Dan Lawlor: What Rhode Island Can Learn From New York

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Dan Lawlor, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™

 

Upstate New York is home three or four major cities - Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany - all along the river canal routes built in the 19th century. The last half century has not been kind to these places. Buffalo, in particular, has been hard hit. Earlier in the 20th Century, Buffalo was the 13th most populated city in the United States. Now, it is the 73rd. In the second half of the twentieth century, factories closed, jobs left, and people moved South or to the suburbs.

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The manufacturing collapse that began in the 1970s was felt across the country. From the Detroit to Bridgeport, numerous working class communities across the US went through great upheaval as the economy shifted from services, technology and manufacturing to services, technology, and finance. High-paying union wages disappeared with the industries that had supported them.

The right wing City Journal argues, since the 1970s, "The other old, cold cities that staved off decline, like Boston and Minneapolis, similarly reinvented themselves, with the density that once served to move cargo onto ships now helping spread the latest ideas. The key ingredient: human capital. The cities that bounced back did so thanks to smart entrepreneurs, who figured out new ways for their cities to thrive. The share of the population possessing college degrees in the 1970s is the best predictor of which northeastern and midwestern cities have done well since then."

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It's not just big cities like Buffalo that are struggling, but smaller communities like Schenectady and Newburgh. US New and World Report notes, "Once known as "the city that lights and hauls the world," Schenectady has become a dim bulb and the first stop in a long, bleak road that runs through much of upstate New York, a countryside pockmarked with a series of eerie industrial relics and shuttered mill towns." The Report quotes Prof. Mitchell Moss of New York University, "One hundred years ago, upstate New York was the Silicon Valley of North America, with GE, Kodak, and Carrier [Corp.] air conditioning. Now we are left with the relics of this industrial age."

The challenges in Newburgh, a small city on the Hudson, are even worse. New York Magazine writes, "It feels almost spooky to walk today among the Gilded Age mansions of long-dead industrialists on Montgomery Street, some of them boarded up, others carved into low-income apartments. Abandoned buildings abound, many of them gone to rot. “We’re not unique,” Nicholas Valentine, a local tailor who serves as Newburgh’s mayor, told [NY Magazine]. “It’s happened to many communities up and down the Hudson. Poughkeepsie. Peekskill. Things die.”

Michael Brown, a graduate student in Rochester, writes in the left-wing Dissent Magazine, "Rochester is a snowy place. It is a place where corporate giants—Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb—once stalked the land but now skulk amid layoffs and falling profits. Rochester is a city with grinding urban poverty, but its suburbs are rather prosperous places from which crops of upwardly mobile students are harvested each graduation season. These students often leave the region, either for college or for work, and many never return."

Brown tries to be bullish about his city, "I feel a sense of ownership over this place; I feel committed to it. I am rooted in it not simply because of the accident of birth. The people I know and love are scattered all over the world, but the highest concentration of them in any one place is in Rochester... There is a conscious sense here of building the community: one vacant lot converted into a neighborhood garden, one old factory turned into an art gallery, one letter to the editor at a time. This is the difference between a rootless professional culture and a rooted local one.

City Journal argues, "A sensible federal approach for upstate New York would invest in people-based policies that improve the economic futures of the children growing up there. Education is the best tool we have to fight poverty. If the children of upstate cities were better educated, then they would earn more as adults—whether they stayed in their hometowns or moved to Las Vegas. And people-based policies may actually motivate states and cities to spend more wisely, in order to retain their newly educated and mobile residents."

The economic challenges faced by Rhode Island are not unlike the challenges faced by communities in Upstate New York. In fact, several Upstaters who've moved to little Rhody have mentioned this to me. We, in Rhode Island, live in the shadow of the economic dynamo that is Metro Boston. Our brethren in Upstate New York are in the shadow of Manhattan. Both regions are struggling to reboot following years of failed economic development strategies, poor political leadership, and cold weather in the age of the jetplane.

To be fair to Upstate New York, as of October, Providence's percent of jobless is worse than Buffalo, Rochester, or Syracuse. Without a stronger investment in education, streamlined applications for business, more electoral competition, more active civic groups, and building up the love and connections invested citizens have toward their homes, it is unlikely we will turn the tide to create booming regions. If population trends continue, Rhode Island will lose its second seat in the House of Representatives following the 2020 census. New York State lost two House seats in 2010. Rhode Island and Upstate New York are both in funk - with effort and imagination, neither has to be.

 

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