Local legend says it was 50 years ago when Teressa Bellissimo dropped fried chicken wings into a vat of hot sauce at the Anchor Bar. The result became Buffalo’s most celebrated export.

Now the city in western New York is banking on a different recipe that Mayor Byron Brown says will bring 12,000 jobs in the next three years: a collaboration among elected officials, businesses and universities. As part of the program, billionaire Elon Musk is opening the largest solar-panel factory of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

Like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, two other former manufacturing hubs that lost about half their populations during the past 40 years, Buffalo is benefiting from the increasing allure of urban life for millennials. Musk’s SolarCity factory will be fed by engineering graduates from the State University of New York at Buffalo, Brown said.

“There’s an emerging younger cohort that’s very knowledgeable and very intent on living in cities,” said Richey Piiparinen, a senior research associate at the Center for Population Dynamics at Cleveland State University. “Companies are moving offices to Middle America, where the talent is being produced, and they can save on costs.”

Erie Canal

SolarCity will be built on the site of a former Republic Steel plant. Once among the largest producers in the U.S., Republic shut its last Buffalo facility by 1983. It was part of a rapid downward spiral for the city, which rose from a wilderness outpost in the 1780s to a bustling hub after the Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean in  1825.

After an environmental cleanup at the former Republic property, Buffalo purchased the tract in 2008 for $4.6 million to offer to developers, according to the mayor. Since 2012, more than $5 billion in projects have begun, he said. And for the first time in decades, cranes mark the city skyline.

“This restructuring of the Rust Belt economy has been very, very difficult,” said Brendan Mehaffy, who heads Buffalo’s office of strategic planning. “We were left a legacy from a lot of industrial activities that inhibited the potential of these cities but also left a lot of the great assets we have locally.”

Sharing Knowledge

Cleveland is now home to the Health-Tech Corridor, a three-mile (five-kilometer) stretch of biomedical, health-care and technology companies centered around the Cleveland  Clinic and Case Western Reserve University. In Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University’s computer-science and robotics work helped attract Google Inc. to a formerly blighted neighborhood.

Technology and biomedical companies are driving the changes in the region, according to a May report by the Washington-based Brookings Institution. For the past 50 years, in Silicon Valley and other suburbs, they conducted internal research on isolated campuses where secrets were kept more easily.

Solitude is giving way to combined spaces. Companies seeking the next breakthrough, such as molecule-sized computer chips that fight cancer, need their researchers to mingle with counterparts at other businesses, the report found.

“When that happens, being physically close to each other is really important,” said Bruce Katz, director of the institution’s metropolitan policy program and one of the report’s authors.

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