The hot pursuit of young professionals has been at the core of American cities' urban revival for more than a decade. It worked. They came, they played, they stayed. "This Millennial generation is the generation that decides where it's going to live before it decides what it's going to do," says William Fulton, president of policy and research at Smart Growth America, a non-profit national coalition against suburban sprawl. "The stakes are very high. ... There are two big quality-of-life things that become important when you have kids: schools and recreational activities."

And there's safety, housing, child care and outdoor space. "It's an enormous topic of conversation for city planners and politicians even if their constituents are older, because they're concerned about where their kids and grandchildren are going to live," Fulton says. "The question isn't so much getting families out of the suburbs into cities but getting them to stay in the cities."

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Low-union and right-to-work (RTW) status may not rank at the top of the list when it comes to site selection criteria, but those factors certainly carry considerable weight in the overall decision-making process for many manufacturers. Choosing a state with a low-union profile or locating in a RTW state only ranked 10th and 12th respectively among a list of 26 different site selection factors, according to Area Development's 26th Annual Corporate Survey. Yet eight out of 10 respondents said that locating in a state with a low-union profile was either an important or very important factor in site selection, while more than three quarters rated locating in a RTW state as just as important.

Low-union and RTW status are important site selection factors for manufacturing companies in particular because the labor-management climate varies substantially from location to location across the United States and across North America, notes Mark M. Sweeney, a senior principal at McCallum Sweeney Consulting in Greenville, S.C. In fact, nearly 100 percent of McCallum Sweeney's manufacturing clients express a preference for operating a nonunion facility. "The primary reason given for this is work force flexibility, which allows companies to compete more effectively and respond in a more timely manner to opportunities in their highly competitive global markets," says Sweeney.  

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