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Keeping Orange in the Black
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Business New Haven
8/23/99
By: BNH
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Orange First Selectman Robert Sousa will step down this autumn after two terms in office (see ON THE RECORD, page 3). However, one of the entities created under his watch - the Orange Economic Development Corp. - will live on.
In his interview with BNH in this issue, Sousa discusses at length the state of the Post Road retail corridor in his town, possible impacts of the proposed Long Wharf mall, and a perceived need to make the Post Road offerings "more unique" to compete with the New Haven mall.
"We're going to try to find those types of stores that still will attract people to the Post Road in Orange," Sousa says.
It wasn't due to government design or initiative that the Post Road in Orange (and, to a lesser extent, in West Haven and Milford) became the retail hub of much of greater New Haven over the past decade. What happened was that individual entrepreneurs - some independents, some chain stores - looked at that stretch of Route 1 and saw favorable population numbers, demographics and commercial real-estate availability. They came to Orange for that irreducible motivator of capitalism - economic self-interest - and not because a few bureaucrats told them it might be a good idea.
We've seen multiple examples in New Haven of the folly of a command-and-control government model attempting micro-manage economic development - Science Park, Ninth Square, Williams Specialty Steel, etc., etc. When government decides that it knows better than business what's good for business, it nearly always fails. And when government decides that it is smart enough to cherry-pick individual winners and losers among businesses (e.g., the state's "cluster" initiative) - Katie, bar the door.
We hope the well-intentioned members of the Orange Economic Development Corp. will work wisely and well to make the Post Road a promising environment for retail businesses and restaurants. This can be accomplished with new U-turn lanes, landscaping, traffic engineering, and the like.
But they would be well advised to leave the task of choosing what businesses would do best where to the selfish, Darwinian - and typically successful - dynamics of a free marketplace.
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