Odd Lots: How an American City Can Become a Manufacturing Hub

Sourced by podcast-ingest on 2026-05-10. Auto-transcribed via AssemblyAI (universal-2, en). Speakers mapped heuristically from numeric IDs to host/regulars by order of first appearance. Duration: 1:01:39. Episode page: https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-an-american-city-can-become-a-manufacturing-hub. Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/UVBrz8bN8aM2Xe47PEPu/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/8a94442e-5a74-4fa2-8b8d-ae27003a8d6b/e2537d51-1bd2-449b-b065-b442010d29aa/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=982f5071-765c-403d-969d-ae27003a8d83.

Show notes (from RSS)

The residents of Allentown are still sore about that Billy Joel song. While it's true the Pennsylvania city became synonymous with deindustrialization after the US steel industry began its decline in the 1970s, Allentown should be known for more: In the 1950s, for instance, some of the first mass-produced transistors were made in the city, which were the precursor of today's semiconductors. The city is also a unique logistics and e-commerce hub — it's a day's drive from nearly 40 percent of the US population. Mayor Matthew Tuerk, who has held office since 2022, has made reindustrialization a focus of his mayorship. In today's episode, recorded in Madrid at the Bloomberg CityLab conference, we speak to Mayor Tuerk about the city's grand strategy for building back and sustaining its manufacturing base, implementing industrial policy on a local level, how rezoning has changed in the last decade, the political puzzle of data centers, recruiting companies to come to Allentown, de-risking the American supply chain, and our favorite new category of industry — weight-gaining industries — which Allentown specializes in. Read more: New Brookfield Venture May Restart Abandoned US Nuclear Project Texas Ranch Lures Futuristic Startups to Revive US Manufacturing See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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Speaker 4: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Speaker 5: And I'm Jo Wiesenthal.

Speaker 4: Jo, do you ever discover little cultural blind spots that you had in your life?

Speaker 5: I'm like, things you missed. Where are you going with this?

Speaker 4: So I discovered one recently and it kind of led to a minor epiphany for me. But I had heard the Billy Joel song Allentown. I had never watched the video. And in preparation for this episode, I watched the video and suddenly a bunch of Simpsons references made sense to me.

Speaker 5: Interesting.

Speaker 4: And I don't mean to be. I don't mean to be very grand Millennial by making yeah, I know. Simpsons references.

Speaker 5: Isn't it depressing how if you make a Simpsons reference to like someone younger in the office, they look at you with a blank stare. I know it's really depressing. I just don't do it anymore because it's so depressing.

Speaker 4: I know. And here I am doing it on the podcast.

Speaker 5: But I actually because we're you know, we're the same generation. So we could do it.

Speaker 4: We can. This is a safe space.

Speaker 5: Our listeners might not get it.

Speaker 4: So the reason I bring it up though is for kind of a serious point, not just to talk about Billy Joel music. Although, now that I think about it, he has a lot of songs about, like, the political economy of America. But it is because Allentown, Pennsylvania basically became a poster child for de industrialization and the hollowing out of American manufacturing in the 1980s.

Speaker 5: That was a great intro.

Speaker 4: Oh, thank you.

Speaker 5: And of course. Right, so we know. And obviously over the years, on odd lots, we've talked a lot about industrialization. De Industrialization, re industrialization. Great. All very interesting themes. Everyone maybe like, feels in their gut somehow that they're like pro re industrialization, whatever that means. Right. But then the gap between, like, somehow, like, we feel good about producing physical things, we want more of that. What does that actually look like in practice? What are these jobs? What are these potential industries? Then it suddenly gets much more hazy.

Speaker 6: Right.

Speaker 5: People don't know what that actually looks like in practice.

Speaker 4: Right. How do you actually go about implementing industrial policy on a local scale? And I have to say, the other thing I found out in researching for this podcast, I had no idea. But Allentown, Pennsylvania was also the site of the first. Some of the first mass produced transistors, which are like the precursor to everything, to semiconductors of today.

Speaker 5: Can I say one random thing about Billy Joel before we go further? You know? Cause obviously you mentioned he talks about a lot of political economy things. Including of course, in We Didn't Start the Fire. The final line of that song is like something about the cola wars. And he's like, I can't take it anymore. And I just think it's really funny that the Cola Wars, Coke vs. Pepsi, is the thing that tipped him over the edge. Like all the Vietnam War. All these things happen. And finally, the thing that tipped him over the edge was the cola. Anyway, sidetracked, but I just had to get that out.

Speaker 4: We should do a whole episode on Billy Joel songs at some point, including my favorite karaoke standard, which is Downeaster Alexa, all about the decline of the fishing industry. But anyway, Allentown, Pennsylvania is focus. We do in fact have the perfect guest. We're gonna be speaking with the mayor of Allentown, Matt Turk. So thank you so much for coming on all thoughts.

Speaker 6: It's from Grand Placid. It's a huge pleasure to be here.

Speaker 5: That actually helps. Cause we are at the Citilab conference In Madrid. Right.

Speaker 4: And we just saw you have a medal from the. From the marathon over the weekend. Tell us about that.

Speaker 6: Uh, landed on Saturday, went right to the marathon expo, picked up my bib. 24 hours later, I was starting the Madrid 42K, not 26 miles, a 42km marathon. It was hot, it was hilly, it was beautiful. Uh, great crowd support, phenomenal marathon. Finished the marathon and then went right to a reception for Bloomberg City Lab. And I've been nonstop since then.

Speaker 4: That is dedication to both cardio and city learning. So congrats on that. I mentioned Allentown, the song and the video in the intro, and I discovered there's some controversy about this because apparently the steel making was more in Bethlehem rather than in Allentown. So should Billy Joel have been talking about semiconductors instead of steel?

Speaker 6: I mean, he could have been talking about Mack trucks. He could have been talking about silk manufacturing. That's like the local controversy is that he's talking about Bethlehem, but he didn't rhyme as well with shutting factories down. But then there's. I was surprised. I thought that everyone in the country felt not great about the song Allentown. Then I met the mayor of Toledo, and he was like, that's a great song. It's about the working man and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, what are you talking about? This is the song that, like, everybody in our region in the Lehigh Valley just, like, dreads hearing. Because it's about this, like, different era that maybe was, like, felt right in the moment in 1982. Like, that maybe kind of captured the moment. But in 2026, it's like, it doesn't sound further from. It couldn't sound further from the truth.

Speaker 5: Give us, like, a little Allentown history. Like, what is the timeline when we talk about these sort of key industries that were once associated with the city of Allentown? What was the sort of peak of it and when was the sort of trough?

Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, the city was founded back in 1762. It had its revolutionary moment. We hid the Liberty Bell there, but it really picked up and incorporated in 1867 for the kind of reconstruction. And that's when the industry really started to. It started to industrialize. Like many American cities. Early industry was cigar manufacturing. So tobacco that was grown in Lancaster was shipped to Allentown for production into cigars. Silk manufacturing became a pretty big deal in that area. It was a place where silk could be brought in and then processed in the early kind of 1910s, sort of around the First World War. Mack truck moved to Allentown from Brooklyn. This was like 1915. And industrial production of those vehicles started. We manufactured Volte bombers, a particular type of a bomber for World War II. This is all coincident with Bethlehem's steel industry rising up. The industrial work continued through to. I think you guys mentioned the transistor and Western Electric. That was kind of a big story. But then, like a lot of places, manufacturing started to decline. Not as strongly in Allentown as other parts of the country. But the Western Electric plant eventually shut down. The.

Speaker 5: What year were we talking about with that?

Speaker 6: Western Electric was in the 70s. It actually. And it morphed into something else that eventually became Broadcom. So there is still some manufacturing. It didn't necessarily exist in the city. It spread out into suburban parts of the region. There's still some chip manufacturing occurring or wafer polishing occurring in the area. We still have the kind of muscle memory of semiconductor manufacturing. But again, the industry evolved and changed. The Voltee aircraft shut down when there was no need to produce bombers anymore. Mack trucks continued operations in Allentown, but in the 80s shifted most of its production to a plant in Makunji that still operates today. A lot of those old Mack plants were acquired by an organization that I used to work for, the Allentown Economic Development Corporation. And repurposed, initially repurposed for. This is the 80s. The thought at the time was that it could be an incubator facility, a business incubator. It did become that, but it was more of a manufacturing incubator. These were old sawtooth roof buildings with 12 to 18 foot ceilings. So some big spaces, but not a lot of clearance. They weren't suited for modern manufacturing. And that's what a lot of the building stock in Allentown looked like. But the production was still occurring in some capacity in the city, definitely in the region. When the steel shut down In Bethlehem in 1998, I think was when they did their last cast. That's when leading up to that, the region had already started to think about how to diversify, how to build on the Western Electric. The semiconductor manufacturer Lehigh University was a source of engineering talent. They started to diversify out into life sciences. So there's some precursor drugs that are manufactured there, some medical supplies that are still manufactured there. Bibron. Another one that I didn't mention was air products. So it's an industrial gas manufacturer. I know you guys were recently talking about helium.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Air Products is like.

Speaker 5: It's so fun talking to a listener that makes it so easy.

Speaker 4: It's just like Helium.

Speaker 6: Oh yeah, the helium. So helium is something that air products manufacturers, it's one of those like head scratchers when you're talking about a region's industrial output to say like we make like an element, like an elemental element, like the lowest table.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 6: It's hard to describe like how that happens, but that was founded in Allentown. Actually it was founded in Tennessee and moved to allentown in the 50s. But a lot of that production was still occurring. The kind of civic leaders of the time in the early 90s as they could foresee the end of Bethlehem Steel when it was acquired. I think it was acquired by Arso or Mittel, but they could see the end in sight. And so they made a conscious effort to diversify, working with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to stand up some tech led economic development which had its successful in a few places. The biggest success in attracting investment or the biggest kind of economic development story for the region was in 2006 when the region convinced Olympus, which is the manufacturer of surgical devices, to relocate its North American headquarters to. They were out in suburban Bethlehem. But that's been the character, right? It's a very diversified economy today. It's still about 17% of the jobs are manufacturing jobs. So it's much higher than many other parts of the country and it's held pretty steady. So that's

Speaker 5: amazing.

Speaker 4: Well, that was a fantastic summary. But on that note, I mean, I think a lot of cities and towns in America, whether they're in the Rust Belt or Pennsylvania or the south or wherever, who have gone through this deindustrialization phase. They all say they want to build back their manufacturing sector in some way. But it feels like Allentown has kind of gone about it in a slightly different way in that you've had a sort of grand strategy or vision for how to do that rather than try to attract just like individual businesses in a piecemeal. Can you talk about how you actually formulated that plan?

Speaker 6: Yeah. So I started working for the Economic Development Corporation in 2008 and we had the manufacturing incubator, it's called the Bridgeworks, the manufacturing incubator that was in place at that time. It was trying to pivot away from manufacturing. When I got there, we also had an industrial building that sort of funded our existence where we had a T shirt manufacturer, industrial valves manufacturer and somebody who is building large scale tents as tenants. And they were kind of keeping the organization alive. There was this in 2008. It was ripe kind of in the early days of the global financial crisis. There was Some concern about how we would recover economically, what we would do. But these early investments in manufacturing were, from what I could see, looking ahead, something we shouldn't turn our backs on. There was this seemingly healthy manufacturing economy in place in the Lehigh Valley. And it felt like there was an opportunity to build for the future. I worked with our CEO, our executive director at that time, to start thinking about how we might position the area as a place where you could bring smaller footprint manufacturing. We knew we had this building stock of buildings that were smaller than 100,000 square feet, sometimes on multiple stories. There was a kind of gravity flow model of manufacturing where you would load in raw material at the top of the building and as it gained weight, it would drop down the building for final finishing on the ground floor and then shipping. We felt like there was an opportunity to kind of leverage the existing industrial inventory to attract manufacturers that were more boutique. I remember reading an article in the Wall street journal in maybe 2009 or 2010 about a bag manufacturer in San Francisco who was very proud of being in San Francisco. I was like, this is. I think there's something here for us. I reached out to the manufacturer at the time. This was kind of around the same time as the rise of maker spaces and 3D printing was kind of coming online. It looked like you could do some stuff in a smaller form factor. And we kept thinking, this is a chance for us with these strong roots in manufacturing to bring some of it back. And we got deep into it and really explored. We formed something called the Urban Manufacturing alliance in collaboration with San Francisco and the Pratt Institute in New York and our friends in the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation and in Detroit to just kind of bring cities who were interested in manufacturing together. We started talking about reshoring or onshoring at that time, but it felt distant.

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Speaker 5: sort of Maker 3D printing phenomenon because

Speaker 4: that was such a thing around that time.

Speaker 5: Yeah, it was. But it's forgotten, isn't it? Because when we talk generally about the tailwinds or the growth of the 2010s, it's almost entirely people talk about tech, right. Software, et cetera, the Internet and all that. And then we talk about post Covid this re, you know, this new enthusiasm for reshoring. But it was like this forgotten chapter that within particularly the first half of the 2010s, the various maker spaces and the 3D printers and people were really excited about that kind of fizzled out. Like that mini movement you don't hear

Speaker 6: that fizzled out for sure. But so we did a re industrialization strategy in 2014. We worked as somebody to evaluate our total industrial stock. I had at that point moved on to work for the Regional Economic Development Corporation, but was still involved with this urban manufacturing alliance at the region. We could see that manufacturing was still important. I had a better sense of what other types of manufacturing was occurring in the area. We developed a strategy, kept thinking. What I kept seeing at the region was that there is real demand to be in the Lehigh Valley and in these smaller footprint buildings. So we saw inquiries all the time for buildings between 40 and 80,000 square feet. But this was a time when the Lehigh Valley was pivoting its economy toward transportation and warehousing, building million square foot buildings with 24 to 36 foot ceilings. Really, as this other technological trend of the E Comm started to show up, this was the high demand for industrial space. So we had lots of interest from small manufacturers, particularly coming out of places like Brooklyn, where maybe it was like not quite the place to be, who wanted to spread their arms a little bit and maybe have access to talent. They were trying to be in the Lehigh Valley, but we didn't have a ton of building space to meet their needs. So when we built that re industrialization strategy, a big part of it was how do we position the built environment for this demand? And some of that is rehabbing existing industrial buildings as surprise, surprise, industrial buildings. So it's continued on from there.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So this is another thing I learned about Allentown. I'm full of Allentown facts at the moment, but apparently Allentown is within a day's drive of 4, 40% of the population in the U.S. is that true?

Speaker 6: Yeah, it's over a hundred million, many more than 100 million people. And that's what made it such a strong destination for some of the E Comm. But it's also like that. You go back to why it is a vibrant economic region, is that it's a great place for weight gaining industries. So the other big thing we worked on at the Regional Economic Development Corporation was we recruited Ocean Spray to make most of its great cranberry juice in the Lehigh Valley. Sam Adams was brewing most of its beer in the Lehigh Valley.

Speaker 5: Was it weight gaining industry?

Speaker 6: Yeah, Anything you add water to, basically. Right. So when you have the cranberries come into the plant, like to become cranberry juice, you add a ton of water. It doesn't make sense to produce that far away and then ship all that water. So because you're not just within a day's drive of 40% of the US population, you're also close to New York. So a lot of Keurig, Dr. Pepper has a big production plant. There's a lot of food manufacturing that occurs there as well. And then on the manufacturing side, you also, because of the E Comm. Because of the food manufacturing, you saw a lot of packaging and bottling manufacturing show up. So one of our most recent and Allentown successes was recruiting a company called Schless Bottle that manufactures bottles for beverages. And they wanted to be close to the production point. So they're manufacturing bottles in Allentown, filling it with beverages and shipping it back to New York.

Speaker 5: This is so core, like Ricardo Haussman coded stuff like, okay, you have this one industry and then you have innovation and an adjacent industry.

Speaker 4: Super monkey swinging from cheese.

Speaker 5: Yeah. I'm also just like learning all these terms. Gravity based manufacturing or weight gaining. This is all fantastic stuff.

Speaker 4: Weight gain industry is, I think what we're both doing in Madrid.

Speaker 5: That's what we're both doing in Madrid. That was really.

Speaker 6: That's jamon gaining. That's it.

Speaker 5: Yeah. We should have run a marathon and then we could have compensated for all that. What are like, you know, obviously this is all against the backdrop of this vortex of manufacturing, going to China largely, et cetera. When people think, you know, you're at a conference like this and probably a lot of mayors are interested in reindustrialization, et cetera. What types of industries are good candidates generally for thinking of what should be built locally? Something like plastic bags or bags. It's like, well, I don't know, maybe that could be offshore. What are strong candidates for what is durable here?

Speaker 6: It's odd that you mention plastic bags because one of the things we recruited as I was kind of leaving the world of economic development and going to Politics was a Turkish plastic bag manufacturer. So that was kind of interesting. So one of the things that distinguished the region and I think is good for onshoring. And I want to go back on the onshoring for a second. When we developed this strategy, when we're talking about onshoring and reshoring back in the early 2010s, there was no. We didn't know a global pandemic was going to come and disrupt supply chains. We were thinking about like the, the logistics of making things in close to the customer. And I was thinking a lot about the theft of IP in China and how it was kind of like those components of globalism didn't make a ton of sense. You were kind of giving away your most precious resource. So a lot of it was driven by how do you kind of capture the spirit of American manufacturing. Now Covid hit and all of a sudden that's what brought it into stark relief. That's what made it make sense. So one of the things that I think makes a ton of sense and we still see a lot of in Allentown, whether it's the transistors or it's the bag manufacturing or Westport Axle manufactures axles for Mack trucks in Allentown area, it's components, right? It's how do you, how do you de risk the supply chain by diversifying your component manufacturing. That makes a lot of sense in cities because you're not building the whole truck there, right? And to build the whole truck you need something like Lordstown or Lordstown, you need River Rouge, you need the enormous factories. When you're building the components, whatever those components might look like, you can exist in a much smaller form factor, something as small as 40,000 square feet. But even like to get down to like what we were calling craft manufacturing at the time, you might be able to exist in a much smaller space and perhaps the ground floor of a mixed use building. And that's what the next step for us was. And what more cities should be doing, I think is making sure that your zoning allows for light industrial to take place in residential neighborhoods so that you're not kind of, you have to make sure that you allow this stuff to happen in your city. And the new manufacturing. We think about Pittsburgh and the early part of the 20th century as being so thick with smog that you couldn't even see across the river. We were, you know, you still see pictures of I remember being in Tianjin in China in 2017 and like you couldn't see as you're going across the bridge that's not what manufacturing really looks like anymore. So you can, you can kind of do that in cities. So as cities are thinking about what type of manufacturing you might try to attract, I think high value component manufacturer, light touch, but high tech. Again, taking advantage of the resources that we have in American cities and taking advantage of the fact that people now are choosing where they're going to be first and then what they're going to do second. And the cities that have a vocational advantage on cost of or quality of life can attract those industries if they set themselves up to do it.

Speaker 4: Say more about the rezoning process because if there's one thing I remember from playing SimCity for hours, you know, in the 19, late 1990s, it was that if you, if you zone industry next to residential, your population is not going to be happy. So I'm very curious, like how much that has actually changed and what the rezoning process is like now versus say 10 years ago.

Speaker 6: So a lot of cities because of the housing crisis, are exploring more aggressive zoning policy that allows for denser housing, allows for different types of housing. We just passed in the beginning of 2026 a reform to our zoning code and a reform to our zoning map that is a form based code. So it's really focused less on what's happening inside the building and more on what the buildings will look like.

Speaker 4: Interesting.

Speaker 6: So that can allow. That's the type of thing that can allow for. Now in SimCity, when you built, when you zoned industrial, you were going to get like the tire manufacturing plant. Not a great idea for cities to have tire manufacturing plants in their downtowns, but great idea to have craft brewing or small garment assembly, something that is kind of like bespoke manufacturing. I think what cities can do as they're investigating the limitations of their zoning code to build toward the cities that they want to be, is dig in and understand exactly what you might allow. I mean, in zoning you have to allow for all uses somewhere in the jurisdiction. So if you can allow for certain types of manufacturing uses, you create flexibility that can add some vibrancy to the neighborhood. I go back to one of my big points when I was in the Urban Manufacturing alliance, that I don't know what it looks like now, but we talked about the lack of interest in young people working in manufacturing and that's always been one of the challenges. And one thing that occurred to me is that when. So when Mack Trucks moved to Allentown in 1923, they built a plant right next to. Well, they built the plant and then they built the worker housing right next door to the plant. And people would walk to work all day. And what we knew then is that it sounds amazing and people would like to do that, whatever they're doing for work. When children saw people walking to work with the lunchbox and knew that that person was going to work in the silk plant or in the truck plant, they saw a person working and a person who was connected to manufacturing. When we moved all of the production out to the suburbs and people were getting in a car to drive to work, the rando kid on the street who's just hula hooping or whatever, doesn't get a chance to see workers and doesn't get a chance to see the dignity of work in manufacturing and loses interest in it. And so we're so far removed now and we've tried to like do things whether it was through 3D printing or like kind of get kids excited about manufacturing, but fundamentally it's still, the work is removed from everyday life. And so if you can get back to that point where you can add manufacturing back to everyday life, I think there's an opportunity to rekindle the interest in the careers.

Speaker 5: We need to do an episode how SimCity destroyed, right? Like people internalizing all these lessons from a video game and then, oh, then sudden all of the manufacturing goes out into the exurbs and then no one sees the workers. Then suddenly, how SimCity ruined America. SimCity ruined America.

Speaker 6: I would love to see that. Honestly, like the, I think the mayor, like any mayor who has played SimCity, like the minute you sit down at the desk, you're like, oh my God, this is total bs.

Speaker 5: That's amazing. Now I really actually want to do this episode post Covid. You get this reenthusiasm for manufacturing, just supply chain reasons, also national security reasons. We get the CHIPS act, we get the Inflation Reduction Act. What did that look like from the perspective of these big programs, these sort of the Biden era programs? What did that look like from your perspective?

Speaker 6: So for us, one thing was it was like a return to an industrial policy, right? Like previously, the United States was like, the industrial policy didn't make a lot of sense for an economic development professional. Now we saw the federal government was pushing in a particular direction and it was like, let's start making stuff again. When I became mayor in 2022, when you are sworn in as mayor, you come in with a bunch of campaign promises, you sit in the seat and you realize all of a sudden there's A completely new set of challenges that you have to unlock. So all the stuff you wanted to do in the campaign, it's nice, but there's more pressing needs. Among the things that I could see in the city was that we were. Well, we didn't know what we didn't know. So we had a lot to learn. We had to dig in and understand the city a little better and understand what was going on. We also didn't like, we had to let some relationships fail. And so we needed to get back and make sure that our partners were on the same page as us. And we kind of lost the capacity to like, innovate, to get creative and do new things. So I was grateful that I entered into the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative at just the right moment when I was feeling desperate and they kind of invested in that capacity. Through doing that, I was able to attack one of the things that was clearly an issue, which was road safety. There was a federal grant, the Safe Streets for All program that was helping cities plan for safer streets. I'm going to get to the point, I promise. So we. I was, I'm a bicycling and running guy. So I wanted to like and I felt like we could do better for our city if we had safer streets. Bloomberg stood up with some partners. The local infrastructure hub. It helped me teach my team how to use data to apply for federal funds. It helped us think about how we could work with partners to accomplish good outcomes for residents and try some new things. We were lucky. I also got right in Secretary Buttigieg's face and said, I need help. And we were lucky to get a planning grant through that program. That experience helped us understand how to as a city, return to federal grants. About. Right after we were awarded that Safe Streets granted, the Economic Development Administration announced its recompete pilot project. And it was focused on areas that were, I think this is June of 2023. It was focused on areas that had a high prime age employment gap. And so prime age employment gap is people between the ages of 25 to 54. Prime age employment gap is people who are either unemployed at higher than average rates or out of the labor force. We looked and saw that Allentown in fact had a high prime age employment gap. Ours was like at 6%. We dialed into a particular neighborhood and saw that in that area it was about 12% region of about or a neighborhood of about 23,000 people that were just disproportionately out of the labor force or unemployed. And we started to dig in on that group of people. And how could we at the same time prepare as we're thinking about, like, these changes and the changes to the demands of the workforce, how can we make sure that our people could work right? And that was where these two things came together, is we knew that through working with our partners at the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation, there's still a high demand for manufacturing labor as well as health care. We knew that the barriers to getting people to good jobs sometimes were a lack of available resources, things like flexible and affordable childcare. We knew that people were sometimes challenged by transportation, that if those jobs are out in the suburbs and they didn't have a car, it was hard to get to them. And we also knew that if we wanted to make sure that people without cars could get to work, we wanted to build industrial sites in the city. So we put together an application and submitted it to eda. And again, because of the work that we had done in the past, we're successful and we're able to. So we landed a strategic development grant in December of 23, and then we got a $20 million investment for implementation. So our team right now is working to make sure that as we work to bring these manufacturing jobs to not just the city, but to the entire region, that Allentonians are well positioned to get to those jobs. And that is the big. A big piece where cities have to be able to play a role is making sure that people have the tools they need to access the good things that are happening in the economy.

Speaker 4: Have you got all the grant money? The Biden era grant money? We did all of it. So, okay, so there's nothing we made sure.

Speaker 6: As soon as the November 5, 2024, we went into overdrive to just make sure that we weren't at risk of losing anything. And that came through the chips and science act. And it was a relatively small program. And practically speaking, our region is intensely political, so it would not make sense to roll back some of that. I had to fight for some other stuff to make sure that we got it, including I wrote a letter to Secretary Rollins and the USDA about how important trees were to cities across America. We've worked to make sure that we didn't lose the street funding. But for some of the funding for things that you do in cities, it's very practical. It's good for residents. It should be nonpartisan, as long as you are not exclusively focused on the various different things the administration is focused on.

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Speaker 4: I sometimes get the sense that there's like a bit of a disconnect between how people in D.C. are thinking about industrial policy, whether it's Trump or the Biden administration versus like mayors such as yourself who actually have to implement this stuff and figure out exactly how to spend the money. What's the biggest area of I guess like tension that you see or what could DC actually do to make using those federal funds easier for you?

Speaker 6: Oh, wow. So there is tension for sure. Right. And I think that a recognition like the biggest thing that D.C. could do is make sure that people are not worried about their healthcare or not worried about putting food on the table, or not worried about a thousand other things and can worry about just like being part of this American dream and building towards something and that they could be part of the dignity of work. And so there's some things that they could just focus less on or trying to cut less of. I think that cities probably don't think as much about immigration from that perspective as an economic driver. But I think that we have to continue to bring new people in, bring new ideas in, make American cities places that can receive investment and knowing that somewhat that investment is like it's intellectual capital. Right. So we want people to come in and feel comfortable making stuff and making new technology in our cities. I want to say I think it's not uncommon for mayors to be pretty bipartisan in Allentown, where one of my senators is Senator Dave McCormick, who he's a Republican, I'm a Democrat, but I appreciate Senator McCormick's interest in competitiveness and trying to attract industry and particular manufacturing to Pennsylvania. And I think my conversations with Senator McCormick, he is somewhat agnostic about where that happens. I think he'd be happy if the manufacturing investments happen in the suburbs or in the cities. It doesn't matter to him as much as Pennsylvania remaining competitive. I know he was involved with one of the big kind of future thinking or future looking manufacturing investments that occurred in our area is Eli Lilly announced a $3.5 billion investment that is just outside of the city limits. But their $3.5 billion investment will create like 850 jobs. I want to make sure that all of the residents of the city of Allentown are capable of accessing those jobs. I also want to make sure that any of the supply chain that goes into that Lilly GLP1 manufacturing can be produced in the city if it can be. We want to make sure that we're capable of connecting to that. So that's one thing, I think, continuing to make sure that the country is competitive. The other thing is, and this is one that we're kind of going back and forth with, Governor Shapiro has launched a very aggressive economic development strategy that wants to attract more investment and lots of different types of investment. I think there's. And I've spoken with Bruce Katz, formerly at Brookings, about this, that Pennsylvania seems like it's well situated to be a center of defense manufacturing in this new world. Clearly, based on what's happening in Iran, there is still need for munitions. And how we can play a role in that is, I think, part of our future. We proudly tell the story of how Bethlehem Steel helped win the war in World War II by building the ships that helped us win the war. I talked about Volte Bomber is helping us win the war. I think that there is. We have. We're home to Mac Defense in Allentown. Mac Defense makes giant, like, heavy duty trucks for the US Military. We can compete in that area as well, and that is manufacturing. So I think there's. If the federal government focuses on creating opportunities in cities and in states to host manufacturing and makes it easy to. For that to happen and makes it easy to hire people and train people to be ready for that work, I think that's where we need them to play.

Speaker 5: You already sort of alluded to this, but does it feel good to be in a state where it's like every national election is just geared towards making the citizens of Pennsylvania happy? Like, all like that is you're talking to some mayor from another, you know, from Florida. It's like, try being a swing state. Try being the most important state for the Electoral College. That must be nice.

Speaker 6: It can be. It also turns you into, like, I have given tours of my city to foreign press, every country, all the importers

Speaker 5: that they go to the diner in Pennsylvania. Right. That's the classic trope.

Speaker 6: Exactly.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Then so, I mean, it's nice to be the center of attention in that way and that politicians kind of want to make you happy. But practically speaking, you know, there's like, as a mayor, your job is to just meet the needs of your residents, right? Like, that's what you dial in on. And so whatever they're doing nationally, like, you're just worried about residents.

Speaker 5: One reason that people are very excited or that people are. Have an affinity towards manufacturing is the jobs.

Joe Weisenthal: Right?

Speaker 5: And you mentioned the jobs and people saying people go to work. Another reason, particularly over the last several years or the last post Covid, is for national security reasons, not wanting to rely on China or other countries for really critical things. However, some of these most advanced industries, they're not particularly going to be job heavy, right? There's a lot of robotics and increasing automation. Is there a disconnect between the sort of, again, maybe emotional, maybe the sort of romantic notions that people have about manufacturing versus the reality of the actual labor intensivity of some of these industries?

Speaker 6: I think that from the mayor's perspective, I probably am more in that kind of romantic world, right? Like, where we're just kind of like, yeah, we envision a world in which people will always be putting their hands on stuff. Right. One way or another. And when you get into higher technology where like, we already have robots doing like precision surgery, presumably some of the precision manufacturing is going to be better done with a robotic hand than. And the steady hand or strong back of somebody on a line. I do think that, as you like, there's still, and this is a vibe that I'm starting to get, mayors tend to pick up because we're on the ground. We start to hear the vibes before they become national vibes. But I think that there's a very strong, at least in my city and some other cities that I've visited, there's a strong handmade or a rejection of the robots and AI, Whether it's art or the produced goods. I don't know if anybody. I don't know what the logical end to that is. But I think there's. On the consumer side, there's still a desire. I think people romanticize some of the product and they'd rather have something that people have made. On the jobs side of it, I think that there's. There's still this belief that we need to preserve the dignity of work, that there's always going to be, that we're going to have to find some way to allow people to continue to work, that maybe you don't need the robots running the whole warehouse. That maybe you need somebody to be involved. And we've seen that. My first job out of grad school was working in the billboard industry in Panama. And I remember vividly talking to somebody who has introduced myself. This is in my economic development days. And I was like, oh, I started in billboards and the guy was in private equity and he was like, that's great, man. Billboards are awesome. The only thing better than billboards is coin op laundromats. I was like, dude, you're in the wrong business now, because maybe in private equity, that was a great idea. The fewer. Fewer jobs down to self storage, which I think is the worst thing in cities. But, like, we're job creators. Like, we have to find ways to create jobs to. To create opportunities for people to be dignified by their work. So while there may be some value to, like, squeezing out every single nickel of cost from some operation, there's a lot to benefit cities and to benefit society of having people, you know, actually putting their hands on things.

Speaker 4: Can you talk specifically about how you're thinking about data centers? Because this is, like, the example of what we're getting at. And in theory, you know, Allentown, you got a bunch of big warehouses and things like that that presumably access to

Speaker 5: that needed energy at one point, right?

Speaker 6: Yeah. I have lots of sophisticated and unsophisticated thoughts about data centers. We, as a city and as a mayor, I'm thinking about them in a couple ways. One, like, they're very clearly a political issue now, and they're a political issue for. I hate saying both sides, but for both sides. Right. Like, we.

Speaker 4: They really are.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Speaker 4: It's kind of crazy.

Speaker 6: There's legislation. So I think that. So we amended our zoning. Like, right after we amended our zoning ordinance, we then we made an amendment to the ordinance with reference to data centers. The reality for a city like Allentown and most cities in the country is that we don't really have any space for data centers. It's unlikely that a hyperscale. Well, it's not just unlikely. A hyperscaler cannot locate in the city of Allentown unless they acquire a bunch of homes and demolish them. People would love that. But it is reality in places like Phoenix. Right. So we amended our zoning code to just set up certain requirements around the establishment of a data center just to make sure that our backs are covered. The worst thing that happens in any municipality is, like, something shows up that people don't want, and your hands are tied because your zoning allows for it. So we made sure that we are covered in that respect.

Speaker 5: Sorry, just to be clear, cover, like,

Speaker 4: you've data center proofed your zoning? Is that what that means?

Speaker 6: We're in the process of review right now to make sure that any proposed data center has to demonstrate not just the highway use or the water use, but also, like, energy sources. So we're making sure that data centers that are proposed for the city can demonstrate their compliance, basically. So it's political, as I understand the technology. And this is probably the less sophisticated side of the thought, it's getting smaller and smaller. Right. The data centers do not have to exist at this incredible. To take up lots and lots of land. They can exist perhaps in downtowns. I don't know what their energy needs are going to be. I know that most mayors are concerned about data centers not because they're worried about land use or a lack of jobs, but because utility bills are significantly rising at the same time that food bills are rising and gas bills are rising and housing is getting more expensive. Now people are also seeing their utility bills rise. So that's what's driving a lot of the concern for mayors, I think.

Speaker 5: You know, I know someone I heard about, there's a startup in New York City that is doing something with like, I don't know exactly what it is. I was hearing about it from a friend, but they're like training some Nvidia chips or doing something and it's just with like a normal, like sort of like residential connection to the electricity. It's fairly small scale. It's not mega, but like, yeah, to your point, like, it does feel like the footprint there, at least in some potentially niche applications, the footprints, you hear about the giant things, but the footprints are also potentially coming down.

Speaker 6: That was what I was hearing. I'm an AI skeptic as a mayor. I've been talked back. I keep going back.

Speaker 5: Yeah, we all do.

Speaker 6: But I was talking to somebody at Hopkins, at Johns Hopkins, who is like, hey, you shouldn't be so skeptical because it's going to open. It might result in somewhat fewer human. Human interactions, but it's going to open the door for humans in city government specifically to participate more and more in helping people out. And she was the one who mentioned. And it's also all of the furor about data center might be misplaced. I'm not necessarily a great believer in technology figuring out a way to get us to save our bacon forever, but it does seem like this is one that there's short term concern about. And I don't know what it really stems from, but whenever politicians are involved, you have to raise an eyebrow.

Speaker 4: I have one more question, and it's a very important one. What's the deal with Yakko's? If I Google Allentown controversy, Yakko's comes up.

Speaker 6: Yeah, I think there's probably a couple of Yakos controversies. The very local one is like, you got to pick a choice. You got to choose between yakos or pots. Apparently they eat pots. Hot dogs in Bethlehem. I guess we should say Jaco's is a hot dog.

Speaker 4: Okay.

Speaker 6: Yeah. The folks in Bethlehem like, I love my neighbor, but I would never eat a potsdog. Yakko is. There's. One of the deals is, like, you have to know how to order it, right? So the order is like, you just get two dogs. I order two dogs with everything. And a chocolate milk. Some people get pierogies with it, too. There was a few years ago, a guy named Gary Iacocca, whose family owned Yakos, talked about how his Yakos on 7th street, which is in center city Allentown, couldn't exist anymore because of the demographic changes that we've seen in Allentown. So Jako's, I think, is. He and I went back and forth a little bit. We're very good friends now, but we. We struggled a little bit because I'm the first Latino mayor of Allentown. So the other thing that makes the Billy Joel song so wrong in 2026 is that in 1982, it was a very homogenous. Basically, everybody in Allentown was white, European. Today we're 55% Latino. We are a very different city. And his case was like, well, you know, it isn't. It ain't like it was. And, you know, it was kind of. It felt to me like kind of a rejection of our new city that I just love. So we went back and forth a little bit on that. There's probably other Yako's controversies out there. There's like, he. He has, like, a big hot dog statue that has moved around a little bit, but it's a good hot dog. I mean, if you come to Allentown, I will treat you to a Yakuza hot dog.

Speaker 4: You'll teach us how to order it?

Speaker 6: I'll teach you how to order.

Speaker 5: This is like one of those things, like, the politicians get a huge scandal, they order it the wrong way. Like, you know, it's like John Kerry, like, order it. Whether you get, like, Swiss cheese instead of something else.

Speaker 6: Yeah. It's our version, I guess, of the cheesesteak.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 6: And there's a special, like, Lehigh Valley version of the cheesesteak as well that. That Philadelphians would want nothing to do with.

Speaker 5: This is what makes America great. He's like, these niche. These niche loyalties towards certain orders and certain hot dogs.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Speaker 4: All right. Mayor Turk, thank you so much for coming on. All thoughts. That was great.

Speaker 6: Thank you. I really had a good time.

Speaker 4: So that was super interesting. There are a lot of things to pick out from there, but one thing that stood out was that sort of 2000 and tens era of like Made in America craft manufacturing. I remember that really well.

Speaker 5: Yeah, no, totally. It's actually apparently kind of depressing because those Makerbot festival or the Makerbot I think is different than the Maker Festivals. But there was that culture of people doing tinkering and 3D printing.

Speaker 4: So the boom in 3D printing starts. Remember that?

Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah. There was like a thing and it was like all sort of fizzled out, but there was yeah, just like a forgotten part of post gfc.

Speaker 4: Artisanal manufacturing.

Speaker 5: Yeah, artisanal manufacturing and people just building weird stuff. Things aren't weird enough anymore. But yeah, I'm.

Speaker 4: Well, they might get weird with AI.

Speaker 5: No, they're gonna get weird. But I'm glad he brought that up. Cause it doesn't get discussed enough. Yeah, just generally though, like, I thought that was great. And like first of all, just learning a bunch of new things. You know, I hadn't heard of weight gaining manufacturing, but that makes a lot of sense. Right? Like if there's some process that adds a lot of weight, such as water to a product, you want that to be at the last mile of the supply chain rather than early on. Also fascinating to think about like, okay, what a strategic advantage it is to be within a day's drive of 100 million people. And so therefore it makes a lot of sense to put various, you know, e commerce warehouses in. So much interesting stuff there.

Speaker 4: Also, the mixed zoning I found really interesting because it is true if you think about industry. You know, even 10 or 20 years ago, it was much more polluting and noisy and disturbing than it is now. And so you can have. In an era of high tech manufacturing, you absolutely could have mixed use neighborhoods and buildings. Why not?

Speaker 5: Right. So you just have to update the zoning to reflect the reality that it's not going to be automatically repellent to the neighbors.

Speaker 4: And then everyone can walk to work with their lunch boxes.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 4: All right. Shall we leave it there?

Speaker 5: Or the bike to work?

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Or bike to work.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Okay. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

Speaker 5: And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, Armenarmon, Dashiell Bennett at dashbot, Cale Brooks Alebrooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more odd lots content, go to bloomberg.com oddlots where the daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all these topics 24 in our discord discord GG oddlauss and

Speaker 4: if you enjoy odd lots, if you like it when we talk about weight gaining industry then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember if you are a Bloomberg subscriber you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening

Speaker 6: Sam.

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