WORDS Brent Rosen
Last Thursday evening, my wife and I gave a talk at the Montgomery TEDx about the amazing opportunities we currently have in Montgomery. We’ll get back to that, but first I want to talk about my debit card. I’d used the card earlier that day to buy a fast-food lunch, but somehow managed to lose it between the drive-through window and my wallet. I didn’t think too much of it, assuming the card was in my car, but at about 8:00 p.m. I received a call from my bank. The bank wanted to inform me of some suspicious activity.
Turns out, my debit card didn’t fall into one of those cracks between the seat and the center console. It actually fell into the wrong hands. Just hours after I lost the card, someone had spent more than $450 at Wal-Mart, $50 at a gas station, $60 more at Game Stop, and $38 at Hardee’s; all on Ann Street. If this were an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, I’d take the theft of my debit card and the subsequent $600 expenditure on what I can only assume to be a video game console (a PS4 goes for 399.99), video games, and junk food as a sign of the complete decline of America. My WSJ op-ed would say something like, “I wouldn’t have even disputed the charges if they’d spent $600 on something to improve themselves, like Jack Welch’s autobiography, or a share of Apple (AAPL). But fast food and video games - get a life.” But this is not the Wall Street Journal.
Instead, the theft of my debit card has me thinking more and more about my TEDx speech. In that speech, I discussed two sorts of city: those that are talent magnets, and those that are talent vacuums. Talent magnet cities - like Nashville and Atlanta - tend to draw talented and ambitious people from an entire region, as talented and ambitious people want to live in cities full of excitement and opportunity… On the other hand, talent vacuum cities - like Montgomery - struggle to retain their talented ambitious people. For years Montgomery bled talent, but that period is over.
Today, Montgomery has a sense of possibility about it, the feeling that opportunity is everywhere. This is causing talented and ambitious people to fill Montgomery’s talent vacuum. There are miles of abandoned buildings and old, classic, walkable neighborhoods are everywhere, just waiting to be renovated. Rents are extremely cheap, competition is limited, and few are trying to offer services new to the area. The conditions for success are ripe in Montgomery and failure in Montgomery won’t cost you anything close to failure somewhere else. As I said in my speech, “you don’t have to wait for your turn in Montgomery, because no one is in line ahead of you.” You move to Nashville to become part of something, but in Montgomery you can create anything.
But in recognizing Montgomery as a land of opportunity, as maybe the ultimate, “buy low -- sell high” city in the Southeast, I ignored something important. That opportunity is not for everyone. That opportunity is not for many of the people who never graduate from Montgomery’s Public Schools. That opportunity is not for the people who can’t find jobs because they don’t have the skills to compete in a global economy. That opportunity is not off Maxwell Blvd. and it isn’t in Chisholm.
There is another individual in this story that cannot take advantage of the opportunities I so proudly spoke of at TEDx: the person who stole my debit card. Instead, that person saw a different sort of opportunity - my debit card lying in the Wendy’s parking lot - and took advantage of it until my card’s fraud protections limited any further purchases. We live in the Capital of Dreams, but the biggest that person could dream was Assassin’s Creed and cheeseburgers.
Unequal distribution of opportunity is not a problem unique to Montgomery. In fact, The Atlantic recently published an article titled “Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South?” explaining that a Southerner born to parents in the bottom income quintile has less than a 5% chance of reaching the top income quintile in his lifetime. For comparison’s sake, in San Jose, California, there is a 12.9% chance of moving into the top quintile. The South is not just America’s least socially mobile region; social mobility in the South is more limited than in any other country in the developed world. “Why” is tangled up in all of our thorniest issues - race, class, segregation by income, family structure - but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean the problem should be ignored.
And I ignored it. In my zeal to present the best of Montgomery, in my wish to provide the TEDx audience “an idea worth spreading,” I ended up failing to acknowledge that there are two Montgomery’s, and only one of them is a pleasant place of seemingly endless opportunity. Hopefully, the continued revitalization of Montgomery will help to close, not widen, the opportunity gap. Hopefully, this period in Montgomery’s history will be remembered fondly by more than just developers, entrepreneurs, and city officials who’ve received credit for “turning Montgomery around.” Hopefully, as Montgomery continues to gentrify, we won’t forget about the people who were here first.