Left In Lowell

Lowell Miracle Needs Jobs

5 Responses to “Lowell Miracle Needs Jobs”

1. joe Says:
   September 24th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

   There are plenty of jobs in Eastern Massachusetts, and good-paying ones, too. Poverty in Lowell is not the consequence of an absence of jobs.

   What’s more, unlike the physical development and redevelopment of a city, economic growth is not something that is terribly responsive to government planning. We can steer jobs and investment to where they can do more good in terms of promoting the physical redevelopment of areas, but even here, if you look at the areas that have bounced back so impressively over the past decade or two - Cupples Square, Upper Merrimack Street, Middlesex Street - it has been led by the private initiative of government-averse Cambodian businessmen.

   We don’t need to try to manage the economy. The best things we could do to help the poor people in Lowell move up the economic ladder would probably be to keep investing in the public schools and expand public transit to make it easier for neighborhood residents to get to major employment center.

   A North Station-South Station link in Boston would do more to provide low-income Lowellians with access to jobs than all the blue-ribbon commissions and government make-work projects in America.

2. waittilnextyr Says:
   September 24th, 2007 at 4:08 pm

   I think the need for jobs goes beyond the opportunity to travel outside the area for income. If all our jobs required such travel, then we would be wasting too much time and energy commuting, and the city would be dead during the day.

   It would be wise to have jobs that created wealth right in the city, and also in the neighboring towns. The wealth created by those jobs would then make other local businesses, that depended on income from within the city, also prosper. Manufacturing was the engine of econmic growth for these very reasons. But beyond manufacturing, there are other disciplines that can produce the same effect, science/engineering, software development, financial/insurance industries and others. And not only would they create wealth within the district, they could significantly expand the tax base over time, even allowing for TIF incentives to get them started.

3. Lynne Says:
   September 24th, 2007 at 4:25 pm

   I think people underestimate the financial sector, honestly. Some of that is even being outsourced, and free trade is killing us in that our workforce in no way can keep up with the quickness a new industry leaves this shore, but a steady influx of financial sector jobs can really help balance things, I think. Even if we could lure 1/100th of the Boston-based financial sector to Lowell because our real estate is cheaper, that would be a real boost.

   And waittil is right - it’s about the secondary economy. First, those who work close to home, shop near home (ask me - I live and work here, and spend all my money here…my husband works in Boston, he spends a lot of dough in Boston). Book and clothing stores and other local retail, restaurants, bars, etc, all do much better when the community they serve doesn’t commute so far. So all those secondary jobs, and small businesses, could really thrive if we had those tech/sci/financial jobs here.

   And though there’s less that a local government can do to attract businesses specifically…as opposed to state/fed level…local government can make decisions that help local economic development along. No one in their right mind thinks that the downtown plan from the 90s had no effect on the local economy. Sure, there’ve been some major setbacks like a bad economy, too much offshoring, etc, but Lowell benefited from those choices. We just dropped the ball since then (hopefully, not anymore.)

4. Shawn Says:
   September 25th, 2007 at 12:05 pm

   Boston’s financial market had been heading to New Hampshire for years. Nashua and Manchester have absorbed a lot of the financial management work.

   Finance and software are too difficult to lock down. Because they are not dependent on local resources they can come and go too easily. All their work flows over the internet now.

   Science/Engineering seems to be working (at least for development) as they work with the universities.. but when they move to manufacturing, they usually relocate to lower tax/cost states in the long run.

   The difficulty is the lack of key resources that tie an industry to an area as the rivers did for textile, the forests did for furniture, toys and paper.

   Vermont has stone and quarries, Maine is timber and coast land (both for tourism/vacation and for the military ports).

   A white collar based society is dangerous.. its too fleeting and hard to harness.

   I heard Pangiotakos this morning talking about the fact that they believe that one reason for bringing in casinos is the number of construction jobs they would create (many construction workers are out of work since the end of the big dig).

   This kind of thinking is too short term, however. As once the things are built, the work ends again. Do we prop up an industry with make-work jobs (ie. the big dig)

   Toursism.. like casino complexes.. can create some new jobs. I just fear the influx of organized crime and other problems that tend to come with this industry.

   The film industry could work.. if we let up on the regulation and union requirements that made them flee the last time they came here. Our historic cities and locations are prime for this industry.

5. Shawn Says:
   September 25th, 2007 at 12:07 pm

   sorry.. sort of stream of consciousness.. its a tough problem

Leave a Reply