Brain Drain in Rochester
Last week’s City News feature was on the intruiging RocWiki.org and its founders and admins, including Tobin Fricke, Ryan Dahl, Robert Polyn, and Jon McKamey.
Now Jon McKamey, a RocWiki admin, wrote a follow-up to the article.
All those wonderful folks who created RocWiki and kept it running are leaving.
All of those crazy and ambitious people that started RocWiki.org (Ry Dahl, Tobin Fricke, Rob Polyn, myself) are going elsewhere. Ry and Tobin left last year; Rob and I are leaving within a month. Of the five to six or so regular “under 30″ contributors I know, three (including administrator Adam Dewitz) are leaving Rochester this summer too.
This is some pretty sad math for Rochester. As a 20-something leaving, I hope our projects, organizations, and businesses help this city retain its 20-something talent of future generations. I love this city. We all do. But the opportunities simply aren’t here. From all of us who have to leave to follow our dreams, I’d like to say “Good luck, Rochester. We love ‘ya, but it just didn’t work out.”
This is a great example of a missed opportunity. We have a wealth of young, smart, go-getting people here in Rochester. If only there were an agency dedicated to keeping them here. Maybe by giving them huge tax breaks and other incentives. Too bad all we have is a dysfunctional, corrupt, and wasteful failure of an agency.
What if we changed COMIDA so it only gave grants to graduates of Rochester-Area colleges? We’d see an explosion of entrepreneurship and small businesses. Instead of giving $180,000 to a company that may or may not create one job, what if COMIDA gave people like Jon McKamey a $180,000 grant to start their own companies here in Rochester?
Whereas recipients of COMIDA grants frequently neglect to create the jobs they promised, we know we’d be creating jobs that way. Instead of having our young flee for better job markets, we’d have them stay here in Rochester. Remember, tax breaks usually have little no role in enticing business to move here:
Any company that makes a decision as to where they are going to be based on the tax rate is a company that won’t be around very long. If you’re down to that incremental margin, you don’t have a business.
—Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, New York Times, November 8, 2001
However, creating a start-up seems rather daunting to most people. This is where COMIDA’s power for tax breaks might be handy.
For more reading, you can read Jeff Greenbaums very helpful CITY article, or check out what MetroJustice -a local organization doing the most research on this issue- has to say.
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As one of the non-20-something contributors to RocWiki, I was sorry to see Rob, Jon and Adam Dewitz (not mentioned in your piece, but mentioned in the City spot) go. But I’m not going to let my regret at seeing them leave bleed into regret about Rochester. Rochester could always be a better place, but there may be valid reasons that 20-somethings leave, and there may be nothing we can do about it.
When I was a 20-something youth, like those three guys, I was following my dream. I led me to spend a few years in Chicago and in a small town in the mountain West. Both of those places were great locales to experience life, and to have adventures. But when I wanted to settle down and raise a family, I chose the Rochester area.
No place can be everything to everybody. Rochester is a great place to start out, to go to college (I believe that all of the contributors mentioned, save perhaps Jon, were students at RIT or U of R). and to raise a family. For that time between the ages of, say, 25 and 35, when people are trying to find out where they belong and what’s important to them, Rochester might not be the place where that exploring is best accomplished. The sense of safety and security that makes Rochester a great place to grow up and experience college, or to raise a family, can be a bit stifling for those who want to push the envelope.
So, yeah, maybe there’s some way to get government more involved that might keep a few more 20-somethings in town. But maybe they’re just destined to go away for a while and do some experimentation.
Jon is going to Philly, Rob is going to Asheville, NC, and Adam is going to Minneapolis. Each of these places is quite different from Rochester. Is there something they have in common that Rochester doesn’t? Other than being the next adventure for three creative minds, I don’t see it.
Well, sure, you have a great point. However, I think one point is that Rochester isn’t a destination at all for others going out of college, as well as many of our local graduates. There are easy ways we could try to fix that.
More importantly, however, I think, are ways in which COMIDA could be so much better, but it isn’t. That Bloomberg quote is key.
I’m 100% in agreement with Bloomberg. If a tax abatement is going to make or break a business, the business wasn’t viable in the first place. Also, I’m not adverse to some government agency giving grants to start-ups. A combined lending and coaching program would probably be a good thing.
But some 20-somethings are going to have to leave Rochester to go see the bright lights, no matter if there’s some kind of COMIDA-like grant available to them. Not every unfortunate occurrence is a problem that needs to be solved.
[...] of distractions like bureaucracy and less on just tax breaks. Tax breaks, you’ll remember, don’t make much of a difference in terms of inducing businesses to start a factory, move headq… Man About Town really likes these programs, and wants Rochester to use them. Unfortunately, we have [...]
“the next adventure for three creative minds”
I think this is the best interpretation.