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Man in the Middle
Oft-heard but sometimes misunderstood Nemerson
defines a broad, activist chamber of commerce agenda
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Business New Haven
1/11/1999
By: BNH
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When it comes to local business stories, no individual may be more often quoted in the press than Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce President Matthew Nemerson. Yet since the publication's founding in 1993, he has never been the subject of a BNH ON THE RECORD interview. Until now, that it. (Listeners of WELI radio are less deprived, having the opportunity to hear Nemerson and his co-host, BNH Editor Michael C. Bingham, talk local business each “Business Wednesday” from 8 to 9 p.m. on 960 AM.)
How do you define your own role in the business community? Clearly you see yourself as more than just chief administrator of a business group.
I don't think I see my role as different from other presidents of large metropolitan chambers of commerce. Chambers are not that well understood. They're under-reported on in the press; no one really knows what a chamber does. We are the voice of those institutions which aren't really defined as government. In a community like New Haven that includes non-profits, large institutions, mom-and-pop companies. People ask, 'Why do you have a voice?' The answer is not just to create profits for those institutions and companies we speak for, but to create a quality of life and a sense of community that is sustainable and attractive to capital and to people who want to work in the area.
Why doesn't the chamber endorse candidates for political office?
One of the things about being a metropolitan chamber that's exciting is that we represent the diversity of a metropolitan area. We take pride in the fact that we have excellent relationships with people who represent inner-city New Haven as well as suburban Connecticut. In that range you run the gamut from very progressive Democrats to staunch conservative Republicans. Part of our mission is to get people to work together as a metropolitan community, and not to draw lines and distinctions between the towns in the region. What we'd like is to get people to think of greater New Haven as a real place that didn't have political boundaries. We want people to think of having neighbors and not of having other opponents or distant people in distant towns. Endorsing candidates as opposed to supporting candidates who are successful in representing their own constituents would not be part of what we would do.
What about candidates for statewide office?
We're a metropolitan chamber. We represent 15 towns in south-central Connecticut. And we need to be in strong position to work with whoever is governor, or Senator, or congressperson. We need to keep that conduit open. I guess if we knew who was going to win [laughs], we could endorse. This last [gubernatorial] election it would have been easy to endorse John Rowland. And you if look at most business leaders in the state, including those who would describe themselves as Democrats probably most of them did support John Rowland because it was pretty obvious who was going to win. But the key thing for a metropolitan chamber is to be able to represent your area to whomever the powers may be, whether in Washington or the state capital. So it isn't as important who we support as it is who we can work with.
On the other hand, you take positions on issues - e.g., the Hartford football stadium. What provided the impetus for that?
We take positions over a long period of time on a number of things. If you were to look at where we were in the 1970s, '80s and '90s in terms of our positions, you would find a remarkable consistency in terms of asking for dollars to rebuild highways, bridges, trains, a downtown high-end mall - that's exactly the kind of relationship we want to have with state government. We want to be able to say, 'This is our agenda; it's always been our agenda no matter who the mayor is or who the governor is. And if you want to adopt it as your project, that's fine, too - we'll work behind the scenes with you.' What I've said about the Patriots stadium - which has been an interesting and somewhat controversial experience - is that here was a situation where the governor and all of the legislative leadership was very much in favor of this, and it clearly going to move ahead. We surveyed our board and had a meeting of our executive committee, and the board and the executive committee clearly said, 'We need to support state government here.' When an issue comes along that clearly has the support of all the people we need to work with to get support for New Haven projects, we're going to be in favor of it. I think that's just being realistic about the fact that there are times when we don't want people from other parts of the state to say, 'Look - you say you need a better airport; we're not so sure.' We want to say, 'Look - we've done the research; we know what's best for southern Connecticut - we're the experts here. We want you to respect us in terms of supporting these things, and we want some money for these things.'
Did taking that position on the stadium generate any controversy among your members?
The board voted about 65 percent to 35 percent against it. We have a tradition on our board where people speak up, and the following week we had a board meeting where representatives of the 35 percent spoke up. And people listened.
Has the chamber actually formally endorsed the Long Wharf mall plan?
Oh, gosh [laughs]. We've endorsed the mall so many times. We endorsed the first mall that was going to be on the Coliseum site in 1984. Before that we had endorsed efforts to slow down the North Haven mall; that was one of the big controversies going back to the early '80s and created a big schism between people who said we should be for private development wherever it happens and others in the organization who said we needed to look at the whole region in an intelligent way and look at where the development should be. At that point the leadership of the chamber came out in favor of a downtown project. And we've been consistent with that: We supported the Taubman project in the early '90s, and then we supported the first New England Development project, which would have been right on top of the old mall, in 1994. When we didn't get funding for that, the mayor came up with the idea of moving the mall a couple of blocks down to the waterfront. And we endorsed that. We've been consistent that there is room for another major mall in the region, and that it would be very advantageous to the sense of community identity to have it in downtown New Haven. In the long run, that will be better for the whole region.
What do your members say about that?
All the surveying we've done, people who live in the suburbs say overwhelmingly - over 80 percent - that they want a high-end mall, with a Nordstrom's, with a high-end Macy's, and they want it in downtown. They will come to downtown. The issues of parking and safety are always there, but assuming these can be addressed, people want a high-end mall in downtown New Haven.
Okay. But what do you hear from downtown business people about the mall? I've yet to hear one express unequivocal support for it.
People are very nervous. Some people are very angry; others are resigned. If you look at the evolution of this project, for ten years it was going to be in downtown. It was going to be replacing either the Coliseum or the old Chapel Square Mall; it was going to be a new fixture in downtown. That creates a certain nervousness, because you've got somebody right across the street and you don't know how that's going to affect you. We've looked at a lot of cities around the country and it really depends on whether the downtown mall itself is successful, because if you build something and it doesn't bring in a lot of new people, it's not going to have a positive impact. And the next issue is: If you don't have it right in downtown - if you have it off to the side - it remains to be seen how this new mall integrates itself. I mean, it is only five blocks from the Green. But in New Haven it's five or six long blocks because of Route 34 and the railroad tracks. If you were to say this mall was going on Audubon Street, which is sort of the same distance, you'd say that's not so bad. It seems much closer psychologically because of the way the streets are laid out. If you look at the numbers that these malls can generate: A mall of this size and this market segmentation will be attracting 15,000, 20,000 people on an overcast weekend. On a pre-Christmas weekend it could attract 40,000 or 50,000 or 60,000 people. These are awesome numbers. We're talking about a downtown, now, that swells up when 1,200 people go to the Shubert. The opportunity to introduce literally hundreds of thousands of people from around the state to downtown New Haven is perhaps the best shot we have to really sustain both downtown and the role of New Haven as the center of south-central Connecticut.
What do you say to those people who are 'nervous' about a Long Wharf mall?
One of the things that should give some sense of hopefulness to the obvious nervousness of people downtown is that when new people do come to downtown - whether it's to go to the Shubert for the first time, or go to the International Festival of Arts & Ideas - they're experiencing downtown, according to the surveying we've done, as 'Gee, it's so much better than I thought, This downtown is beautiful; it really works.' You've got the Green. You've got Church and Chapel Streets. You've got a real sense of arriving in a downtown, which you don't have in Hartford or Bridgeport or Stamford. So when people who have had a mostly suburban existence arrive in downtown, they are usually very positively affected. They say, 'This is much nicer than I thought. There is much more parking here. The stores are nicer. The Green is nicer.' It's a better experience than they've been led to believe either from the press, or from their neighbors. When you think about this mall attracting 10,000 or 20,000 people on a weekend - and ten percent or 20 percent of them finding their way to downtown - these are new people who we think are going to be positively affected.
Isn't the idea of a big enclosed retail project anchored by department stores an anachronism?
In 20 years of looking at downtown development since the invention by Rouse of the 'festival marketplaces' - which really didn't work, [proving] that malls without department stores didn't turn out to be successful - so in a sense, this is a retreat. This mall is built more on a model before the 'festival marketplaces' were conceived. But at the same time, the model seems to be to have old buildings with good, high-end stores, and then figure out some way to bring in large numbers of people. You need to be a player. There are 500,000 people in [greater] New Haven, and the data that we've looked at said only about 50,000 of them see themselves as frequent users of New Haven. You've got about half the population which just doesn't come into New Haven - at all. We're a regional organization, and you could say, 'Why even worry about one destination?' That's something that large metropolitan chambers wrestle with a lot, which is when you have explosive growth, as we do, up and down the Boston Post Road, on Route 5 in North Haven and Wallingford, does it even really matter what happens in the downtown? But all our surveying shows that people still want to have a center, something that defines the region that they can be proud of. People still like big office buildings in downtown, sports arenas, arts centers. At the same time, what people end up spending most of their time doing is eating and shopping. So what we've seen in most of the country is that downtown has continued to be the sports, arts and business center - or at least big building center - and the restaurants and the shopping tends to move out to the suburbs. But now there's the trend the opposite way where people are getting tired of suburban sprawl and the [generic quality of offerings]. They want real Italian restaurants; they don't want the Olive Garden. They want Sally's Pizza; they don't generic pizza. And they want excellent retail experiences. But where it gets difficult for cities is, Americans are very adamant that they want no-brainer parking. Cities are wrestling with that in places where there's not a lot of space and it's expensive to stack cars in a garage. It all relates to this issue of comfort and security. When you talk about security, the bar is very high about what people want. People say they don't want any panhandlers.
New Haven hasn't done a good job on that issue.
A lot of cities haven't. When you have a city such as New Haven, part of whose role is as the only location in this part of the state where the poor are welcomed...If this is the only place where the suburbs feel comfortable having the poor live, and New Haven accepts that role, then when somebody from the suburbs sees a poor person on the streets, they shouldn't get that upset about it. Because that, in essence, is part of the social contract.
How do you overcome that?
Get more people on the sidewalks. Whether you have one or two panhandlers standing outside the Shubert shouldn't ruin your evening. What you want is to have those sidewalks so chockablock with people shopping and walking and going out to dinner, that you don't even notice it.
In the last decade we've seen a real hardening of suburban antipathy toward the city. What accounts for that - race?
It's clearly one of, if not the hardest, thing that many institutional leaders have to deal with right now in greater New Haven. When you look at other parts of the country and talk to institutional and political leaders there, what you find is that most center cities have similar kinds of challenges. There tends to be a greater lack of racial and income diversity in cities; there tends to be a larger crime in the cities, simply due to the greater concentration of poor people. What seems to be unique about Northeastern cities is that there is not the sense of community destiny that suburbs have connected to the center city. Across the country people want the name of their center city to be known nationally. They take pride in the history of their city. They support efforts to build it up. I'm not saying that people here don't do that, but it's harder here for suburban politicians to say, 'We are part of greater New Haven; let's go support our namesake.' There's almost a sense of, 'Can we change the name and not call it greater New Haven?' There's a sense that people in New Haven are somehow different, instead of saying, 'Our ancestors all landed in New Haven; the suburbs are simply neighborhoods that are contiguous to New Haven.' Other communities around the country don't have these hard borders.
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