffalo had some of the most expensive real estate on earth as a result of the newfound manufacturing wealth.
Buffalo, of course, fell on tough times. Postwar suburban flight fueled by federal highway construction combined with perceived urban disorder emptied out the city. This was a common fate for midsized American cities in the 1950s. Buffalo hasn’t come all the way back, but like many Rustbelt cities, it has rebounded. Part of that is because it’s a relatively large metropolitan area in a strategically important location: the Canadian border. It isn’t terribly surprising that Buffalo has crawled its way back.
Buffalo isn’t the anomaly, though. Mid-sized cities throughout North America are doing fine, for the most part. Even the hardest hit big cities like Detroit and Baltimore have started to turn the corner, albeit slowly. It’s the smaller, less central cities that face the biggest challenges.
As we drove through the state, what surprised me was the number of small college towns with functioning mainstreets. Often when you drive through an old American town of twenty or thirty thousand people, the downtown is in rough shape. Part of that is from suburban development siphoning business from mainstreet. A bigger part, in many cases, is the historical employers no longer create as many jobs as they once did.
This wasn’t entirely new terrain to my friend either. It wasn’t his first time in this part of the state. But it had been a long time. People don’t tend to drive to Western New York from downstate for fun. He’d also spent a few years working on Capitol Hill, for a member from Central Pennsylvania. It’s no accident that he was one of the first people I know to see MAGA coming. He got out while the going was good.
Locals like to say that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Appalachia in the middle. I’m told I’m not supposed to use the term Pennsyltucky, but I guess I just did. While Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are both big cities with much to offer, parts of Central Pennsylvania aren’t doing great.
Upstate New York, on the other hand, is doing pretty well. Not just the bigger cities like Rochester and Syracuse. But places like Utica and Binghampton. On the way out of Oneonta he gestured towards the idyllic mainstreet. “You know why this doesn’t look like Central Pennsylvania, right? SUNY.”
SUNY, or the State University of New York, is one of the most successful state college systems in the United States. It has 64 campuses, usually named after a particular town. When you say Oswego or Potsdam or Geneseo, people are as likely to think of the college as the city. The reputation and strength of the SUNY system allows these colleges to act as effective anchors even for relatively small, remote cities.
The reality for a lot of smaller, more remote towns that have experienced economic decline is that they may never be able to reclaim their past glory. Resource towns are always at the whims of global commodity demand, and a lot of towns that used to specialize in domestic manufacturing don’t have the infrastructure or aren’t in the right places to compete in global manufacturing. The task, for many, is to manage decline. Or ideally, to stabilize the local economy so that they can maintain the types of services required for people to live a good life. One of the most promising avenues is what we call Eds & Meds.
Education and healthcare are services that are needed everywhere. If locals don’t have access to higher education, your town is probably in trouble. If they don’t have access to healthcare, your town is in real trouble. Institutions like SUNY can be the lifeblood of stable communities. Because they’re distributed throughout the state rather than just clustered around major metropolitan areas, people don’t necessarily have to leave Upstate or Western New York to get an education. Moreover, they act as magnets for students looking for a quality education without private college prices. If your colleges are mostly very expensive and the most reputable institutions are all clustered around major centers, you get something closer to Pennsylvania.1 And you get a lot of people who feel like the system isn’t working for them.
As we drove through the state, I couldn’t help but thinking back to Northern Ontario. Half my family is from the Sudbury area, and I did my undergraduate degree at Laurentian University. Recently, as a result of the school’s financial challenges, many programs and departments were eliminated to cut costs. One of those departments was the political science department, where I earned my undergraduate degree. Higher education is crucial to a cyclical resource based economy like Sudbury’s. Suffice it to say I was alarmed by this development.
As I prepare to return to Northern Ontario for the first time in several years, I worry it will feel more like Central Pennsylvania than Central New York.2
There has long been a perception that people at Queen’s Park really don’t care about the North. After all, they probably don’t bother to travel north of Muskoka, so to them it’s basically a different province. Worse, actually: a burden. So there’s already a lot of resentment. Especially given how much more press the renaming of Toronto Metropolitan University got than the bankruptcy of Laurentian University. Or the fact that the provincial government opened an under-subscribed French university in Toronto while the province’s existing bilingual university in Sudbury was failing.
That resentment seems manageable. For now. But let’s not forget that there are several other universities in Northern Ontario facing financial challenges. It’s also become increasingly hard to maintain adequate healthcare resources in Northern communities. It doesn’t get easier to attract healthcare professionals when there’s a perception that the community is declining. And it sure doesn’t get easier to pay them.
It's also not just Northern Ontario. Southwestern Ontario has its own distinct challenges, with the decline of manufacturing in the region. Eastern Ontario, where I spent much of my childhood, is also struggling with decline. That’s most of the geographical footprint of Ontario. In some ways we seem more like Pennsylvania than New York. With all due respect to Pennsylvania, that’s a problem.
Prosperity in New York State is relatively distributed, with anchor institutions across the state. In Pennsylvania, it’s concentrated primarily around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (and State College). Substitute Toronto and Ottawa, and it sounds like you’re describing Ontario. We should aim to be more like New York State than Pennsylvania.
People in the GTA and Ottawa shouldn’t be complacent about Ontario’s geographical disparities. Even if we think of the rest of the provinces as a burden to be managed, that burden isn’t going to get lighter if we let these problems fester. Moreover, as we’ve seen in places like Central Pennsylvania, those problems can lead to deep resentment. While I have no solutions to offer just yet, I think it’s time to give some realistic thought to the future of Ontario outside of Toronto and Ottawa, rather than letting the future punch us in the face.
While I won’t claim this is a comprehensive or authoritative measure of the quality of a state’s education system, I will note that US News ranked New York State a respectable 17th out of 50 states, while Pennsylvania was ranked dead last.
Note: this was written several weeks ago. Those of you who follow me on Twitter may realize I’ve already returned to Northern Ontario. It may be awhile before I’m ready to write about it dispationately.
Not sure if it's weird responding to older posts of yours, but I've been really enjoying "North of Bloor" after discovering it yesterday. Sometimes I wonder if Northern Ontario would be better as its own province because it's clear Queen's Park doesn't care. Your point about the strange Francophone university in Toronto while Sudbury's bilingual campus flails its arms is a good one. But that also has its own challenges, not chiefly among them the fact that Northwestern and Northeastern Ontario don't really talk to each other much and it almost makes sense to break Ontario into 3 provinces, not 2, if you were to go that route.
It's interesting that there seems to be two things that can make you thrive in Ontario if you're not Toronto or Ottawa:
1) Universities, like you're saying. Outside of the GTA and NCR, Ontario's most thriving cities are anchored by at least one prestigious universities: London, Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, and Kingston.
2) Frequent and easy access to the GTA, often by rail. We've been seeing this with the formerly stagnant Niagara region and Hamilton area, as people continue to get priced out of Toronto. This also applies, to some extent, to the university cities in point 1, as they're all basically in the extended Toronto universe.
I do wonder if beefing up the academic capacities of a school like Laurentian, coupled with upgraded service on VIA (or a GO extension) to Sudbury would be an economic boon to at least that part of the North.