When a Fortunate 500 corporation leaves a city, what happens to who is left behind? What happens to the local restaurant owners? The real estate market? The club sports teams? The charities? In this post, I want to explore a similar case study involving GE departing the Connecticut town of Fairfield. Dino Sakakini, owner of a restaurant called Layla’s Falafel, was quite pessimistic about UBS’ impending move back to Manhattan.…
Perhaps because of its proximity to New York and the coast in general, Stamford boasts an unusual diversity of citizens from different backgrounds, races, and places. Stamford has a population around 127,000 making it the 219th largest city in the United States. Source: https://www.towncharts.com/Connecticut/Demographics/Stamford-city-CT-Demographics-data.html By and large the city is a young one. The median age is 36 which is about 10% lower than the state average. The education level…
Located along the rail line to New York, Stamford is a popular bedroom community for people looking to live outside but adjacent to the Big Apple. One of the nice things about Stamford is that it is nautical, which means that parts of it are somewhat historic and touch the ocean or tidal bodies of water, such as inlets and bays. Because of this, visitors and locals will often go…
Another way of viewing the corporate flight of Fortune 500 companies in Stamford may be the volatile nature of the financial services industry. Perhaps Stamford was simply unfortunate to have housed the American headquarters of two European banks, which are facing unique financial challenges as the entire continent of Europe struggles to cope with several debt crises. RBS, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is now controlled by the…
This blog is the product of student research for the Cases in Commercial Real Estate: Design, Development and Innovation course at the Yale School of Management, Fall 2018. Five of us chose to research and write about Stamford, Connecticut, which is in the midst of a $6 billion building boom, for the opportunity to study an active real estate development project happening close to New Haven. This explosive growth in…
In 1994, UBS set off municipal warfare when it announced its decisions to move from its two Manhattan locations, one in Midtown and the other in the Financial District, to the comparatively quieter suburb of Stamford. Some experts speculated that financial firms no longer needed to be headquartered in the outrageously expensive and cramped locations in Manhattan, due to growth of computerized trading and telecommunications platforms such as Skype and…
