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Good for Gateway
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Business New Haven
5/13/2002
By: BNH
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Considerable ink has been spilled here and elsewhere over the prospect of Gateway Community Technical College relocating from Sargent Drive to downtown New Haven. Most of the discussion has centered on the benefits accruing to the central business district from such a move.
And they are considerable. Even those who disagree on exactly what constitutes the most desirable mix of uses for downtown - retail, entertainment, office, residential - agree on one central principal: Successful downtowns are full of people. Gateway presently enrolls more than 8,000 students plus faculty, staff and administrative personnel. The presence of all those bodies downtown on a daily basis would surely lend new energy, ideas and dollars to the center city generally as well as its shops and restaurants.
But the benefits cut both ways. What about the advantages to Gateway students - most of whom are training to start, resume or enhance productive business careers - to studying and working in the region's economic epicenter, having access to thousands of jobs and interacting daily with the people who make greater New Haven businesses, large and small, successful and enduring?
One need only look 20 miles to the south to see the benefits of a downtown location for a community college. This spring enrollment at Bridgeport's Housatonic Community College reached an all-time high, and since relocating to the site of the old Hi-Ho Mall at the beginning of 1997, HCC's enrollment has swelled by 61 percent. That's a dramatic change.
We are encouraged to see that the issue of relocating Gateway to downtown is at last being discussed seriously. There are more than enough benefits to go around.
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