How to Sell a City

In the 2020 horror film Scare Me, Fred Banks (no relation) meets Fanny, who says she is on a writing retreat before appending "hashtag escape Brooklyn." Such a hashtag does exist, and its contents include quaint cabins (which just so happen to be the setting of the movie) along with farms, exquisite food, fishing, and a lot of real estate agents’ listings. Megan Brenn-White, the head of the Upstate Curious Team, recently acquired by Compass), runs the @upstatecurious Instagram account with over forty-two thousand followers. Her immaculately curated account has many videos of home walk-throughs for new listings, but that’s maybe two-thirds of the posts. The other third is filled with roadside farm stands, nature trails, and a lot of pizza. A post with two pizzas and a cocktail reads: 

Hashtag escapebrooklyn draws a big circle around Brooklyn, often encompassing the entire Capital Region but regularly capturing the counties to the south like Sullivan, where Mountain Dale is situated. (I’ve seen buttons with the tagline "You take Brooklyn, I’ll take Troy.") Josh Ruben, the writer, director, and co-star of Scare Me lives in Ulster County, to the east of Sullivan, and told MEL Magazine that he added that little "hashtag escape Brooklyn" to "jab at that culture, but I feel like I can do that because I’m a small-town boy from the area that’s now turning into the East Coast’s alt-Hamptons. It’s really just a treat for me. It’s an artisan inside joke for no one." Ruben has more company than he realizes, because the escape Brooklyn ethos is not just a hashtag on Instagram, it is the name of a whole business that publishes travel guides and write-ups of cute restaurants and shops and advertises real estate listings.

"And North, Escape Brooklyn, Design Sponge, The Shop Keepers. Those were the main blogs at the time that were beginning to pay attention to new businesses of this type popping up in Upstate NY." That’s Caroline Corrigan. For four years her gift shop, the Fort Orange General Store in Albany, was the only Capital Region entry in Escape Brooklyn until Saratoga Springs got a whole travel guide at the end of 2019. Corrigan reached out to these blogs to drive business to her store, which sold gifts and unique items from the region. "We knew if they wrote about us or posted about us on Instagram, it would help get the word out. I think those posts made an impact for sure, especially with folks from out of town or the Hudson Valley area."

Corrigan, along with her business partner, closed the Fort Orange General Store in 2016 to pursue other projects, but Instagram remains a big part of her work life. "I wouldn’t have so many of my clients without it. I think I get 90 percent of my [illustration and design] work from people who find me on Instagram." Even though most of her clients still come from the social networking platform, the brick-and-mortar store caused her to spend "more time obsessing over Instagram. If you’re a business in a brick and mortar and you sell food or coffee or your shop sells clothes or something, like yeah, you need it."

Cities of any size and their constitutive neighborhoods must now use social media—just as they used to use blogs, message boards, travel magazines, and regional newspapers—to build a buzz and brand. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the ’90s relied on restaurant and gallery reviews to attract Manhattan money before the attention went national and then international. It was only through this media attention that, as Sharon Zukin writes, "Williamsburg crystallized into an identifiable local product for global cultural consumption: authentic Brooklyn cool."

Big cities and their neighborhoods are physically and culturally closer to the media than smaller cities, and so the Capital Region has had to work a bit harder to get attention. The May 2019 cover story of the Albany Business Review asked "What is Albany’s brand?" The illustration that went along with the article was of a grocery store shelf with different boxes with city names on them. Nestled among Boston, Nashville, Austin, and Columbus was Albany in a box slightly bigger than the rest. The lede explained the illustration to anyone who hadn’t caught on: "Are we the Capital Region, Capital District, Albany, Tech Valley, or Tri-City Area? Business and creative leaders say a regional brand is a good first step to attract more investment."

What binds people together in urban centers are the things they choose for themselves—sports teams, social clubs, and so on—and the city itself. That is why Maureen Sager, the executive director of the Upstate Alliance for the Creative Economy (ACE), told the Albany Business Review’s Liz Young, "We need to create something that’s bigger than a tagline or a logo. We need to create an identity that feels real to us."

Achieving this would be difficult and expensive. That is why Sager was just one of 250 business leaders who gathered in the historic Troy Music Hall to hash out a regional brand identity. $600,000 in cash and services had been donated by several organizations, including a property developer, a local health insurance provider, and two marketing firms. The challenge was succinctly described by Ellen Sax from MVP Healthcare: "We’re competing against the Austins and North and South Carolina and Nashville. . . . We’re competing against all these different communities that have been developing their identities and that’s what we need to do so that we can attract top talent."

Granted, these are replies given to a business reporter in a public setting—which means they’re canned responses meant to convey to the world that the Capital Region is setting up the cultural infrastructure for the creative class. That’s all the better for our purposes because what these quotes also show is that marketers realize that people are suspicious of marketing and want to feel something authentic when making the decision to move.

Corrigan, who—like me—came here to get an education and stayed, told Young that selling a city isn’t all that different from two restaurants "where one has tin ceilings, great music and nice furniture, and the other has cheap chairs and fluorescent lighting. ‘Even if the food is identical, you’re going to want to stay at the place that looks nicer. The big lesson that I think is sometimes overlooked is investing in the visual experience for a visitor or a customer is so valuable.’"

Not to leave anything to chance and undeterred by the pandemic, Sager and ACE—which since the Albany Business Review article has become affiliated with a larger organization called the Center for Economic Growth (CEG)—moved forward with the branding project. In April 2021, they launched the brand that would unite the over one hundred cities, towns, municipalities, industrial development authori- ties, and chambers of commerce. It was a brand that would be so powerful, so relatable that creatives from Nashville to Asheville would know it by name. New York’s Capital Region would now be called CapNY.

"I like it! I . . . um . . . I don’t . . . I have to be honest. I don’t love CapNY because it’s not compelling in my mind." Real estate broker Michael Field and insurance agent Ryan Hanley are speaking to Katie Newcombe, the chief economic development officer at CEG, for their Capital Region Business Podcast about the CapNY campaign.

"Be honest! Be honest!" Newcombe urges.

Hanley pivots to a positive: "I love the [web]site though. The stories, the imagery, I really like the site. I think this site does give a more real . . . almost—I don’t mean this in the negative connotation in any way—almost gritty kind of real feel to what it is to live here."

"Yes! Yes!" Newcombe replies. "There’s an authenticity to it, right?! There’s an honesty to it."

"Oh, 100 percent," says Hanley. "We’re not trying to be anyone but who we are and then you gotta tell those stories about who we are." 

The three of them are now feeding off each other’s excitement about the website and the promise of the CapNY brand. The hosts express the familiar frustration over the fact that the constituent cities, towns, and counties are reticent to cooperate and in fact compete with one another for attention. The result is a disconnected feel to the region. Hanley points out that "Albany and the Catskills, they’re right next to each other, [but] you don’t see that connection made very often."

The website—I have to be honest as well—does not strike me as gritty. The site follows the best design practices of the time: big photos and punchy text laid out on contrasting fields of color. The site has a slick video where smiling denim and flannel-clad workers restring guitars, pour farm-to-table cider, and hold baskets of baguettes as a man’s voice intones, "New York’s Capital Region, where one million people, 24 higher educational institutions, thousands of acres of parks and trails, over a hundred arts and cultural institutions, an abundance of farms and farm-to-table restaurants, over 100 breweries, distilleries, cideries, and wineries. New York’s Capital Region. Together, we’re capable of anything." The generic, upbeat music stretches this ungrammatical script to a little over a minute. Above the video, the site reads: 

Start your day with a bike ride across the Hudson. Grab an espresso at your favorite cafe. Work your job—Fortune 500 pharma, freelance web developer, loan officer at a community-based bank, baker, organic farmer . . . Next it’s local brews and an open mic. Go home to water your garden, tweak your latest game designs (yeah, you’ve kind of got a side hustle), watch the last of the sunset from your porch.

Room to breathe. Dream big. Live large. CapNY. CAPable of aNYthing. 

In a story about buying your first house in CapNY, the site reads, "Many CapNY millennials are finding great single family properties with mortgage payments that are lower than what they were paying in rent." The article interviews a young couple who bought their first house to build a family in. Tatiana, ("the 25-year-old Founder of Home Aesthetic and Real Estate Investor") is quoted as saying, "We got approved for $250,000, which was interesting because at the time I only made $13.50 an hour. That just shows how easy and affordable it is." Other stories on the website include "5 Millennials on Buying Investment Properties" and "Moving Upstate: Miami Transplant Tony Quezada."

That last one caught my attention—would I see myself in Tony’s story? In a way, yes. His adjustment to the seasons was highly relatable, but this part about affordability was so interesting that it’s worth quoting in full:

The salary-to-cost-of-living ratio is a key comparison factor here. The Miami economy is dominated by lower-wage tourism and hospitality. This leads to a lower living wage overall. It’s no surprise the average, working-class individual experiences a range of financial difficulties. From purchasing a home to achieving financial independence and freedom, it’s harder in Miami.

The Capital Region’s lower cost of living and higher living wage was conducive to me improving my financial situation, making home ownership a short-term reality. As a result, I did not sacrifice my standard of living nor quality of life. I was still able to indulge in restaurant delicacies and consume material goods at my desire. And I could have all of this with less of an impact on my cashflow.

It doesn’t help that there are phrases that sound like they came out of a Federal Reserve report (e.g., "I was still able to . . . consume material goods at my desire"). More substantively though, these claims about economic stability are questionable. Using the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics dataset provided by the Census Bureau, we can see that the percentage of jobs in food service, accommodations, entertainment, arts, and recreation in Miami, Florida, is not substantially larger than that in the Capital Region.

The affordability claims, however, are accurate. Only 12 percent of homes in Miami–Dade County would be considered affordable for a four-person family making the area median income, compared to between 29 percent (Saratoga County) and 61 percent (Schenectady County) in the Capital Region. The reason is that affordability is a function not only of income. It is also determined by real estate market speculation driven by global finance and the desires of the ultra-wealthy to park their wealth in investment properties like condos and, increasingly, of pension funds that buy entire housing developments to flip into rentals. This unrelenting push toward growth is what drives up prices more than anything else.

Avoiding the uncomfortable conversation of global wealth accumulation and inequality is understandable, even advisable, for a regional branding campaign. But as you read on and find out Tony "found a job he loves" at Goldman Sachs, the rest of the story begins to feel different. Again, while no one is expecting hard-hitting journalism or advanced political economy in their advertorial, it’s not a stretch to say that CapNY has a perspective that is friendly to capital and less interested in improving the lives of the poor. Gritty is a pliable word, but using it to describe a Goldman Sachs associate buying a house in the suburbs just doesn’t make sense.

"What they meant was Black," says Pat Harris, co-founder of Collective Effort, an entirely Black-owned and operated media co-op based in Troy. "There’s a ton of color all over that site. It’s one of the things I respect about it. Y’all did your due diligence. You found a fair representation of what up here looks like." Harris is right, the site builders clearly went out of their way to show a wide range of people and include multiple stories about women- and Black-owned businesses. Tony from Miami is Hispanic, and Tatiana—the real estate investor who got a $250,000 loan for a home—is Black.

Collective Effort has worked with global brands like Puma and Under Armour, and CEG approached them to help with what would become the CapNY project. Harris describes the early meetings they had with the CEG team, who had yet to hone in on a brand but already wanted content. Collective Effort told them, "We can tell any story. You need a story, a foundation." They showed up at the Collective Effort office about a year later with an idea they called "all Caps," with messaging around exuberance and living life out loud. "It looked nice; the creative was beautiful," says Harris, but the message was all wrong. "We were just like, ‘You ever heard of "no cap"?’ So it’s a thing that we all say in the Black community. It’s very popular; most people say it. It means ‘no bullshit.’ [Cap] means lies. So you just made a campaign that said y’all full of shit."

The CEG folks took it well. They were, in fact and to their credit, appreciative that the Collective Effort team was willing to do this translation work, and a few weeks later the team came back with several new ideas focused on community. They bought the work but what came out at the end was the tagline "CapNY. CAPable of aNYthing." So while they had been taught what cap meant, they couldn’t shake it, though they did tone it down a bit.

What frustrates Harris more than anything is not the insistence on the use of cap but the loss of access and creating a community with those that are already there. "They were serving the wrong audience," he says.

They were serving the financiers, right? They were serving the people that put up money for this campaign and trying to make them happy, and what makes them happy is bringing talent up here that they can hire and will eventually pay for one of those expensive-ass lofts—that is their idea of what regional success looks like. That’s their whole thing, but that’s the failure too, because no one gives a fuck about that. That’s not what this place is! This place is about folks like us that have literally been here and just keep grinding it out, doing stuff and trying things and fucking making awesome relationships.

In the blog post announcing the launch of the campaign, Maureen Sager included a note at the bottom that read:

ACE is aware of the inadvertent problems that can occur when a region takes its eye off of the people who live here, and focuses its efforts on attracting and courting outsiders. This was made clear by consultant Meredith Powell during our "Lessons from Austin" event in 2019. Meredith said something that sticks in our heads to this day—"Dance with who brung ya." In other words, don’t forget the residents who made the region great in the first place.

"You talk to Maureen now. That’s all she talks about," says Harris. "All that came from us. Like that literally came from us from being like, ‘This campaign isn’t about us here. It is about everyone else and why the Capital Region would be great for you in Boston or you in New York or you in, you know, somewhere in Canada.’"

While Harris disagrees with the direction CapNY took, Collective Effort’s contributions are still visible on the site, and individuals at CEG seemed to genuinely take these issues to heart even if the organization is clearly focused on drawing people from outside the region. Collective Effort is featured on the CapNY site as one of "5 Companies with Unique Social Missions." Fellow Collective Effort founder Jamel Mosley was even invited to be a panelist alongside CapNY producer Gabby Fisher and others at a CEG-sponsored event that I attended in July 2021. Mosley told the story about "no cap" to a crowd of about 50 young creatives. What followed was a surprisingly frank conversation about economic development moderated by Jeff Buell, a principal of Redburn Development. "You caught something that would have been a disaster," Buell said to Mosley.

Buell, who’d worked for the City of Troy in 2005 and worked on a citywide branding campaign, remarked that he saw something in the CapNY campaign that he had seen "come up over and over again: the genuine opportunity to make a change." The rest of the panel agreed emphatically. In a place like New York City, experimentation is frequent but expensive and very difficult to get noticed. In the Capital Region, however, experimenting with a totally new menu in your restaurant, having a dance party in the rain, or some other quirky event can fail miserably and not completely sink you. And with the power of social media, they argued, the reach can still be there if you’re savvy enough.There seemed to be a consensus in the room that day that growth, hometown pride, and creative experimentation were all connected in a frustrating but ultimately rewarding web of relationships. You want to show off your city and be protective of its authentic character, but you also know that more people joining you is inevitable and with it comes change. That change is good, it’s inherent to a city, but it is something that must be managed and cultivated.

For now, though, I’m going to leave the last word to Pat Harris, who captures something we would be foolish to forget. While he’s not against new people coming to the Capital Region, he is steadfast in believing "that’s not the only way you create jobs. You don’t just create jobs by begging people to come here, you know? Oh, we’re a million strong? Yes, we’re a fucking million strong. Now imagine if you made those million even stronger."