Harry Siegel

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.

The new construction, much of it built over and replacing old, small-scale office parks, is mostly campus-like, self-contained. Workers arrive, park, work, eat and leave. Some even shop and go to the gym on site. The new construction may be bigger but its less to house more workers than to offer more space for wealthier ones. Some of the new buildings also include retail, which will erode the city’s strolling-sized downtown, and because the new work mostly conforms to existing zoning law, the city can do little to plan or alter these projects.

(Speaking of campuses, town-gown relations are predictably minimal; Brandeis has a separate life and when students leave, they head to Boston. When town kids occasionally find their way to the campus, they’re asked to leave, and they’re not generally welcome at off-campus parties, either.)

One result of the new construction will likely be to continue the city’s population drain, even as the state (barely) continues to add population. And those leaving are mostly under 30, which will mean quickening population loss in the years to come—a trend seen in once industrial, now vestigial cities across the nation, and especially in the Rust Belt, the North East and New England.

What one telling report calls superstar cities continue to draw in the best and the brightest, but as that group stays stable in size even as it grows in income and influence, these cities do increasingly little for the regions they anchor.

In a recent blog post, USC Professor Peter Gordon points out that “Living in the ‘superstar’ places has become a luxury good. The less affluent put up with long commutes or try their luck elsewhere. As cities push up the regional cost of housing, though, especially in the Northeast, that elsewhere tends to be fast-growing cities outside of this rubric, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, that have the open land and the lax regulatory climate to add housing and dampen price increases."

Meanwhile, Boston—the world’s 11th largest regional economy, according to Pricewaterhousecoopers—thrives even as Massachusetts declines.

Harry Siegel is the managing editor of Cities on a Hill.