How Are You Going to Keep Them in Manhattan?

For the second time in a month, a major corporation last week announced that it was moving out of Manhattan. Three weeks ago General Dynamics declared its intention of transferring its head offices to St. Louis. Last week Chesebrough-Pond's, which sells more than $261 million a year in cosmetics, toiletries and food products, disclosed that it was shifting its headquarters from New York to Greenwich, Conn. The official reason was that the company wanted to be closer to its Connecticut laboratories and factory. Chesebrough-Pond's is only one of several large firms to move all or part of their central offices out of New York in the past five years. Among the others: American Can, American Cyanamid, Borden, Uniroyal, PepsiCo, Corn Products, Shell Oil, Continental Oil, M.W. Kellogg, Lone Star Cement, Olin Corp., Stauffer Chemical and IBM.

A smaller number of big companies have either moved to New York or announced their intention to do so, including Elgin Industries, U.M.C. Inc., Atlantic Richfield and Norton Simon Inc. The traffic in companies, though not in overall employment, is mostly outbound. One reason is New York's living costs, which are 9% higher than Chicago's, 18% more than Denver's and 26% steeper than Houston's. But says Leonard Yaseen, chairman of Fantus & Co., a corporate site-seeking adviser, "I don't think economics has much to do with it. The intangibles have at least as much weight." Among the intangibles that corporations cite: rising crime, transportation snarls, the fact that young people are not as attracted to New York as they once were, and the difficulty in recruiting well-educated white-collar workers from the city's schools.

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