Dear Atlanta:
Hope you like your new railroad headquarters. We enjoyed it for many years — well, part of it anyway.
Please don’t misunderstand us: We’re not jealous or angry. We’re beyond all that. The railroad headquarters left Roanoke back in 1982 when our Norfolk & Western Railway merged with the Washington, D.C.-based Southern Railway and decided to pick Norfolk as a neutral headquarters. Later on, the railroad shuttered its regional office here in 2016. So we don’t lose anything by this move from Norfolk to Atlanta; the jobs we lost were lost years ago. We look on this move more like someone watching their ex divorce their second spouse and move onto a third. At this point, we can’t really say we’re surprised.
That’s not to say we don’t still have some feelings, mind you. Roanoke wouldn’t be here if it were for the railroad. Otherwise, we’d just be Big Lick.
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We still have a fondness for giving things railroad names. Our hockey team is the Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs; a hockey team before that was the Roanoke Express. We once had an indoor football team called the Roanoke Steam and might soon have another called the Virginia Iron Horses. We have a theatre company called Off The Rails Theatre (which has the Christmas show “Reckless” continuing tonight and Saturday). When the historic 611 steam engine is running, we line the tracks to see it. We’ll always have a soft spot for railroads, but at this point, whether Norfolk Southern is headquartered in Norfolk or Atlanta is immaterial to us except to the extent it’s no longer paying those taxes into our state treasury.
We do hope our governor sends Norfolk Southern a bill for the incentives the state paid just two years ago when the Roanoke office closed and some of those jobs went to Norfolk (although most went to you in Atlanta — foreshadowing!). At the time, state officials said they were offering Norfolk Southern $2 million in incentives to keep 165 of those 400 jobs in Virginia rather than seeing them all go to Atlanta, part of a larger $4 million incentive package.
Of course, it looked to us as if the state was paying the railroad to move jobs from Roanoke to Norfolk. But hey, we’re over that. Still, we hope Gov. Ralph Northam can get that $4 million back. Otherwise, it looks like Virginia got totally snookered. We hope you won’t mind if we point out to our governor that you in Atlanta offered Norfolk Southern $23.6 million in tax breaks and that the company is making $100 million by selling some property it already owns in your city. Somewhere in there, you’d think Norfolk Southern could find the money to repay Virginia.
We completely understand why Norfolk Southern would rather be in Atlanta than Norfolk. We really do. First, Norfolk Southern already had more employees there than anywhere else — 2,800 in Atlanta versus about 1,000 in Norfolk. It simply makes sense to put the headquarters in the place with the most employees (although we remember that even into the 1990s Roanoke still had more than anywhere else). The railroad’s office in Atlanta is called the David R. Goode Building. How’s that for irony? That former railroad chairman was born in Vinton.
The move to Atlanta is also just the way of the world. As Robert McNab, an economics professor with Old Dominion University, told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk: “What we’re seeing across the United States and really across the world is that as corporations become more global and complex, they need an area that offers your workforce a high quality of living. But also you need the ability to travel. You need an airport that goes anywhere.” So Norfolk Southern picked Atlanta over Norfolk. Amazon picked Northern Virginia and New York over 236 other places in North America. Advance Auto first picked Raleigh, North Carolina over Roanoke. Over the years, General Electric has migrated from Schenectady, New York, to Boston. Caterpillar, Inc. has moved from Peoria, Illinois, to Chicago. It’s sort of always been that way.
What’s different now is that we’re seeing some profound structural changes in the economy as the industrial age gives way to whatever we call this new economy. Broadly speaking, blue-collar jobs in the heartland are disappearing — either moved overseas, or eliminated altogether — while the new jobs being created are “knowledge worker” jobs in a relative handful of big cities. We saw one clear example of this recently when General Motors announced it was shutting down car factories in the industrial Midwest, but adding software jobs in San Francisco and Seattle. To that extent, Atlanta, you’re part of the problem. You’re helping accelerate this concentration of jobs in major metros. Let’s be clear: We don’t begrudge you for making a play for Norfolk Southern, and we don’t begrudge Norfolk Southern for making what seems a sound business decision. But this “great divergence,” as economists call it, between the great metropolises and the rest of the country is not a healthy thing. President Trump has one idea; he’d like to make it 1958 again. We wish he’d focus on how to create a 21st century economy and spread that more evenly across the country, but that’s hard to fit into a tweet.
We noticed what the governor of Georgia had to say: “This is the 17th Fortune 500 company to come to our state either initially or by way of relocation.” Your governor’s probably most interested in the first part of that sentence, but we notice the last four words — “by way of relocation.” Here’s the lesson we take from all this: In today’s economy, anything that’s not nailed down is up for grabs. And, realistically, there’s not very much that’s permanently nailed down. Some things will move; some will be rendered obsolete, often at a pace that astounds us. Atlanta, you probably don’t have to worry much about this. You’re on the growth side of that great divergence. You’ve lost two hockey teams you didn’t care about — now the Calgary Flames and the Winnipeg Jets — but that’s not the same as losing a major employer. Instead of writing you in Atlanta, we should probably be writing every locality in our circulation area to remind them of how impermanent the economy really is and how they need to be constantly focused on creating a new one because the old one could change at any minute. Of course, the coal counties already know this. Pulaski and Galax already know this. Martinsville and Danville already know this. We in Roanoke know this, and now, even Norfolk knows this.
Don’t worry about us, Atlanta. We’ll take care of ourselves — because it should be painfully clear by now that nobody else is going to do it for us.