If you build it … chances are you’ll expand it later.
That doesn’t have quite the same poetry as the mysterious voice telling Ray Kinsella “If you build it, they will come” in “Field of Dreams.” But the idea is music to the ears of community leaders who have attracted a company investment. It’s equally pleasing to company executives whose savvy location choice has proved itself for the long haul.
Every year at this time, our research team works with Editor Emeritus Mark Arend and me to quality-check thousands of corporate facility project entries from the previous calendar year in the Conway Projects Database in order to determine the highly anticipated rankings in this issue: the Governor’s Cups, the Top Metros in three population tiers and the Top Micropolitans (i.e. small towns), as well as Top Industries globally and our look at project data along the Mississippi River Corridor.
To ensure we don’t have duplicate entries, we routinely scan across a few years of data. It makes for more work, but it also allows insight into which companies and areas are making more work opportunities. This year, as in past years, I’ve been struck once again by how often an investing company chooses to invest again in a short span of time, sometimes more than twice. Far from duplicate data entries, these repeat investors — like a .300 hitter you know is coming to bat again — are more like prosperity dividends.
Travel back in time through the Conway Projects Database and stories emerge from the data. The stories told by the people we talk to pick up where the data trail off. Across 71 years of those stories and reports, we can see that, even where bricks and mortar are demolished or left behind and built back up again, the one constant is community, a place with character, a destination with some sense of destiny.
In “Field of Dreams,” the one constant through all the years, the happily kidnapped writer Terrence Mann told Ray Kinsella on his cornfield bleachers, was baseball. In a speech broadcast around this time of every year in stadiums across the nation, the late James Earl Jones intones, “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”
Projects mark the time in this and every issue of Site Selection. And we mark up our scorecards. Explore our findings and see which places continue to be places companies “will most definitely come.” They are a part of our past, Mr. Mann might say, but they’re building a future too.
