By Bob Bouyea
Executive Editor

It is no longer OK to be a cool community. Today a community has to be “way cool”  to attract the best and brightest, according to Bruce Yandle, a professor and interim dean at the College of Business and Behavioral Sciences at Clemson University. Actually, that is according to Yandle’s granddaughter.

Yandle last month addressed the S.C. Economic Developers Association in Greenville and addressed the issue of the knowledge economy.

“What matters now is brains. How do you get them and get them connected?” he said.

Today, it matters where the brains are. In the 1970s, people with college degrees and higher were fairly evenly scattered across the county, according to data Yandle gathered. Today, people with college and post-graduate degrees are concentrated in certain areas around the country.

Mainly those areas are cities such as New York, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle and the like. Not surprising considering Yandle’s first statement that people are looking for “way cool” places; are there any other places cooler than those in the U.S.?

Minot, N.D.? Probably not. But maybe it could be if it listened to Yandle.

So where are the way cool places in South Carolina?

Well, if you go by the data that Yandle has compiled, as to where there is a high concentration of people holding college and post-graduate degrees, South Carolina has four distinct areas.

They are Charleston and Greenville counties. OK, no surprise there. Another is Lexington County. Really? Yep. Of course, being right outside the state capital and the University of South Carolina. OK, I can see why there are a lot of highly educated people in that area.

And finally, Dorchester County. Yes, that’s right, Dorchester County. Now, I would speculate that the major reason for this is its proximity to Charleston County and that most people who live in Dorchester County work in Charleston. I make this assumption based on several thousand of my closest friends that I share the interstate with twice a day each day.

OK, so does that make Lexington and Dorchester counties way cool? No. But, at least in Dorchester’s case, it is next to a way cool city. Who doesn’t like Charleston? And there are beaches nearby and it has rivers and beautiful marshlands. Water is one of the amenities that draw people to an area, Yandle said.

So people are flocking to this area and are expected to continue to come. What are they going to do once they get here? Some are retirees, so to them it’s whatever they want.

Others have moved here and are telecommuting to their jobs in the Northeast. Others graduated from local colleges and decided to remain here for no other reason than they like the area.

For others still, Yandle sees growth in the professional and business service industry such as bankers and financial investors. These jobs will increase while the number of manufacturing jobs will continue to shrink.

Although the number of manufacturing jobs is decreasing, production will continue to grow. As manufacturers become more automated, the need for laborers declines and the plants are operated by a few highly educated and highly paid employees.

So how does a city become way cool to attract the brains? Charleston seemed to be one of those cities that was born with it. But Greenville has had to build it. Greenville Mayor Knox White made redevelopment of the city’s downtown his No. 1 priority.

The city has poured millions of dollars into the revitalization and development of a park around the Reedy River, complete with trails, waterfalls and a suspension pedestrian bridge.

It is cool, and now the city plans to extend the park farther upriver and it is developing residential loft and condo housing downtown. It is on its way to being way cool.

Charleston is there and is now developing other areas which will become other cool places to hang, with the neck developments of Magnolia and The Navy Yard at Noisette.

These new urbanization projects are being developed to draw the brains. These developments will help Charleston continue to be the place to be. Way cool!

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