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New Dawn for Bridgeport?
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Business New Haven
10/20/1997
By: BNH
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Once again the city of Bridgeport is rolling the dice on a massive waterfront redevelopment.
If realized, the $1 billion Harbor Place project (see story, page 8) would transform the Steel Point site into a sprawling 52-acre entertainment and shopping complex intended to lure visitors from near and far. At its core would be a permanently-moored ocean liner refitted as a hotel, a boardwalk, IMAX theater, conference facility and more.
Park City officials estimate that approximately $200 million of the project's cost will need to be borne by the public sector to make the project work. That's a major roll of the dice for city that has seen no shortage of redevelopment proposals, but a notable lack of completed redevelopment projects.
But for Connecticut's largest and arguably most economically troubled city, the vision seems worthy of pursuit. The developer - the Greenwich-based Conroy Development Co. - has developed successful mixed-use retail/entertainment complexes elsewhere. And the Park City's location just 50 miles from New York and enjoying ferry access from Long Island, makes it attractive from a tourist-access perspective.
For those who have charted Bridgeport's travails over the last decade, the vision of the Park City as tourist Mecca does not easily come into focus. But the Harbor Place project appears to us to be within a scale and scope that the developer, city and state, working together, ought to be able to realize.
It's time for all interested parties to embrace the commonality of interests and get Bridgeport into the “win” column this time. We wish them all success.
Whys and Wherefores
It seems that Connecticut's economy has at last begun to participate in the national prosperity of the past few years, with non-farm employment up to its highest levels - and unemployment to its lowest levels - since 1990.
Signficiantly, manufacturing employment has ended its seemingly intractable decline and has begun to trend upward. Unfortunately, although that good news makes for nice headlines, it masks serious problems of underemployment among the minority population and among many previously “downsized” professionals. It also obscures the problems of stagnant job growth in greater New Haven and greater Hartford. The New Haven region added only 2,000 jobs between July 1996 and July of this year.
Ironically, at a recent awards ceremony or the Connecticut Technology Council (see story, page 8) many of Connecticut's fastest growing technology companies complained that their growth is being stifled by a lack of skilled workers, particularly in the computer science field. This skills shortage occurs in a state with more than a score of colleges and universities. Likewise, many smaller companies and the region's manufacturers have been bemoaning labor shortages for both skilled and quality entry-level workers for years.
Why the incongruity? No one is certain. There have historicially been few attempts to understand the problems of inner-city unemployment in Connecticut, and even less interest in studying the plight of under-employed professionals. As many management gurus will tell you, however, what we measure we can improve.
It is time for economic development efforts to better focus on and clarify the real status of the human resources available to the state's economy. These efforts may undermine some feel-good political rhetoric. But they're absolutely necessary if we want to make tangible progress on improving the greater New Haven and Connecticut economy.
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