Can New England be saved? Report finds too many negatives Article created: 10/16/2005 04:21:06 AM NEAL PEIRCE and CURTIS JOHNSON
Citistates Group
Are New England's best days behind it? Is it fated to be an old, blue, cold and complacent corner of a red-hot America?
Some indicators suggest so. The six states are barely holding their own in population; Massachusetts is actually slipping. Each year the merger mania of big companies seems to snap up a famed New England corporation — a Hancock, Fleet or Gillette. Only scrappy fights stem closure of the region's principal military bases, an anchor of its long-standing defense economy.
Despite the remarkable surge of biotech research and corporate spinoffs in the Boston region, the overall economic growth rate is anemic.
Check around New England, as we have in hundreds of interviews over the past three years, and you sense little of the dynamism of the American South and West.
The region's congressional strength is dwindling, and it won no favors in Republican-led Washington with its six-state sweep for John Kerry in 2004. Right now, states like Massachusetts and Connecticut look strong in national rankings of education and income, but the trend lines are down as competitors nip at their heels.
But is decline inevitable?
We argue "no." This is a region with stupendous assets. It has smart and resourceful people, great places to live, world-famed universities and a leading edge in critical 21st century technology skill sets. It's attached at the hip to New York City, a linchpin of the global economy.
New England's environmental consciousness, its tradition of political independence and self-reliance, suggest character and strength, whether capitalizing on good times or coping with disasters.
And in a nation being engulfed by faceless cookie-cutter development, the images of New England seascapes, farmlands and hills, its historic towns and cities, tug at heartstrings, even generate envy across the continent.
So what stands in New England's way?
The region's own mind-set. New Englanders are first to tell you what a hopelessly disjointed, every-town and every-state-for-itself region they live in. The attitude we heard everywhere: "Our towns go back to 1630 or before, our states almost as far; we've done fine each town or state going its own way, so why collaborate now?" Each time we heard that, we wondered to ourselves: "What century do these folks believe we're in?" The islands of time and space that once separated this lovely corner of America from the maelstrom of global reality are gone. No more waiting ages to recover from such crises as the rise and fall of clipper ships, or the flight of textiles to the American South, or the loss of high-tech eminence to the Silicon Valley. The region must sink or swim in an era of instant global communications, finance and warfare.
It can expect little help from an increasingly debt-ridden and war-distracted national government.
Historically, New Englanders have innovated, thought anew to reposition themselves for new eras' challenges. But in these years when precedent-shattering collaborations for survival and progress are being forged around the world, is New England in the game?
Is there matching New England effort, for example, to the inventiveness of the European Union? Nations torn for centuries by bitter and bloody warfare have made remarkable progress through a common passport and currency (the euro).
Couldn't the six states of New England, "divided only by a common language," be as inventive? With its wealth of talent, what better region in America to mount team approaches to energy, education, transportation, health care?
We discovered some highly creative networking — grassroots groups impatient to move ahead on "green" energy initiatives, to compare notes across state lines on "smart growth" strategies, to measure progress and set goals in every area from job growth to health to housing.
Conservative grassroots organizing altered American politics in recent years. The Howard Dean presidential campaign and a flurry of activist "dot.org" groups have disrupted old top-down ways of doing things.
Amazingly often, we found, "official" New England lends a tin ear to fresh ideas and initiatives, even when they come from prominent regionwide organizations. The congressional delegation focuses sporadically, at best, on New England-specific issues and the New England Governors
Conference meets infrequently. Gov. Mitt Romney actually withdrew Massachusetts from the conference, purportedly to save dues.
The result for New England: one missed opportunity after another. Consider tourism, a "clean," multibillion dollar, job-generating industry that also draws potential residents.
It's true: many visitors do now flood into Vermont, Cape Cod and the Maine coast. But overall, New England tourism is underdeveloped.
Better from afar?
Yankee Magazine underscores the region's potential draw: more than half its subscribers live elsewhere. A national survey by the business-led Team New England group found outsiders have a higher positive image of New England as a whole than any of its individual states. Yet the six states keep going their own way, refusing to promote New England jointly — except to foreign markets.
It seems too difficult for New England towns to drop their prickly go-it-alone mind-sets and collaborate for mutual gain. Though when they do, the gains can be big.
Take Maine's twinned, historically cantankerous cities of Lewiston and Auburn, facing each other across the Androscoggin River. They're collaborating creatively to rebuild economies devastated by the loss of textile and shoe factories.
And they're not alone. "New England's Knowledge Corridor," a Springfield- and Hartford-rooted development alliance of businesses and famed Connecticut River Valley universities, is striving to make inroads against the big psychological barrier of the Connecticut-Massachusetts border.
But scattered islands of collaboration need to improve if New England is to deal with tough economic perils:
? Population loss. In the '90s, more people left Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine than moved in. Today, even as national population levels surge forward, New Hampshire (fed by Massachusetts migrants) is the only New England state showing appreciable increase.
Does stagnant population matter? Yes. Taxes are higher for the people left. Fewer people mean a smaller workforce, a red flag to any corporation deciding where to locate or expand. The resulting danger, says Doug Fisher of Northeast Utilities: "loss of vibrancy and hope."
? Talent shortage. This emergency was cloaked in the '90s, when foreigners accounted for all of New England's labor force growth. Without the immigrants who came to get New England university educations, the region would now have a critical shortage of physicians and skilled laboratory researchers.
Even with foreign enrollment, the count of students earning scientific, engineering and information technology degrees in New England universities — the lifeblood of the region's vaunted high-tech economy — actually declined in the '90s.
? Flight of youth. Even while New England "grays" faster than any other U.S. region, its young people are fleeing to the Atlantas and Phoenixes. New England lost a stunning 20 percent — twice the U.S. average — of its 20-to-34 year-olds in the last decade.
? Deep income divisions. There are millions of financially secure New Englanders — but also disturbing numbers caught in distressed mill towns, remote rural areas or troubled inner cities.
? New England is high-cost country — to live, and to do business. Decent incomes are offset by high housing, transportation and energy costs. In a recent report for the New England Council, nationally known consulting firm A.T. Kearney reported that measured by cost of living, New England's current level of prosperity is only average in the U.S. So what's to be done? In this series, we'll identify challenges that can best be solved only when New England starts acting like a team, faces the world as a coherent entity, like a single state.
NEXT MONTH: In times when easy-come oil and gas are fast-disappearing, New England must take the offense on energy.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
