Civic Strategies consultant Otis White speculated on reasons why non-profit jobs seem to cluster in city centers in a November 15 piece, "Who Works in Big Cities?" White’s speculation stemmed from a piece by Christopher Briem and Sabina Deitrick in the September 15 issue (PDF) of the Pittsburgh Economic Quarterly, a publication of the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center for Social and Urban Research, which says that three of Pittsburgh’s top five employers are non-profit organizations. The sectors predicted to increase the most in the coming two decades are health care and social assistance.
White’s ideas about reasons for the clustering: 1) Non-profits have always been in city centers. 2) The city is where there is greatest need. 3) Non-profits that serve an entire region need to be located where the regional decision-makers are, and where the regional conversations take place. "But is it good for center cities that so many of their jobs are in non-profits?" White asks. More from his piece:
The quick and easy answer is no, but a more considered one is maybe. Non-profits don’t pay as well as private industry or add as much to the tax base. (In many cities, non-profits are exempt from property taxes.) So it’s tempting to say that, in places like Pittsburgh, non-profits weigh down the city.
But some of these non-profits are intellectual storehouses and cornerstones of culture. There are many companies that live off the products of university laboratories or position themselves as high-quality work environments. Would these companies benefit by being in walking distance of the university or adjacent to a lively theater district? Probably, but we may never know for sure, since cities do such a poor job of selling themselves.
For more on this topic, the Urban Institute recently published the second edition of a book, Nonprofits and Government: Collaboration and Conflict, about the complex relationship between governments and non-profit organizations. Co-author Elizabeth Boris, director of the Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, writes, "Nonprofits and government interactions are multifaceted in a civil society. Simplistic assumptions about what nonprofit organizations can do and how they affect society may lead to public policies that are ineffective or have unintended consequences both for the organizations and for society." Co-author Eugene Steuerle, an Urban Institute senior fellow, writes, "The past quarter century has been a period of significant policy change, though the impact of these changes on nonprofit organizations has often been overlooked."
