I first visited Binghamton University as a senior in high school. I was excited to see my first real college and the surrounding area. After touring, I made my way back to the bus station Downtown to get home. While walking, I noticed a group of people camped out in the park on State Street, alongside the bars. It was the fall of 2011 and Occupy Wall Street was sweeping the country, with mass protests lining the streets of major cities and small towns. Only a handful of people camped out on that cloudy day. It’s been four years since then, and the Binghamton economy is still downtrodden.
During the 20th century, corporations and government investment built the economy of the United States. Areas like the Triples Cities benefited greatly from this, allowing them to grow in population and density. The area was home to powerhouses like IBM and the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company. Yet throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, corporations began to pull their workers from the area, moving jobs to different parts of the country and across the world.
When corporations left the Triple Cities, government investment left with them. The region and its people were hung out to dry by Albany, alongside other industrial towns like Rochester, Utica and Schenectady. Downstate received all the attention, while upstate continued to slip. In recent years, Rochester and Buffalo have come back by finding new ways to build their cities while the Triple Cities continue to struggle. The Binghamton metropolitan area is home to over 250,000 people; college students cannot be the sole answer to this region’s woes. BU can only go so far in revitalizing and investing in the area — there are too many families far out of the reach of the University. Its efforts need to be met by our politicians, in reforming policies to develop and diversify the economy, rebuilding the infrastructure and attracting businesses to the the region. We can no longer rely on the state to help bring the change we need. We must do it ourselves.
Sometimes it is not about big reform, but smaller ideas. Eliminating blight in neighborhoods, attracting new industries in avenues other than START-UP NY, providing job training at community colleges, confronting the homeless problem and making public transit even more accessible so people do not have to travel for hours to get to their jobs. Small reforms add up to overhaul and not everything requires action on a state level. The Triple Cities needs advocates in Albany, but we need reformers here in the Southern Tier. Most importantly, we need people, both locals and students, to rise up and tell their politicians they won’t take it anymore. They will not settle for second-rate status in a state so great. Binghamton has been subjected to decades of economic downturn; that is too long for this community to suffer. We all have a shared interest and desire to see this region grow and it is time that our local politicians realize that.