Arthur W. Wright

English

Research Papers in Economics

4 The Connecticut Economy Spring 2001
By Arthur W. Wright
It is the best of times—in Providence.  It is the
worst of times—in Hartford.  Neither city is the
London or Paris of Dickens’ novel, but the mayors of
these two small cities continue to joust for southern
New England bragging rights.  At the moment,
Providence holds the honors.  Could copying
Providence help Hartford snap out of its blue funk?
More, what can the City of Hartford, the State of
Connecticut, or private groups do to restore
Hartford to Mark Twain’s “chief…of all the beautiful
towns it has been my fortune to see”?
Providence waxeth.  It sports a spiffy new river-
side park, a new hotel-shopping complex,
Narragansett Bay, Brown U. and the Rhode Island
School of Design, its own primetime TV namesake
replete with golden sunsets, and a recently made-
over small, growing airport, T.F. Green.  And who
can forget the colorful mayor, Buddy Cianci,
straight out of a George V. Higgins novel, joking on
the Don Imus radio show about his recent Federal
indictment for running the city as a criminal enter-
prise?
Hartford waneth.  True, it has its own gem, the
Wadsworth Atheneum, and the nifty new Learning
Corridor, inspired by (outgoing) President Dobelle
at Trinity College.  But Riverfront Recapture, a
haunted Civic Center, and “Judging Amy” (set in
family court—no golden sunsets there) don’t quite
stack up against the Bay, Providence Place, and
“Providence”.  UConn’s main campus and Health
Center are each miles away.  The venerable Aetna
and Travelers companies have decamped to new
headquarters, and Hartford’s rickety government
has endured a cascade of tawdry scandals and a
looming fiscal crisis.  To top it off, residents recent-
ly voted down a proposed charter reform that
arguably would have made it easier to change the
status quo. 
Then there is attitude.  Hartford’s official home
page on the Web is backward-looking: the center-
piece is a snow-covered Charter Oak, and there’s a
link to the Connecticut Colony Charter of 1622,
plus the above quote from Mark Twain.
Providence, in contrast, highlights its motto,
“America’s Renaissance City”, and features a link
for “Moving to Providence”.  As yet the mayor’s
home page makes no mention of his 97-page
Federal indictment.  
Small wonder that Connecticut’s capital city
prefers looking to the past instead of the present.
Its population fell by a phenomenal 13%—nearly
one-eighth—between 1990 and 2000, from nearly
140,000 people to about 122,000.  Hartford was at
the bottom of the not very illustrious list of
Connecticut’s largest cities, all of which lost popu-
lation over the decade.  In contrast, the city of
Providence grew by 8%, from 161,000 to 174,000. 
Interestingly, the two cities’ metropolitan areas
are not all that different.  They have almost identi-
cal populations—1.2 million—and the Hartford
metro’s 10-year growth rate of 2.2% ranked it
236th out of the 280 largest US metros, not very far
behind Providence’s rank of 217th.
So there must be something about Hartford the
city…
Excuses, Excuses
In its defense, Hartford could cite such factors as
its greater remove from Boston, the heavier hit it
took in the recession of the early 1990s, and its
weak-mayor form of government.  How much dif-
ference did those factors make? 
Being closer to Boston can’t hurt.  Over 1990-
2000, Boston’s metro population grew by 6.7% in
its broadest, four-state definition, and by 5.5% in
the narrower two-state (MA and NH) version.
Much of T.F. Green Airport’s growth traces to the
ground and air congestion at Logan.  Living in
Boston’s shadow?  More like basking in Boston’s
glow.
The Providence metro area took a staggering
blow during the recession of 1989-1991, losing
8.7% of its non-farm employment.  But it recov-
ered quickly beginning in 1992 and went on to win
the round with a double-digit gain of 13.3% for
1991-2000.  Hartford, in contrast, lost “only” 6.9%
of its non-farm employment, 1989-1991, but then
went down for a mandatory eight-count.  Non-
farm employment finally bottomed out in 1995 a
full 10.5% below the 1989 level.  By 2000 it had
recovered half its losses, but non-farm jobs were
still 5.3% below 1989.  Its Rhode Island rival was
back in the black by 2.3% over 1989.  
Providence has the traditional strong-mayor/
ward-heeler council form of government.  In
Hartford’s “good government”, which dates to the
late 1940s, the mayor is a figurehead; council
members are elected at large.  The appointed City
Manager has day-to-day operating power but little
real clout.   Thus, everyone is responsible—but
that means there are no bums to throw out.  The
main political discipline is administered through
editorials in the Hartford Courant.  The abdicating
“Mayor Mike” Peters has truly made the best of a
bad job for four terms.
Is Mayor Cianci responsible for Providence’s
renaissance?  He has been mayor for 21 of the last
27 years (with 6 years off for bad behavior), and
he was personally involved in many of the renewal
projects.  But would they (or something like them)
4
Tales Of Two Cities:
What the Dickens is Wrong 
with Hartford?
And Would Acts of 
Providence Fix It?5 The Connecticut Economy Spring 2001
have occurred anyway, and he merely had the
good sense not to get in the way?
Hope Springs Eternal…
How to revitalize Hartford?  There is no lack of
suggestions, large and small in scope and ambi-
tion.  No one has yet suggested dragging the city
closer to Boston, or making Buddy Cianci City
Manager.  Periodically, the Sunday Courant runs a
progress report on the myriad projects around the
city.  The graphic on this page lists the biggest pro-
jects and their status.
Will they work?  Skeptics like Bruce Katz, of the
Brookings Institution, fret that costly projects are
not the magic bullets they’re touted to be, because
they don’t address the fundamental structural
problems facing a “distressed central city” like
Hartford.  In the Courant on April 8, 2001, Katz
argued that creating opportunity, not simply spend-
ing money, is what will make “city assets … part
of self-sustaining, self-organizing markets.”
Without reforming municipal taxes, local govern-
ments, and state policies that encourage suburban
sprawl, it’s impossible to overcome the poor
schools, scarce jobs, and dangerous neighborhoods
that deter people from living in Hartford and busi-
nesses from locating there.
The themes of sprawl, taxes, and governance are
familiar in debates about what ails Hartford.
Traditional New England home rule, which spawns
multiple city governments within a single metro
area, has deep roots, and it has not obviously held
back economic growth in and around Boston.
Nonetheless, that the city of Hartford housed only
10.3% of total population in its metro in
2000—down from 12.1% in 1990—doesn’t add to
its clout in the General Assembly, where mandates
for more regional cooperation must originate.  (The
comparable figure for Providence is 14.6% in 2000,
up a half percentage point over 1990.)  Not all the
news is bad on the regional front: Riverfront
Recapture had to secure the co-operation of several
other river towns abutting the state’s capital city.
Hartford has long socked it to industrial and
commercial property owners on real estate taxes,
to keep effective residential rates down.  After all,
homeowners vote and businesses don’t.  But the
ploy is shortsighted.  Over the long term, it attracts
residents looking for low real estate taxes but
repels new businesses and drives out existing ones.
The resulting fiscal penury weakens street mainte-
nance, schools, public safety, and other urban
amenities, in turn encouraging flight to surround-
ing towns by upwardly mobile residents.  State
policies that help build new suburban schools and
improve traffic arteries to shorten commuting times
only exacerbate trends that originate in City Hall.
How attractive is it to do business in Hartford?
One might hope that the urban dynamic just
sketched would eventually lead to lower business
costs that would offset if not overcome a city’s
decline.  Not so, at least not yet, according to
Economy.com’s ongoing study of relative business
costs by state and metropolitan area across the
U.S.  The latest figures, from the November 2000
issue of its Regional Financial Review, rank
Hartford the 8th highest-cost metro in the nation,
out of the 162 sampled, after New York, Boston,
and a set of smaller New Jersey metros.  San
Francisco is a paltry 14th.  In general, states and
metros with the highest incomes have the highest
business costs, as we might expect.  But Francis
Markey and Michael Burt, authors of the study,
stress that relative business costs are critical to
future growth, accounting for about a third of rela-
tive employment growth over the decade 1989-
1999.
The Economy.com cost index consists of unit
labor costs, adjusted for productivity (65%), elec-
tricity costs (15%), state and local tax burden
(10%), and office rents (10%)—all measured rela-
tive to the national average.  Hartford’s unenviable
position traces to unit labor costs (+12.2% over
the average), electric rates (+46.1%), and state
and local taxes (+9.5%).  Only in office rent is
Hartford cheaper than the rest of the country, by
11.2%.
Providence slouches in as merely the 68th high-
est-cost metro, with an overall index (99.3) just
under the national average (100.0).  Its big advan-
tage over Hartford is in unit labor costs, though
Markey and Burt note that the “advantage” may
well reflect sputtering job growth, slack labor mar-
kets, and hence slow wage growth in Rhode Island.
The important lesson here: It’s not enough sim-
ply to let Hartford run down until new businesses
will be attracted by the immense opportunity it
presents.  Bruce Katz hit the nail on the head.  The
powers that be have work to do: reducing business
costs, offering incentives (or punishments) to
induce cities and towns to work together
more—and, for the city of Hartford, scrapping its
weak-mayor governance so that the powers can be,
and can be held to account if they don’t deliver.
So progress is an uphill climb … what else is
new?  In Hartford, it will take political and moral
will, backed by courage, and not simply landing
more Federal grants.  If a few good politicos, even
a flamboyant one or two, will make the effort, who
knows, maybe Hartford will one day scare the
Dickens out of Providence.
Reinventing Hartford?

Tales of Two Cities: What the Dickens is Wrong with Hartford? And Would Acts of Providence Fix It?

http://cteconomy.uconn.edu/articles/AW_S2001.pdf

Tales of Two Cities: What the Dickens is Wrong with Hartford? And Would Acts of Providence Fix It?

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