Distressed Cities Find Hope in Federal 'Opportunity Zones'

A new program may be a boon to struggling cities — if it targets the right ones.

York, Pa., grew up making things. The brick smokestacks that break up the skyline are inescapable reminders of its industrial past. Buildings that once housed factories employing hundreds of workers have now been converted into warehouses that employ only a handful of people, at wages that don’t come close to rivaling those of their industrial predecessors.

Mayor Michael Helfrich grew up in York. He remembers when middle-class jobs were only a short walk away from the homes of the men and women who produced everything from Pullman cars to Pfaltzgraff dinner plates to York Peppermint Patties. Those companies are gone. Pullman succumbed to competition from Detroit automakers. Hershey’s bought the York candy factory and moved production to its own plants, which eventually landed in Mexico in 2009. Pfaltzgraff was purchased in 2005 and its operations moved to China.

But most of the jobs haven’t left because of competition or consolidation as much as they’ve left to escape York’s taxes, which are almost three times the rate in surrounding York County. The taxes have led to a vicious cycle — innovation, development and flight — that has persisted for decades. “We used to build wealth in the city of York,” Helfrich says. “In almost 50 years, we have not seen that. Our growth has been, ‘Can you come here and give us some jobs?’ Meanwhile, the wealth was going somewhere else. It wasn’t building in York.”

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BY J. BRIAN CHARLES | FEBRUARY 2019



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