Matthew Tuerk

And one thing that occurred to me is that 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 like 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.

I would love to see that.

Honestly, I think any mayor who has played SimCity, the minute you sit down at the desk, you're like, oh my God, this is total BS.

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 like the federal government was pushing in a particular direction, right?

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 a seat and you realize like all of a sudden there's a completely new like set of challenges that you have to unlock.