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Magic-Bullet Theory
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Business New Haven
5/31/1999
By: BNH
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Even though we might all wish it otherwise, it is self-evident that Connecticut's beleaguered cities have to date proven incapable of extricating themselves from their long decline into economic irrelevance. Moreover, private-sector investment - which is stubbornly unsentimental about such things - has proven uninterested in major urban investment without substantial government safety nets in place.
What to do, if you are the public sector? Look for a few magic bullets - massive taxpayer-dependent urban projects which government hopes - and is perfectly willing to gamble our money - will turn Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport into Disney Worlds in one fell swoop.
A billion-dollar Harbour Place may or may not persuade families from, say, Delaware to vacation in Bridgeport. For more than a decade southern Connecticut shoppers have voted with their feet, and their dollars, to make the suburbs, and not New Haven, the region's retail center. But let's put a half-billion-dollar mall there, anyway. It's all so clean, so neat and so simple.
Only in Hartford, where Robert Kraft and the New England Patriots have thrown a monkey-wrench into the billion-dollar Adriaen's Landing phantasm, are officials being forced to grapple with the prickly realities of the marketplace. All this leaves the University of Connecticut, which had banked on a major Hartford stadium to upgrade its football program to the NCAA's highest level, somewhat undeservedly scrambling for alternatives.
For argument's sake, let's ask an unsentimental question: Do Connecticut's cities deserve to be saved if they no longer serve an important economic function?
From an economics standpoint, perhaps not. But from the perspective of morality, the poorest inhabitants of the state's principal cities - effectively barred by custom and law from places like Guilford, Milford and Branford - cannot simply be left to a future without hope or opportunity. And most Americans today accept that government must be responsible to care for those who cannot care for themselves.
The oft-stated theory is typically expressed as, “You can't have a healthy region without a healthy (urban) core.” And that may be true. It is likewise true that urban distress tends to bleed outward from the center, as many residents for inner-ring suburbs such as East Haven, Hamden and West Haven can attest.
Fine. But Adriaen's Landing, Harbour Place and the Long Wharf mall are to a large extent about high-end retail, which it is hoped will lure suburban shoppers and suburban dollars back to the cities - and not about helping poor people, other than by the promise of low-end clerk and stock jobs at glitzy stores.
Here's a thought: If we took these billions now earmarked for shopping and recreation and invested them, instead, in education and job training, what would happen? Is it too glib to say that, within a generation we could replace urban poor people with urban smart people?
In any event, the state's business community must play a role of dispassionate skepticism when government proposes to repair longstanding urban ills with magic bullets. One sees signs of this in New Haven, where the downtown retail community is asking hard questions about the proposed Long Wharf mall - questions for which which all of us should want answers.
Further, the voice of business should insist that discussion and debate about urban mega-projects take place in the light of day, subject to the scrutiny of a public which is being asked to foot a substantial part of the bill.
This is healthy. This is democracy. We should try it more often.
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