On the Wired Front

Looking for low-cost real estate, plenty of bandwidth, and a terrific quality of life? These blue-collar communities are designing their own high-tech networks to attract you.

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Blue-collar communities are designing their own high-tech networks to attract business

Tacoma, Wash. Stand on a street corner and you can feel it. Not the unstoppable rush that hits you when you emerge from a New York City subway station. Not the charged air hovering about MIT in Cambridge, Mass., or the relentless new-day vibe of a Silicon Valley morning. But there's something brewing in Tacoma, this city on the south shore of Puget Sound.

Young men and women on their lunch breaks dot the sidewalks. Men in hard hats pop in and out of boarded-up, abandoned warehouses and mills that they're renovating into San Francisco-style loft offices. Cranes swing around the waterfront, where new buildings are going up. "I can't say I've ever seen that before in 20 years," says Rob Grenley, an area native who cofounded two companies in downtown Tacoma: Grenley Stewart Resources Inc. and ID Micro Inc.

How is it that after decades of stagnation the city of Tacoma is sputtering back to life? For starters, it's only about 30 miles south of Seattle, where the high-tech growth spurt has gobbled up almost all the available space and ratcheted up real estate prices to twice what they are in Tacoma. And there's another ace up the smaller city's plaid-flannel sleeve: a state-of-the- art, high-speed fiber-optic network that covers the city. Tacoma -- rich with small-city business perks like a sane commute, ample parking, and a start-up-friendly permitting process -- is now technologically equipped to play ball with the big kids.

Two or three years ago, says commercial real estate broker Eric Cederstrand of Colliers International, corporate clients refused to even drive past Tacoma and look out the car window. Seattle was the city they wanted on their business cards. Now, he says, the Tacoma warehouses he's renovating are filling up faster than he can sandblast the timbers and hang the reproduction windows. "It's like Tacoma was put in a time capsule," he says. "All of a sudden we've broken open the time capsule, and we are literally creating a brand-new city."

The new network in Tacoma represents another chance at economic viability -- perhaps even boomtown success.

As is true with many small cities, all this might not have happened if Tacomans had waited for the local cable or phone company to install the high-speed networks that businesses now demand. Frustrated with the inattention of big cable and phone companies, publicly owned utilities in tiny towns and small cities in states all over the country have taken matters into their own hands. They've dug up streets, laid fiber-optic cable, and connected residents and businesses to new high-speed lines. Service providers are rushing in to sell Internet access through the new infrastructure. (In some cities, the utilities are even selling the services themselves.) The introduction of choices has made life easier for the businesses already in place and made the cities more attractive to start-ups.

For Tacoma, the new network is much more than a tangle of glass threads. It represents another chance at economic viability -- perhaps even boomtown success.

City of Destiny
Nearly surrounded by water, with preposterously huge Mount Rainier looming in and out of the clouds to the southeast, Tacoma tends to hang back behind its sexier sister, Seattle, just up Interstate 5. In 1873 the Northern Pacific railroad chose Tacoma over Seattle for its western terminus, and ecstatic Tacomans tagged their town the "City of Destiny." For many years paper mills choked the air with an acrid stench that came to be known as "Tacoma's aroma."

In the 1960s a shopping mall was built in Tacoma. Almost immediately, the downtown retail district started to collapse. Buildings stood abandoned for decades. Crime rose; street gangs moved in. To business owners in those days Tacoma's nickname must have sounded ironic. "We were the corner business on both corners," says Steph Farber, whose family's LeRoy custom-jewelry shop has occupied a storefront in the middle of a downtown block since 1942. For years buildings on both sides were blighted all the way to the end of the block.

By the 1980s, Tacoma was standing still as Seattle flourished. Thousands of people from the Tacoma area clogged I-5 every morning on their way to jobs in Seattle and surrounding King County. When Rob Grenley left for college, Tacoma had "a postapocalyptic look," he recalls. "You didn't want to do business there unless you had to." Grenley worked first on Wall Street and then in Seattle, but returned to Tacoma in 1990 to start a truck-fueling business with Greg Stewart, a childhood friend.

Things were just beginning to turn around then. City officials were working hard to clean the place up. They threw all their resources at improving public safety. They ripped down offending buildings and put grassy parks in their place. And they clung tightly to Tacoma's marquee business, the Frank Russell Co., a multimillion-dollar international investment-services firm that is headquartered on Tacoma's waterfront.

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