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’We’re All in This Together’
Regionalist Yaro says regional revitalization begins with transportation
Robert D. Yaro of New Canaan has been executive director of the Manhattan-based Regional Plan Association since 1990. The plan's 1996 final report, “A Region at Risk,” set forth strategies to sustain the competitiveness, environmental quality and social equity of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey through investments in transportation, communities, education and the environment. Yaro was in New Haven March 23 to speak at an “ideas” forum presented by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. BNH caught up with him that day.
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Business New Haven
4/5/1999
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Are cities, as cities, dead?
The way urban thinkers, scholars and, increasingly, practitioners are looking at metropolitan regions is that these places are the building blocks in the global economy - not cities or suburbs or even states. When you get beyond the platitudes about the global economy, what you find is that with capital and entrepreneurial people more or less freed from nation-states, that it really is regions that are driving global markets. The third thing is that the success of regions and their cities and suburbs are highly correlated - that is, if center cities are doing well across the country, the regions are doing well. If the center cities are doing badly, the regions are also underperforming. The fourth new reality is that the successful places are the ones that are finding new ways to collaborate, creating new regional outlooks and institutions that are getting over the divisions between cities and suburbs.
Of course, in Connecticut those
divisions have been institutionalized for centuries.
Yes. We're living with these political boundaries that were left to us by our 17th-century predecessors. I think of Connecticut's 169 cities and towns as Charles II's revenge. Charles II had a special distaste for New Haven, because the three gentlemen who killed his father, Charles I [regicides Whalley, Goffe and Dixwell], were given refuge here. We've had this static political system here even though the economy has changed, transportation systems, environmental systems, we now understand, cut across political boundaries. These 17th-century political boundaries have really become an impediment to the effective management of these systems. If you look at the economy of the state and the region, Connecticut has essentially been static in terms of population for 30 years. It was the only place in the country to lose both population and employment in the first half of the 1990s, and we're only now getting back to 1990 employment levels. If you ask the question, Why aren't we growing, the answer is that probably 100 of our 169 communities have pulled up the drawbridge. They've made it very difficult for housing markets to operate as they should; housing prices are very high, our roadways are very congested, and so on. Some of this has been self-inflicted.
Is New Haven the center of its
own metro area, or merely the last eastern outpost of the New York metro area?
I really think of New Haven as part of three different regions: We are in different ways part of the two models you've suggested, and there's even a third way, and that is as part of a regional corridor that I call 'Guilwich,' which runs from Guilford to Greenwich, this coastal corridor which is really where our transportation system is. I don't think these [three] things are mutually exclusive. In greater New Haven you've had real problems with rivalries between cities and suburbs, and yet the city obviously is the commercial and service and education center for that immediate region. With 'Guilwich,' you have a larger economy, the western end of which is the wealthiest place in the country. We just haven't built on our connections with that economy. We're not positioned at the moment to get our share of it. In 'Guilwich' we have the potential to be the intellectual center, a major service center with the hospitals, theater and so forth. In greater New Haven [the city's role] is obviously services, culture, health care, education. New Haven needs to build on its assets and advantages to build a role in all three regions.
Where does New Haven fit into
the New York metro area?
In the tri-state [New York, New Jersey, Connecticut] region, New Haven can cast itself as kind of an edge city in this region. The bookend to New Haven at the other end of this region is Princeton, N.J., which also happens to have Princeton University as well as office parks, is a major center of the reinsurance industry in the country. One of the things that's happening for the first time since the late '80s is that we're looking at activities in Manhattan that don't have room to expand, or that can't afford to have their operations in that expensive real estate market, so they're looking for places to go. There are creative people who are looking for places to go as well. One potential role for New Haven in this region is to become 'the Upper West Side, with trees.' It's got a great urban fabric, it's urbane, it's historic - but it's also green, and has got lower density than most of the urban centers to the west. A second opportunity is to see if we can pull some back-office operations and some research activities out of points west - not just Manhattan, but Stamford as well. It's pretty much built out. There's no capacity in the transportation system to handle much more, anyway.
What do we have to do in order for that to begin to happen?
One of them is the transportation system. At the moment we've got a commute [to Manhattan] that's about an hour and 40 minutes; we need to trim that back. We've had some very preliminary discussions with [the state's Department of Transportation] and Metro North about the potential to run some high-speed express trains from New Haven into Grand Central.
Amtrak is going to begin high-speed service as well.
These services have the potential to complement each other. Eventually they want to get down to just over an hour. Amtrak is a premium express service which connects New Haven not just with New York, but also with Boston. It also gives a direct ties to Newark Airport, which is now the region's busiest airport. The Metro North service in some ways might be more important, because while it might be just a few minutes longer, it delivers people to the East Side, which is where three-quarters of the destinations are. You really need to push both of these things to make it possible for businesses and individuals to start making locational decisions around these services.
What else has to happen?
As far as the residential stuff, the city has to focus on the public-safety issues, as it already has, as well as appearance. The perception has to be of the place being attractive and safe and well-run. But the transportation link may be the most important thing we can do.
In greater New Haven you have a lot of suburbanites who fear and refuse to identify with the center city. Is that unique to our community?
No, you see this across the region and across the country. But there are a number of places where they're beginning to rethink these center city-suburban relationships. The Denver area collaborates around the arts. Chicago has got a new regional plan. The most striking one is Salt Lake City, where they're developing a new regional strategy for transportation, the environment and growth management. The realization that we're all in this together - that Branford's well-being depends on New Haven's - we're not there yet. We need to move in that direction.
How great a role does race play
in this?
It's a big part of it. Unfortunately, race and class and income are still highly correlated here. However, one of the great successes of the past few decades here and across the country is that we've integrated the workforce, and we now have a black and Latino middle class in New Haven and across the tri-state area. And the black and Latino middle class is now moving to the inner-ring suburbs. The irony is that West Haven and New Haven now probably have more in common than they have separating them.
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