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Pride Goeth Before the Fall
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Business New Haven
3/19/2001
By: BNH
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We've been hearing from a great many voices that downtown New Haven is “poised.”
The restaurants are hopping, retail sales are strong, there's nowhere to park, there's no Class A office space left, tech companies are booming and - oh, yes - biotech is busting out all over.
And we haven't even started to market this place yet…
Unfortunately, New Haven - besides being predictable - is a place where the conventional wisdom has almost always been wrong. Too many people love the place, others have grand “world-class” pretensions, some are simply looking out for No. 1. Whatever the case, we feel pretty comfortable raising the yellow flag.
Truthfully, New Haven is doing better than it has in years. New Haven has turned around perceptions across Connecticut. Many have come to see what its boosters have long said: that the city and the region that surrounds it is prime entrepreneurial territory. No one understands that, or celebrates it to a greater extent, than we.
But in downtown New Haven, we still see quite a bit of hand-to-hand combat taking place as building owners, restaurateurs and retailers struggle to keep their properties and businesses growing and profitable. City government, as Mayor John DeStefano Jr. relates in an “On the Record” interview (see page 3), will shortly be soliciting proposals for the Malley's and Macy's sites. We await them eagerly.
Since the city is seeking proposals, we will offer one.
Gateway Community College has two locations, serving more than 4,000 students. The college would like to consolidate its two locations at an expanded campus on Long Wharf. Taxpayers will be asked to pay upwards of $60 million for the site, buildings and a parking facility.
Gateway's prescence downtown would add more than 4,000 day and evening students - not to mention staff, faculty and visitors - and a new, powerful and vital tonic for downtown.
According to a recent study released by Connecticut United for Research Excellence (CURE), lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical and biotech industry in Connecticut, workers in such companies with associate's degrees earn slightly less than $40,000 per year.
So why aren't the powers that be hungry for Gateway?
A few reasons. First, Gateway administrators say they would rather be in a spacious campus on Long Wharf. But we see Gateway as a “community creation” and resource. Our guess is that they'll go wherever the money tells them to go.
Another reason cited against Gateway relocating downtown is the potential tax value of the downtown property that the city would cede by transferring it to a tax-exempt entity. Once again, our mirror sees everything backwards. The Long Wharf, area should be seen as a prime site for potential corporate development. Whether Gateway is sited at Long Wharf or downtown, it will be tax-exempt. At least one powerful group has boosted a plan for a $70 million building on the Malley's site that would (in part) house the Long Wharf Theatre - in another tax-exempt entity.
We're not sure we want to call the lack of interest in re-locating Gateway downtown, racism (yet)- but it certainly smacks of elitism.
Many see New Haven's future as Connecticut's Baby Boomer/Gen X Disneyland, a destination where everyone sips lattés on the way to their massage-therapy appointments. We don't see that vision of New Haven as economically viable or sustainable over the life of a retail trend cycle. Just ask Conran's.
We can't wait to see new and exciting proposals for the Macy's and Malley's sites - but at the same time we hope that all of them are greeted with a healthy skepticism. Gateway would be a great addition to downtown New Haven, and our guess is that with a little creativity, there's actually more than one location that could house it.
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