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Thursday, April 26th, 2012

More Parking Madness in Providence

As a quick addendum to my Providence series, here’s a graphic put together by Greater City Providence that highlights all the parking in downtown Providence. As in most downtowns, it’s pretty staggering.

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

Providence: The Quiet Revival by Alon Levy

[ Here is the second in the two part guest author series on Providence. Alon Levy of Pedestrian Observations brings his typical keen insight to the city - Aaron. ]

Rustwire’s recent article about Providence, and a less recent article on the Urbanophile, have made me think about Providence’s growth. The Urbanophile comes strongly on the side of the power of its coziness; Rustwire takes the opposite track, talking about redevelopment and about the problems of the current recession, which has hit Rhode Island particularly hard.

With the caveat that I’m familiar mainly with the East Side, let me say that the redevelopment is unimpressive. Providence doesn’t look like it’s booming (in reality, its metro area income growth is high), and the city itself is very poor. That said, it doesn’t look very poor – not just on the East Side, which is solidly upper middle-class, but also near downtown. Downcity has a lot of urban renewal hell, but it doesn’t look especially bad.

To me the contrast is with New Haven, a city I’ve visited many times over the last few years, and there’s simply no competition. Although New Haven’s Chapel Street is busier and livelier during than anything I’ve seen in Providence, away from it the city looks post-apocalyptic (and even then, Thayer Street generally stays open later than Chapel). Yale student housing is in glorified project towers surrounded by too much parking, and a never-completed freeway stub and elevated parking structures cut off the main campus from the medical center. Providence has its share of freeways slicing neighborhoods apart, but the East Side managed to avoid them, and its housing stock is normal buildings, developed by different individuals over hundreds of years. Perhaps this better urban integration is why despite being poorer than New Haven, Providence maintains lower crime rates, echoing Jane Jacobs’ points about safety.

In other words, Providence is starting from a much better base than peer cities, though, going purely by income, nearly all secondary Northeastern cities are growing fast. The issue is not that Providence is rebranding itself as the Renaissance City, or Creative Capital. It’s that it was messed up less than other cities. Worcester has almost nothing next to the train station. New Haven has housing projects that I know people who are afraid to walk through. Providence has sterile condos and a mall, but next to them are some nice secondary shopping streets, and beyond them, in the right directions, lies intact urbanism, on the East Side and in Federal Hill.

If anything, most relevant government policy even in recent decades has hurt city walkability. In the 1980s, the city moved the railroad tracks north of the river, severing them from the East Side Railroad Tunnel. Simultaneously, it built Providence Place Mall and today’s train station, covering what used to be elevated track. The project was meant to remove an eyesore from downtown, but instead just moved the station to a more inconvenient location, and the mall sucked retail out of Downcity streets. Even what Rustwire calls highway removal was really a realignment: the I-195 river crossing was moved to a more southerly location since the old route was not up to the latest design standards, and this also happened to move the freeway farther away from Downcity and reunite it with the previously-isolated Jewelry District. There’s nothing wrong with that realignment, but it’s the kind of project Robert Moses would’ve supported.

On top of this, the attitude toward economic development is just embarrassing. Last year, I went to a meeting featuring smartphone app writers who claimed that “Providence is like a startup,” without a shred of irony about using this word to refer to a 17th-century city. A representative from the city government talked about the subsidies the city is paying to young entrepreneurs to just come live here.

And still the revival continues. Rhode Island may have one of the highest unemployment rates in the US today, but income growth is high; things are slowly getting better. The most visible growth in the US is in population rather than income, and so the usual markers are new housing starts, new infrastructure, and a lot of “coming soon” signs. Providence of course doesn’t have much of this. Instead, people are getting richer, slowly. RISD students occasionally go down the hill to Downcity (though Brown students don’t, since Brown’s campus is much higher uphill).

Economic growth in the richest countries is slow enough that people don’t perceive it. Instead, they think it’s the domain of countries that are catching up, such as China, where it’s so fast it includes new construction and the other markers that signify population growth in the first world. In the long run, it matters that a city’s income grows 1.8% a year rather than 1.1%, but it’s not visible enough to be captured by trend articles until long after the spurt of growth has started.

This article originally appeared in Pedestrian Observations on March 7, 2012.

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

Providence: The Rust Belt’s Most Northeasterly Point? by Nicholas Cataldo

[ Today I'm kicking off a two part mini-series of guests posts on Providence, Rhode Island. As a warm up to this, you might want to read my earlier blog post on the city if you haven't already - Aaron. ]

Whether it is the Beehive of Industry, the Renaissance City, or the Creative Capital, this city has been changing hats for centuries. That isn’t a typo, this place is old. Not unlike other rust belt cities, Providence has been struggling to shake off the ashes of the golden age of manufacturing in favor of greener pastures. In each pursuit to reinvent itself every decade or so, this town certainly goes all in. Economic crises seem to hit here harder than most places. So, who or what is Providence and where does it plan on going from here?

Historical Perspective

In 1636, a man named Roger Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and founded Providence after being exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was lambasted for heresy because of his criticisms of the church and is credited with being the first person to refer to a wall of separation between religion and government. He welcomed people from all over the colonies who were escaping persecution including Jews, Quakers, Baptists, brigands, and other misfits. Providence had, early on, marketed itself as a safe haven for free thought and independence to the other colonies’ disdain. If you want, you can think of it as a pirate fortress, and you’d be partially right. This independent nature remains today as a backdrop to both the city and the rest of the State of Rhode Island.

Fast forward to the great depression, and most factories had packed up and left, and with white flight following World War II you have a situation where there are relatively few jobs, a dismal tax base, an interstate highway dividing the city, and the New England mafia is running things. If this last sentence sounds familiar it is because you could substitute Providence, minus the mob, for much of the urban north east and to a certain extent, any post-war American city. Economic fluctuations just seem to hit this part of America harder; and so ended Providence as the Beehive of Industry.

Resurgence and Rebranding

Buddy Cianci, ‘the’ mayor of Providence, wanted nothing more than to lift this phoenix from the ashes of deindustrialization. This rebirth branded Providence as the Renaissance City and over half a billion dollars were invested over the course of the 70’s and 80’s. A river running through the city was uncovered, a park built, a downtown ice skating rink, and the movement of a railroad line to a less intrusive location. This gave beautification to a crumbling city. Bouts of intense building happened periodically right up until the current financial crisis and everything went downhill again. Construction halted or was cancelled for countless projects and investors hunkered down for the bleak economic forecast. Several proposed skyscrapers were put on indefinite hold. Foreclosures became part of daily routine. The very people who were once optimistic about the path the city was taking as a center of education, art, business, and sciences now faced the reality of a city threatened by bankruptcy. I’m going to be honest here, if frogs started falling from the sky, people would shrug it off. How, you ask, will Providence try to pull itself out of a mess like this?

How Providence Will Try to Pull Itself Out of a Mess like This

Situated nicely between Boston and New York City, it is pretty hard for Providence to get positive attention. Any reference of Providence as part of a top ten list, will more than likely lead to bad publicity. So, in lieu of innovation, the city has taken principles that have worked for other places in similar predicaments and is attempting to implement them here.

The street car lines that were abandoned in favor of automobiles and busses are being reassessed. This flirtation with mass transit will be lurking behind the scenes for years to come until the budget will allow for it or at least until people believe that it’s worth it. Being a dense city built before the advent of the automobile, the compactness and ease of travel makes Providence attractive for New Urbanist concepts that shun cars.

With a large higher education base, it is not too much of a stretch to reach for a sleek and sexy biotech industry. This worked very well for Boston. And, with a commuter line running between these two cities, why not hitch a ride on their success? In 2011, with the removal of a section of highway from downtown, 35 of prime real estate have been freed up. I can imagine that many people, myself included, are biting their nails in anticipation with what will eventually fill this space. A worst case scenario will be 15 Wal-Marts side-by-side with the zoning approval of a desperately cash strapped city council. On the other, much more plausible, side of the spectrum the branding of this new section as the Knowledge District will invite new high technology business firms in and save this place from floundering. This is the kind of long term planning that will make or break this city.

With good press, solid subsidies, and firms willing to take a certain level of risk in this current market, Providence is due for another makeover sometime soon.

This post originally appeared in Rust Wire on March 5, 2012.

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

Providence and the Virtues of Scale

After visiting cities and doing some research on them, I like to come back and write a “master narrative” survey of my impressions of a place. I’ve been able to do this fairly successfully – at least natives have viewed my take as basically fair – and pretty easily for Midwest cities.

I’ve spent some time in Providence, Rhode Island recently, a small city reasonably comparable to the ones I focus on in the Midwest, and was hoping to do something similar there. But I’ve found it difficult. New England culture is something I just don’t grok, so unlike with cities in the Midwest, the South, or the West, where I have more basically cultural familiarity, it’s hard for me to get a feel for Providence. So a full take on it will have to wait for another time.

I can relay a few basic facts though. The Providence metro area has 1.6 million people. The entire state of Rhode Island only has about a million. So Providence has the unique feature of having a metro area bigger than its entire home state. But Providence is also unique in that it’s so close to Boston, making the entire metro area almost a suburb of greater Boston in some ways. Providence is actually on the MBTA commuter rail system, with a slightly over one hour ride into South Station. With wi-fi equipped trains, this isn’t a bad commute. This shares tracks with Amtrak’s Northeast corridor, and Providence is served by both Acela and regional trains, giving it key connectivity both to Boston (only 36 minutes away on the Acela if you’re in a hurry) and New York City. (Providence is the 17th busiest Amtrak station).

Being so close to a thriving tier one city and not far from America’s premier metro hasn’t helped Providence that much though. Its population is stagnant. It has been losing jobs. Unemployment has been stubbornly in the double digits. Any visitor to Rhode Island immediately notices how old everything is. I’ve yet to find anyplace that is of the pristine new suburban variety. It looks like not much has been built in quite a while. Various decrepit mill downs like Woonsocket dot the landscape. The state is among America’s worst for pension problems. If the state were bigger, this would certainly loom larger in the national consciousness.

Although Rhode Island/Providence has its struggles, there’s still a lot to like and enjoy about the place. Rhode Island has some extraordinary natural beauty. As the Ocean State, coast line and beaches abound. Towns like Newport remain picturesque if no longer very economically active apart from tourism. The flip side of having a lot of old stuff is the you are clearly aware this is a place with history to it, and a ton of character. There is excellent food to be had. This isn’t just the stereotypical Italian – if there’s one thing that might stick in people’s mind about Providence it’s a reputation for being mobbed up – but includes things that might surprise you like good Indian cuisine. The people in Rhode Island are much friendlier than you’ll encounter in Boston or New York, and probably on par with what a Midwesterner would expect. Also like the Midwest, I was very surprised to find that, despite the postage stamp size of the state, lots of people there are lifelong Rhode Islanders. Traffic is a breeze and the city is very livable. You can enjoy small city living while only being a short train ride away from all that Boston has to offer.

With Providence’s demographic, economic, and fiscal issues, it might be tempting to dismiss the place as simply lacking the scale necessary to compete in the global economy. It doesn’t have the critical mass of amenities or industry to draw the talent it needs to build a truly dynamic 21st century economy, or vice versa. This might be the traditional “spiky world” view in which it seems to be primarily very large, dense cities that have the advantages, save for a few very special places, normally major college towns like Madison, Wisconsin.

If that’s all there is to it, most smaller cities are doomed. Yet I think there’s a flip side to scale, and places like Providence need to be able to exploit it as a source of opportunity. Providence and Rhode Island are big enough to have pretty much everything you need in a big city, and what they don’t have is nearby in Boston.

But they are small enough to have some structural advantages from that as well. First, as a small state and city, it’s easier to turn the ship. As I’ve observed about Detroit and Michigan, part of the challenge for them is that they are big. It’s always harder to turn a large ship than a small one. That’s Rhode Island’s advantage. You could almost literally turn the entire state into a civic laboratory in a way that can’t be done elsewhere.

In a related vein, things that wouldn’t make much of a difference in New York can make a huge difference in Providence. The presence of Brown University and RISD make a palpable difference in a smaller city that they wouldn’t in a much bigger one. Successful civic initiatives can have a bigger impact here.

Also, I’ve already found in Providence the other piece of magic I’ve often noticed in smaller cities, inter-disciplinary cross-pollination. A Rhode Islander tweeted me about something, and I responded by saying I’d be there in a week if he was interested in grabbing a beer and talking cities. This led to cocktails with a guy running a tech incubator, a former senior economic development official in the state, a transit planner, and a couple of art types. I don’t have many conversations like that in Chicago. In Chicago, because the various scenes are large, it’s easy to spend your time hanging out with only other people in your circle. And elites tend to like talking to each other. That’s not to say that disciplines never cross in Chicago, because they do. But my observations from not just Providence, but also Indianapolis and various other small Midwestern cities leads me to believe that this is more the default mode of operation in those cities. A shallower pool means that of necessity, you come into contact with more different types of people than you sometimes would in say Silicon Valley.

Lastly, like various Rust Belt burgs, Providence is a fairly cheap place to live and gives you plenty of space to do your own thing without all the baggage that comes from being in a bigger city. As someone there told me, if you’re looking for a corporate job, Providence is a tough town. If you’re looking to make something happen yourself or do your own thing, Providence is a great town.

Whatever its current struggles, a small state and city like Rhode Island and Providence – it’s even tough for me to distinguish them – have the virtue of small scale to provide some weapons with which to compete. How to position them to exploit that, and their other unique geographic advantages, is their key challenge going forward.

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Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker, and writer on a mission to help America’s cities thrive and find sustainable success in the 21st century.

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