NORTH ANDOVER, Mass. — The Massachusetts political elite has
had its nose twisted by the latest Census Bureau estimates, which
show Massachusetts the only state in the union to actually lose
population. Local pols and pundits have made the usual commentary,
sniffing around the problem, but only barely coming close to
why.
Secretary of State Bill Galvin wrote a column in the Boston Globe correctly
identifying one key element of the problem: “…the largest
age group leaving Massachusetts (is) men and women 30 to 49 — not
just recent college graduates looking for a career but more
established younger people who were the most productive part of our
workforce.” (“Stemming Population Loss in Massachusetts,” January
2.)
Globe columnist Joan Vennochi responded to Galvin with an essay of her own, in
which she brushed by another reason, giving it short shrift: “In
‘The Changing Workforce,’ Northeastern University researchers found
that since the mid-1980s, foreign immigrants, not native-born
workers, accounted for 82 percent of the growth in the state’s
labor force. The population would have shrunk every decade since
the '70s were it not for immigration.” (“What’s the Matter With
Massachusetts?” January 11.)
Both, however, fell back on the same old nostrums for improving
the situation: More affordable housing, better public
transportation, more affordable healthcare. Both missed the point.
Massachusetts has for decades pursued policies designed to create a
specific
“quality of life” around its commercial and political capital,
Boston.
The quality of life types point to the usual desiderata: Highly
educated people, vibrant neighborhoods, intellectual stimulation,
all the old models of the nineteenth and early twentieth century
urban intelligentsia. Those policies have worked. But they have
also made Eastern Massachusetts a closed cluster, like the center
of a highly competitive Scrabble game, with interlinking words and
meanings — and few edges left to play on.
JOEL GARREAU, AN EDITOR AT THE Washington Post, published
Edge City in 1991(Doubleday). To an educated person in the
post-war era, it is one of the most profoundly shocking and
iconoclastic books of the last 50 years. Edge City, which
started as an angry impulse to investigate suburban sprawl,
gigantism, and alienation (“I wanted to get somebody indicted,”
Garreau told me some years ago), developed into a dispassionate
chronicle of exactly what most people love to despise: Mall cities.
Office parks. Developer’s pods. Row houses.
In short, Tyson’s Corner, Burlington Mall, Westwood Village, the
edge cities that give the book its name. That’s where the jobs are,
the people are, and the future is.
And that’s why Massachusetts doesn’t grow.
“There are now 180 edge cities, each of which has more white
collar jobs than Memphis,” Garreau told me last week. “These urban
cores that are brand new, 30 years old or less, are the real
bellwethers of what constitutes a genuinely American idea. This is
where you find people who are really slogging it out.”
Since publishing his book, Garreau has kept track of what he
calls “endangered downtowns.” All share a common characteristic —
a characteristic both Vennochi and Galvin did manage to mention
about Boston. “They’re really bad at producing places for their
cops and teachers,” as Garreau put it. Edge cities, by contrast,
operating in a free market environment, are quite adept at creating
a diverse economic and cultural mix, essential for growth.
Massachusetts touts its universities and “highly educated”
population and job market. But, as Garreau said, “Every one of
those high rolling six digit jobs has to be supported by 20 people
who make sandwiches, fix Xerox machines, etc. You can’t do without
those people.”
SO HOW DID MASSACHUSETTS get this way? Easy. For at least 20 years,
Boston and Beacon Hill pols have refused to vote for expanded
airport capacity anywhere other than Logan Airport, which is
(perversely) stuck right in the middle of Boston Harbor.
One of Joel Garreau’s favorite conversational gambits explores
the evolution of the nineteenth century city from the intersection
of harbors and railroads. “Warehouses lead to whorehouses,
whorehouses to a police force, a police force to courthouses.”
Voilà, civilization. “Blow it up seven or eight
times, and you’ve got Boston or Paris.”
But today’s modern port is the airport. Massachusetts has a good
one in the midstate city of Worcester, now pretty much a gentle
joke in Commonwealth affairs. A new runway or two and expanded
terminal capacity in Worcester, located directly west of Boston
about 50 miles down the Mass Pike, would create the edges to open
up Massachusetts’ Boston-centered Scrabble cluster. Extend the
suburban rail links to Worcester, and the state could blossom.
Route 128, once the touted boom loop, now stalled, would boom
again. Further out, Route 495 would begin to develop, too.
But it all goes against the grain here. Because what would open
up Massachusetts is just what Massachusetts pols don’t like: the
free market, doing what it does.
Government has to be willing to invite development in. Not shut
it out. Can Massachusetts do it? Sure. Will it? Probably not.
