The Duke Energy Center in Charlotte, N.C., was designed to be a nighttime attention grabber. Some evenings, the tower lights up the skyline with colors paying tribute to local athletic teams, or in patterns tied to special events, like the rolling rainbow that celebrated gay pride week last summer.
On Nov. 29, the top of the 786-foot building glowed in the bright yellow hue of a ripened banana. It was an electric homage to Chiquita Brands International, which announced earlier that day that it would be moving its corporate headquarters from Cincinnati to Charlotte.
The relocation would bring 400 jobs to a city known less for fresh produce than for Cam Newton, NASCAR and big banks. And there was something else Chiquita offered that Charlotte needed. As Michael Smith, head of the downtown development group Charlotte City Center Partners, told the local paper that day, Chiquita's arrival represented "an unprecedented diversification, in jobs, investment and development in our economic center."
Unprecedented, perhaps, because there never had been much need to diversify in a city long dominated by two firms and one industry. Bank of America and Wachovia, and all of the predecessor institutions that went into building them, had long ago turned Charlotte into a banking town-so much so that by 2007, the peak year for industry wages locally, financial services accounted for nearly $1 of every $5 paid to private-sector employees in the metro area. For Charlotte, just like the industry it grew up with, the latest downturn was an object lesson in concentration risk. "We truly were just a one-trick pony," a BofA banker from the area says.
The number of finance and insurance jobs in the metro area, which topped out at 57,767 in 2006, had shrunk to 51,691 by the end of 2010, according to the most recent figures from the North Carolina Employment Security Commission-and that was before the most recent round of industry job cuts. Overall, the city has lost $800 million in industry wages since a peak of $5.77 billion in 2007.
"We know that the payroll mix has changed," said Bob Morgan, president of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce. "There are fewer investment banking jobs, and I suspect the overall payroll numbers won't be what they were."
So it was big news in 2009 when the city poached the North American headquarters of appliance maker ElectroLux and lawn and garden equipment maker Husqvarna from Augusta, Ga., in two separate deals. And the yellow lights that heralding Chiquita's relocation announcement last fall would have held a special poignancy for anyone remembering that the Duke Energy Center originally had been known as the Wachovia Corporate Center.
Charlotte's effort to diversify was being met with some success. But a funny thing happened while civic leaders got busy touting the city as an ideal home for manufacturing, energy, health-care and transportation companies: regional banks from far-flung parts of the country started moving into the vacuum as well, picking up veterans of the two Charlotte banking giants and establishing beachheads in the South.
One of the most prominent of the regional players is U.S. Bancorp, which employs about 180 people in Charlotte.
The company, which weathered the crisis better than most, had decided to press ahead with plans laid before the downturn to expand its corporate banking group beyond the Midwestern and Western footprint of the Minneapolis-based company. It opened a New York office in 2007 and arrived in the Southeast in 2009, building a corporate banking and high-grade debt team led by former Wachovia executives.
"We were looking at Charlotte and Atlanta," says Dick Payne, the U.S. Bancorp vice chairman in charge of wholesale banking. "But Charlotte had two huge banks and a deeper talent pool."
