We'll be off tomorrow for Passover, so here's a new featured essay to take in between now and then. Comments as always welcome.

Two recent reports on the greater Boston economy, one from The Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research and one from MassInc and Brookings, point to a disturbing trend—so-called superstar cities are having less and less effect on regional economies. The trickledown, that is, is drying up.

As an undergrad, I attended Brandeis, located in Waltham, Mass., a city of just under 60,000 sometimes called the Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, where Francis Cabot Lowell built America’s first cotton-to-cloth textile mill. Waltham was also the home of the once-world famous Waltham Watch Co., which manufactured the first fully mass-produced (also the first fully-American made) watches. The company moved to Switzerland in 1957, and the factory ceased producing timepieces altogether after more than a century and a half of continuous operation in 1994, when ownership moved operations to the cheaper climes of Ozark, Alabama. The city continues to identify with what’s gone—businesses include The Watch City Brewing Co., Watch City Cigar, and at least a dozen other Watch City businesses.

Waltham doesn’t quite fit the model of Boston’s reduced impact on its orbit. It’s a mere eight miles west of Beantown, just off of the I-95/Rt. 128 artery that’s become an office space destination for information- and knowledge-based businesses looking for low rents in close proximity to Boston. That, along with Brandeis and a downtown restaurant row that’s become something of a destination, has kept the tax rolls from suffering too much with the loss of Waltham’s defining industry.

Just blocks from the downtown dining, though, are unused factories and abandoned properties, a secession of shady and aimless characters peopling the 24-hour stores. In short, a state of dilapidation that few take as opportunity, even as new construction by the highway to house the companies escaping Boston’s still-supercharged real estate market swells Waltham’s tax rolls.

Continued here.