A new Pawtucket?
Rendering of the Fortuitous Partners proposal for Pawtucket
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
t’s far too early to know the fate of a Fortuitous Partners proposal to create a $400 million project in downtown Pawtucket that would include a minor league soccer stadium, an “indoor sports event center,’’ apartments, a hotel, offices, shops and restaurants. What will the financing environment look like over the next few years? What if the nation goes into a recession soon? But from what we know now it does look like a better -- and of course much bigger -- project for the city and region than the Pawtucket Red Sox plan to build a new stadium – as sad as the team’s exit is.
The project would leverage people’s love of being along the water – in this case the Seekonk River (which I always think is the Blackstone in that part of Pawtucket) – and presumably heavily promote the project to people from very expensive Greater Boston who might want to live in Pawtucket, further encouraged to do so by the Pawtucket-Central Falls MBTA commuter rail station, scheduled to open in 2022. A big question is how successful the soccer stadium would be, however popular the greatest international sport has become around here, considering that the major league New England Revolution is based just up the road at Gillette Stadium, in Foxboro.
The public part of the financing totals $70 million to $90 million, most of it from a commonly used tax technique called “tax increment financing.’’ This lets developers use part of the tax revenue created by developments to help pay to build them. Also involved in what the developers call “Tidewater Landing’’ are often controversial federal “Opportunity Zone’’ tax breaks that are supposed to encourage economic development in low-income areas but, many note, greatly benefit rich developers. But then, most tax breaks favor the rich. (See below.)
In any case, I hope that this is not one of those projects whose fate is tied in knots in layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. America used to be known for doing big projects; now, big – and needed— projects often seem impossible because of the veto power of too many interest groups, public and private. And there is no such thing as a perfect project. For an overview of our big-project paralysis, using New York’s Penn Station as Exhibit A, please hit this link.
David Warsh: Take Trump's attempted extortion to the electorate
Pennsylvania Station in the 1910s. It was torn down in 1963.
There was a time when New York City had the gateway it deserved.
Demolished more than half a century ago, the former Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead & White was hardly the first great building in town to face the wrecking ball. The Lenox Library by Richard Morris Hunt and the old Waldorf-Astoria by Henry Hardenbergh on Fifth Avenue also came down. For generations, New Yorkers embraced the mantra of change, assuming that what replaced a beloved building would probably be as good or better.
The Frick mansion, by Carrère and Hastings, replaced the Lenox Library. The Empire State Building replaced the old Waldorf.
Then, a lot of bad Modern architecture, amid other signs of postwar decline, flipped the optimistic narrative.
From “Penn Station Was an Exhalted Gateway. Here’s How It Became a Reviled Rat’s Maze,’’ by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times. April 29, 2019
You hear a lot these days about narrative. I don’t know anyone better on the topic, at least in the world of economics that I follow, than Mary Morgan, of the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics.
Morgan is an expert because she is an accomplished practitioner. The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (Cambridge, 2012), is based on eight scrupulous case studies of how mathematical models gradually supplanted words in workaday technical economics. The philosophical examination established Morgan among the world’s leading historians of economic thought.
A related group research project on the nature of evidence produced an edited volume of essays, How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge, 2011). Since 2016, she has led a scholarly European Commission research project on “Narrative in Science.” Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012, she served four years as its vice president for publications.
From Morgan’s introduction to a special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, “Narrative knowing is most immediately relevant when the scientific phenomena involve complexity, variety, and contingency….”
From her essay in the same issue, “What narratives do above all else is create a productive order amongst materials with the purpose to answer why and how questions.” Their power is illustrated in novels, she writes; their question-answering and problem-solving capabilities are most evident in detective stories.
I’ve been reading Morgan in connection with an economics story. But I thought of her in connection with events these last two weeks in Washington, D.C.
I had no time to listen to the impeachment hearings last week. I gathered from the news reports I read that the testimony was damning.
Republicans seem to believe that the attempted extortion of the government of Ukraine was, as Wall Street Journal editorial columnist Daniel Henninger put it, nothing more than Donald Trump’s “umpteenth ‘norms’ violation.” The Ukraine caper wasn’t a constitutional crisis. But is clearly was a crime. The fake Ukraine election-interference story was even more shocking.
Therefore it seems right to bring the case. Still, it doesn’t seem sufficient reason to remove the president from office at a time when an election is at hand, especially since a significant minority of voters seem not to think the president did anything out of the ordinary. Impeachment forces Republicans candidates to clarify their views – and to go on clarifying them for years to come.
The thing to do is to take it to the electorate. The attempted extortion was an anecdote – a short, grimly entertaining account of something that Trump did, an illustration of a good tradition torn down. But it is only one anecdote of many.
Next year’s election is the key event. The order of American presidents is among the most fundamental narratives of the history of the United States. Let the House leaders draft the impeachment articles, the membership pass quickly them, and the Senate debate. Move on to the Democratic Party primaries.
The Moynihan-conceived plan to convert the Farley Postal Building across the street across the street from Penn Station (also designed by McKim, Mead & White, into a new train hall is going forward. But only Donald Trump’s defeat next year can begin to flip the pessimistic narrative of the nation.od
David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somervillle, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
America a very tough place to do big projects
Amtrak's Downeaster train, which connects Boston with the Maine Coast.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
Amtrak and commuter rail travelers face a summer of hell in and around New York’s Penn station as long overdue repairs are made to rail infrastructure there. There will be many delays. New Englanders traveling to New York might want to consider taking Metro North trains from Connecticut. Those terminate at Grand Central Station, not Penn Station. Hopefully within a decade the hellhole that is Penn Station will be replaced with something more gloriously fitting for the nation’s busiest train station.
In other train news, I was sorry to hear that plans for a new high-speed Amtrak route through southwestern Rhode Island and southeastern Connecticut have been held up or perhaps killed by local NIMBYs who assert that the proposed route would have some bad local environmental effects. In fact, the environmental effects would be minor. And by thwarting building along the most commonsensical route in the area, the foes would hurt the environment by ensuring that the train trip between Boston, New York and points south wouldn’t be as fast and competitive with driving as it should be.
Thiswould keep more cars on the roads, causing more pollution and perhaps necessitating more and/or wider roads. Highways, of course, are much wider than rail lines. This is yet another example of why America is the toughest place in the Developed World to build and repair infrastructure.
Still, there’s happy rail news. Amtrak’s Downeaster, which connects Boston and southern Maine, terminating in Brunswick, reported its second-highest number of passengers – 511,422, in fiscal 2017, which ended June 30. That’s up 9 percent from a year earlier and close to the record of 518,572 set in fiscal 2014.
People grow to love their trains – if they’re given the opportunity. Patricia Quinn, who runs the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority, was quite right to crow: “These results are pretty impressive. Achieving near-record ridership in a year of low fuel prices and construction-related service interruption indicates that the Downeaster has come of age in solidifying a durable and loyal customer base.’’
James P. Freeman: Will Boston follow New York's perilous progressivism?
“One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”
— Vincent J. Scully, Yale architectural historian
So was the thinking about the demolition in 1963 of a Beaux Arts masterpiece in New York City, the old Pennsylvania Station, an act of progressive vandalism, from which rose (or sank) the present site of the Madison Square Garden complex, a dingy maze of commerce and commotion. In the 1960s, progressivism – once a purely political movement – began to seep into civics and cultural mores, even private-sector architecture.
The city ultimately recovered from this destructive movement in the 1990s and 2000s. But with vicious irony, Bill de Blasio was elected in 2013 as New York City’s mayor (the first Democrat in 20 years) within days of the 50th anniversay of the old Penn Station’s demise.
De Blasio is today’s most outspoken urban progressive, with ambitions beyond his abilities. His friend, and fellow co-chair of Cities of Opportunity Task Force (COTF), Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, should resist this progressive lurch, and distance himself from de Blasio, as he eyes re-election next year.
De Blasio’s Progressive Agenda is intellectual graffiti, slowly defacing the very progress that New York City has enjoyed over the last 20 years; it is also agitating residents, given recent polling.
Boston too has experienced a remarkable 20-year rejuvenation, from which it should not retreat in an effort to emulate New York.
Walsh may not seem like a progressive pillar (more of a wanna-be) but that didn’t stop then-Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi, during 2013’s mayoral campaign, from describing his stance on issues as, “dear to progressive hearts.” As The Globe further noted a year later, de Blasio and Walsh “both campaigned on a message of economic populism, vowing to tackle income inequality and dramatically expand early education” – among the flash points of the progressive agenda.
With regard to “rising inequality” and “declining opportunity,” de Blasio said, upon the launch of the COTF that, “the task force is going to organize and focus the progressive ideas coming out of cities.” The defining mission of the COTF is to “make equity a central governing principle” and “advance a national common equity agenda.”
What progressive ideas in the last 50 years have benefitted the likes of, say, Detroit, Chicago and Baltimore, bastions of murder and mayhem? And since when is equity a “governing principle”?
Under Mayors Rudolph Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg, New York City repelled those progressive ideas, making the city safer and more prosperous. Boston was certainly not a progressive haven during these years. Indeed, the late Thomas Menino – Boston’s longest serving mayor – was more of a powerbroker and pragmatist, eschewing lofty ideas. Rather, he fully embraced being the “Urban Mechanic.”
Last year at the second meeting of the COTF, held in Boston, Walsh said, “inequality is a national crisis. It’s holding down wages, it’s holding back our economy, it’s undermining the American Dream.”
Not in Boston. Apparently Walsh does not see the paradox of progressive thinking as it applies to his city. Boston has one of the highest inequality levels in the country, yet The Hub is flourishing. It will be fun watching Walsh explain why Boston should adopt de Blasio’s progressive politics during next year’s mayoral race.
There are other areas where the two mayors are ideologically simpatico: climate change (both mayors attended a Vatican conference on slavery and climate change last year; Walsh says – seriously! – there is “social equity” when “talking about the environment”); free universal pre-K education (in a 2013 position paper Walsh indicated that there is“no greater equity issue” than ensuring all students “start kindergarten with foundational skills”); and affordable housing. Progressives demand equality of outcomes in all aspects of life — even if it is not earned or deserved or paid for.
Writing for The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson noted that the mayoral class of de Blasio and Walsh, among others, in 2013 is “one of the most progressive cohorts of elected officials in recent American history.” Collectively, they may be “charting a new course for American liberalism.”
Today 27 of the nation’s 30 largest cities have Democratic mayors. But, mercifully, 23 states are controlled by both Republican legislatures and governors. It remains to be seen if the new progressives will leave a positive legacy. Preferably, it will be a short-lived one.
Once again, there is talk of “transforming” Penn Station and returning it to its former state of grandeur. That is the delicious irony of New York’s progressivism: everything old is new again. Boston need not repeat the refrain or rattletrap.
James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and former columnist with The Cape Cod Times. This piece originated in The New Boston Post.
Webcast: Using 'white hat hackers' to thwart cybercriminals
From The Boston Global Forum (bostonglobalforum,org), see a Webcast on using "white hat hackers'' to to fight cybercrime.
http://bostonglobalforum.org/2016/03/white-hat-hacking-presentation-to-the-bgf/