Benjamin Forman - Excerpts from Capstone Report to Rappaport Institute

Fellows work directly with officials from state and local public agencies in the Greater Boston area on policy research and management projects. In addition, at the end of the summer program, all fellows are required to submit a capstone project or report that addresses the policy and management challenges posed by their work. Here are some excerpts from our public policy fellows.

Benjamin Forman

The mill towns and port cities of Brockton, Fall River, Lowell, Lynn, New Bedford, and Worcester offer a novel solution to combating sprawl and increasing the housing stock around Greater Boston. These cities are already built for dense living, and they enjoy a wealth of historic assets as well as access to a skilled work force. Public officials and civic leaders can take several creative steps toward revitalizing these satellite cities.

During the first half of the twentieth-century, residents migrating north and immigrating from abroad crowded into the region’s satellite cities. For a time, urban populations continued to swell. Eventually a growing number of middle-class families purchased cars, bought land, and built large new homes on the outskirts of the older cities. With the advent of air-conditioning and modern travel, competition from southern and western states with less expensive land and labor mounted. Additional competitive pressures from abroad forced manufacturing, the lifeblood of these cities, into serious decline. Between 1985 and 2001, the six Greater Boston Satellite Cities (GBSCs) as a group lost 56 percent of their manufacturing jobs.

As industry fled the region, services employers attracted to the human capital associated with Greater Boston’s prestigious universities and hospitals invested in the area, fueling a rapid transition to service-based industries. Boston and its sister cities lost out as new employers chose to locate along the highways ringing the core rather than investing in office space in older urban areas. The population of Boston’s satellite cities increased in the 1990s but largely due to an influx of poor residents pushed out of core neighborhoods by rapidly rising rents. The poverty rate today in the satellite cities is roughly double the average statewide.

One obstacle to revitalization is that the satellite cities are typically home to only a few nonprofit organizations addressing a range of issues from child well-being to substance abuse. In contrast to Boston, where there is often more than one community development corporation (CDC) working in a single neighborhood, the satellite cities often lack a single CDC.

The satellite cities have in common large and growing foreign-born populations. By working together as a group to extend voting rights to unnaturalized citizens these cities would win several victories simultaneously. The move would bring a media spotlight showing the GBSCs as a group of welcoming progressive cities. Allowing non-citizens voting rights would also help heal some of the tensions within each city. Giving voting rights to immigrants would increase their commitment (and feeling of belonging) to their new communities. When these immigrants gain citizenship, it is likely they will be more familiar with voting and thus go to the polls sooner and more frequently to influence state and national elections.

Foundations invest large amounts of money directing research in large cities. These investments bring special attention from think tanks and university research centers. Smaller cities rarely benefit from any type of direct research. Yet these formerly industrial cities require serious attention from scholars who can help identify their assets and formulate strategies to address their unique social and economic development challenges. Mayors of GBSCs should take up this effort jointly. They have much to gain by the establishment of a research center dedicated to their issues.

The satellite cities can also gain by cooperating rather than competing for economic development. Compared to large cities like Boston, the GBSCs have few resources to devote towards attracting new employers. Since they offer very similar environments to prospective businesses, they are frequently competing with one another by giving away tax incentives. The winning city often gains very little. If GBSCs work together they could market themselves as a group to industry groups. Sharing their resources would allow them to design more sophisticated sales strategies and promote a more unified image of the advantages of the region’s medium-sized cities.

GBSCs can also turn the fact that they have been abandoned by industry into an advantage. The GBSCs are relatively clean and quiet urban environments. They can market this advantage by creating "Green" campaigns. The cities could work together to tailor environmental plans that would generate energy and cost savings for the cities and their residents. These plans could be created by officials from each city working with students studying environmental planning at local universities.
Greater Boston is an increasingly expensive area to live and do business. The danger is that the region will suffer as firms seek less expensive business environments.

Fortunately there is an alternative vision. The recent recovery of inner-city neighborhoods in places like Boston, Cambridge and Somerville demonstrates that there is demand for dense urban living – demand that far exceeds the available supply. Medium-sized older historic cities offer vital attractive living environments to families and new dense nodes of activity to growing businesses. In order to achieve this vision, local leaders from GBSCs must cooperate and convince powerbrokers beyond their borders that their cities can become ideal destinations.