Examining the Promise of New England's Small Industrial Cities

A recap of yesterday’s “Smaller Industrial Cities” forum

Yesterday was the “Smaller Industrial Cities” conference put on by the Federal Reserve of Boston, MassInc, and Harvard University’s Rappaport Institute. The event, held at Clark University in Worcester, attracted policymakers and the top thought leaders in the realm of old industrial cities. Among the attendees were our local friends Barry Bluestone of the Dukakis Center, David Luberoff and Ed Glaeser of the Rappaport Institute, Jean Horstman of Interise, Mayor Lisa Wong of Fitchburg, MA, and George Gendron of Clark University and Kirk Sykes of the Urban Strategy America Fund (both are ICIC board members, to boot). We love seeing all these familiar faces, and learning a thing or two from them along the way. Here are some of the key ideas that we walked away with yesterday…

-  “Eds and Meds” still rule the day. Eric Rosengren, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, explains that these are vital to small and mid-sized cities, as they hire locally, buy locally, and cannot up and move with an economic downturn.

-  Resurgent industrial cities have gained momentum in a variety of ways; there’s no “silver bullet”. In Fort Wayne, for instance, the manufacturing industry is still incredibly strong but the industry has been retooled; rather than manufacturing auto parts, the industry has shifted in to the manufacturing of plastics. Other cities have completely done away with manufacturing and instead focused efforts on entirely different sectors. Grand-Rapids went from being the furniture capital of the world to hosting “Medical Mile”. 

-  Long-term “vision” plans are too long for private investors to invest. Private companies want to know that they’ll have an absolute return on their investment within 8 years. When cities put together their “vision” plans that span the course of 20 years, this is too long for private sectors to risk investing in; private foundations would play a better role in cities with these long-term plans.

-  The best role for city leaders is to eliminate bureaucracy; create a transparent permitting and building process so that companies/investors can come in and know that within X number of months, they’ll be shovel-ready.

-  Companies want to know that municipalities have their finances under control; otherwise, investment in these cities will be temporary because investors want stability.

-  Hartford has been able to stop the outflow of local businesses to the suburbs by creating a better quality of life (namely, adding more amenities) and has prepared and trained the workforce so companies can hire local workforce.  Hartford has also taken a large empty building and created 1br apartments because city leaders realized that young professionals are looking for cheap housing in downtown areas.

-  Antonio Cabral, Rep. from New Bedford, explained during the panel on “Fiscal Challenges” about that the state's economic development aid formula has to be reformed; it’s not currently aligned with need. Cambridge gets almost $18M whereas New Bedford gets only $715k. Moderator Leslie Kirwan, former Secretary of ANF, defended the formula and explained that cities must look at overall funding package: i.e. New Bedford gets almost its entire school funding paid for; ultimately, New Bedford gets a much larger package from the state than Cambridge—money is just distributed differently within New Bedford’s package.

-  Entrepreneurship should not be looked at in terms of just “business owners with great ideas.” Barry Bluestone explained that entrepreneurship is about innovation and job creation—entrepreneurs can be mayors, university presidents, and even heads of unions!

-  There’s always going to be an ongoing debate as to whether these cities should train workers to be prepared for new jobs in the emerging sectors (think, energy, IT, etc.) or whether cities should try to attract jobs that their current residents will be able to jump right in to. Jack Wilson, President of the UMass system, explained that we should be training our workers for the future, not opening another McDonald’s simply because the workforce can fill these jobs. He explained that while the Green High Performance Computing Center may only create 24 jobs in Holyoke, more economic growth will spring up from this center than the 24 jobs added at Mickey D’s. Remember when our friends on the south coast wanted to open a bio-tech park but then instead opted to bid on a (still uncertain) casino license? Fall River: take note.

-  COLLABORATION IS KEY. This brings us back to our “Collaboration is the New Competition” blog post from last week. Almost every panel talked about how the best way to revitalize small to mid-sized industrial cities is by the city, local businesses, nonprofit organizations, chambers of commerce and related organizations all working together to create one vision for the city’s future. Everyone must be on the same page and work together to achieve success.

In all, this was a great discussion about what does and doesn’t work to help small and mid-sized industrial cities prosper after their industrial bases have been decimated over the past several decades.  I’m sure there were other important ideas that I missed. Readers, if you were there, we’d love to have you fill in the gaps!

As an aside, we learned about the Deshpande Foundation’s “Sandbox Initiative,” which I liked so much that I feel like it’s going to get its own blog post within the next 24 hours. During lunch we also got to chat with a Deshpande Foundation representative who told us about their work in India. So very inspirational.

A big thanks to FRB Boston, MassInc, Harvard University’s Rappaport Institute and Clark U for hosting us yesterday. We learned so much yesterday and we are excited to follow up with many of the attendees as it relates to our efforts in the industrial sector research and our upcoming (October) Inner City Economic Forum—of which a component will be looking at how to retool old mid-western industrial cities for future growth. Stay tuned for more information!

BY Amanda Maher on July 14th, 2011

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