Looking Back and Forward in New Britain
Image from NB Blogs
Over at the Progress for New Britain Blog, there are two new posts about the city. One is a look back:
Meanwhile, between the abandonment by large factories and the corrupt feeding frenzy, the city’s shrinking tax base has been throwing an ever greater property tax burden on a shrinking number of homeowners. Now, the city is trapped between two desperate problems: either raise taxes on a middle class that pays more than most people in the state or cut education and deprive the city’s kids of a lifetime of opportunities.
So, the problems that confront New Britain are great and the history of both bad luck and malice that caused it is long.
And the other is a very optimistic look forward:
[T]here are great opportunities for our city, if only we can make them a reality.
Good paying jobs.
[...]
Education that provides real opportunity for New Britain’s kids.
Without question, the city is enormously dependent on the state for the funding to adequately fund our local schools. But this is no excuse for city hall failing to step up to the plate in support of our city’s kids. As much as the opponents of education like the say, of education, that “You can’t throw money at the problem,” the reality is that most direct way our leaders can improve the quality of education is to lower class sizes. And that means that investing more money does, in fact, work. The city needs to ensure that class sizes in our schools are as low as we can get them.
More schools and smaller schools.
[...]
Housing rehabilitation and construction.
[...]
Local control of local money.
The city’s million of dollars in cash flow, and the city’s money reserves, mean that the city government can, if it chooses, be a major financial player. The city should only let a bank handle its money if it commits to do a certain amount of business in New Britain. Better still, the city could create its own local financial institution that could, not only hold the city’s money, but take deposits from city residents and businesses – a locally owned bank. Either way, this would increase the amount of money made available for city residents to buy homes and start and expand businesses. Add the idea of a local currency, that people could use to buy and sell in locally produced goods and services, and these kind of local money strategies help build prosperity in New Britain by fostering growing local commerce and building the local economy.
Locally produced energy.
[...]
Wireless Internet.
[...]
All of the subjects above are explored, though I left the bulk of it out. I want to encourage you to go and read the post in its entirety at the author’s page.
I’m particularly intrigued by the wealth of ideas. I’m not sure that all of them are practical, but I’ve heard more vision from the Progress for New Britain blog than I’ve heard from Mayor Stewart in the three years I’ve lived here. Also worth noting, Stewart has a challenger–Democrat Jim Wyskiewicz–who is probably no fan of this blog.
The employment picture for New Britain appears to have deteriorated rather significantly over the last 35 years. New Britain has lost a significant number of jobs, many of them in the relatively high wage manufacturing sector. This loss has continued into the 2007s. As in the country as a whole, there has been a marked shift in the local economy from manufacturing employment to the service sector. Unemployment rates, as officially measured, are higher than the statewide average and what might be called “underemployment” has gotten even worse. As a whole, while median household income has risen, the number of workers per household needed to maintain that income level has also increased. Unemployment and underemployment have their most serious repercussions among members of minority communities and among women. Female members of minority groups are the most seriously affected. While there would appear to be a significant problem with an undertrained and undereducated population, the lack of available employment opportunities also affects those with high school diplomas and some college training.
As the prominent Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, has recently observed in his book, When Work Disappears, the lure of welfare is not what keeps people poor, but the fact that decent jobs have ceased to be available. Such a “disappearance of work” is what has happened in New Britain over the last three and a half decades.
New Britain is at the center of a modern and highly developed transportation system. Like the rest of America, its dependence upon the automobile for personal transportation is virtually total. Not only is the automobile socially and economically necessary, it is has become an essential part of the culture, making any diminution of its centrality problematic. It has been only recently that people have become somewhat conscious of the social costs that such a dependence on auto transportation entails: the high costs of road construction and maintenance, enormous parking problems, traffic jams, polluted air and its attendant health costs, not to mention the vulnerability that comes with the need for imported petroleum products. Several New Britain officials have pointed to the fact that an extensive system of rails still exists, though extremely underutilized, that could make possible a revitalization of local existing rail lines and double tracks for local commuting purposes.