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As if the fiscal meltdown and national recession are not enough, Greensboro has taken a pounding from the national media over the past year with unflattering stories about our local economy appearing in The New York Times and Business Week magazine.

Just last month, Forbes.com ranked Greensboro-High Point as the fourth-emptiest metropolitan area in the nation based on housing vacancy rates — just slightly behind Detroit, where average home prices now hover at $18,000. 

Yes, times are tough, but is Greensboro really that bad off?  I don’t think so and I suspect many folks in the Triad don’t either.

So, why have we suddenly become a poster child for all that is going wrong with this country?  

I think part of the problem lies in the way in which the U.S. Census and federal government defines the Piedmont Triad region.  Back in 2003, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget decided to redefine the region.  Rather than leaving Greensboro in the old eight-county Piedmont Triad metro area that included our neighbors in Winston-Salem, OMB created the new Greensboro-High Point Metropolitan Statistical Area that included only Guilford, Randolph and Rockingham counties.  The Piedmont Triad, as we know it, all but disappeared off the U.S. Census map and the Greensboro market slumped from a Top 40 ranking to 72nd (based on population size). 

The new geography does Greensboro no favors since the unemployment rates in both Randolph and Rockingham counties exceed the state average. I suspect that part of the reason behind Greensboro faring so poorly in the recent Forbes rankings lies largely with the slumping performance of the housing markets in Randolph and Rockingham counties.  

All of this sounds like serious business, but do the OMB metropolitan designations really matter?

 They matter a great deal because metropolitan-based statistics are used by corporate executives when making decisions on new plant locations, advertising and retailing.  The federal government also uses metropolitan data when making major budget decisions relating to health care, Medicare, public housing and transportation —  not a trivial matter in this era of $787 billion federal stimulus packages.

OMB defines an MSA as at least one urbanized area that has a population of at least 50,000.  The MSA consists of at least one central county plus any adjacent, outlying counties with a high degree of social and economic integration with the central county. That interaction is measured through commuting levels.

 Under the 2003 rules, counties were tied together if 25 percent of the employed residents of an outlying county worked in the largest populated county in the MSA, or vice versa.  For commuters traveling Interstate 40 at peak hours, it might be hard to believe that the commuter flows between Greensboro and Winston-Salem did not reach this 25 percent threshold, but, because they did not, the Triad was sliced into two separate metro areas. 

According to the Brookings Institution — an influential Washington, D.C., think tank — the Triad was one of only nine metropolitan areas in the nation larger than 500,000 that were split apart in this fashion.  Matters were made worse when national rankings in influential economic development magazines like Site Selection and Expansion Management continued to be largely based on MSA data.  The Triad plummeted in many of these rankings.  It is difficult to figure out the full impact of all this on potential lost business for the region, but we do know that the 1 million population threshold is frequently used as a benchmark by corporate executives when looking for new site locations.

Neither the Winston-Salem MSA nor the Greensboro-High Point MSA exceeds the 1 million threshold.

That said, the news is not all bad.  OMB also allowed some MSAs to be tied together in much larger so-called Combined Statistical Areas based on less-stringent commuting thresholds, but only if local opinion favored the combination.  Fortunately, a Triad-wide CSA that included Winston-Salem qualified under these alternate rules.  In 2007, the Triad CSA had a population of 1.5 million and ranked a respectable 30th in the nation — just behind the 28th-ranked Research Triangle CSA.

 So far so good. But now is not the time for complacency.

  OMB has consistently recommended that national rankings should be based on MSA, not CSA data.  Unfortunately, the MSA data rarely capture Greensboro’s best side as we have seen in the recent Forbes ranking. 

However, the recently published OMB revisions to the federal standards for defining metropolitan areas provide a very important opening for Triad leaders. The Federal Register just published these revisions on Feb. 12 and the public comment period runs through April 13.  At the top of our region’s agenda should be figuring out ways to put Greensboro and Winston-Salem together again and persuading OMB to consider relaxing the MSA-based commuting thresholds that tie the region’s metropolitan counties together.

Back in the early 2000s, the Triad was caught off guard by new metropolitan standards and definitions that were ill-suited to our region.  Rather than being left out in the cold this time around, the area needs to quickly put together a regional working group to develop alternative metropolitan definitions for OMB.

  One approach might be to form a coalition with other metropolitan areas that have been similarly impacted by the 2003 definitions, such as the Raleigh-Durham and Greenville-Spartanburg areas.  We need to act quickly because OMB will only consider feedback submitted before April 13. 

One thing is for sure: If we do nothing, we are guaranteed to be hamstrung with metropolitan definitions that continue to hinder, not help, the Triad’s long-term competitive advantage.  The time to act is now before it is too late.

Keith G. Debbage is a professor of urban geography at UNCG. Contact him at 334-3911 or kgdebbag@uncg.edu or see his Web site at www.uncg.edu/~kgdebbag