Chattanooga's Downtown Revival

Posted by: John A. Byrne on August 17

A big thanks to BusinessWeek reader RJ Burns Jr. for asking us to look at what a city can do when the manufacturing core leaves its borders. Burns, a former auto worker and now an artist in Jacksonville, Fla., inspired reporter Greg T. Spielberg to look for an American city that successfully dealing with that issue. Though the Rust Belt has many examples of cities wounded by industrial flight, none seems to have coped with it more successfully than Chattanooga, Tenn. Like Burns, Chattanooga started out focusing on manufacturing – more than a third of the city’s citizens worked in the sector in 1970.

By 2000, the number was down to 16%. City leaders, however, were prepared. For the past 20 years, Chattanooga has been tearing down its industrial downtown – replacing vacant lots with parks, warehouses with museums and factories with open-air markets. Private development has followed, Chattanooga is growing in population, and the city is one of only three in the U.S. to increase downtown jobs between 1998 and 2006.

Not incidentally, the hospitality and tourism industries exploded over the past decade. The sector saw 17.5% growth between 2001 and 2005 just as primary metal manufacturing shrank by 70%. Two decades of executing private-public projects such as brownfield remediation and highway redevelopment added infrastructure skills that aided Chattanooga in attracting a big player from the manufacturing industry too. Talk about full circle. Read RJ’s story and find out who what international car company will start making sedans in Chattanooga by 2011.

And, keep the ideas coming!