When New Haven economic development folks started talking about beefing up the city’s “entertainment district,” I was excited or aroused or something.
I envisioned a real effort by the community to encourage an industry cluster of whorehouses and pole-dancing clubs and strip joints and other “entertainment” that would hire hundreds of local residents, whether or not they had a degree in English literature from Yale. It would create the kind of stimulus that President Obama has been praying for. At least, it would stimulate me.
You might think that entertainment districts just spring up like the dandelions of spring, inspired by entrepreneurial instinct and easy access to liquor licenses and lots of young, upper-middle-class carousers and assorted conventioneers with expense accounts.
No, no, this is Connecticut, where fun is largely frowned upon and the creation of anything, including an entertainment district, requires three or eight or 10 bureaucracies and forms filled out in triplicate.
The entertainment district in New Haven is a piece of real estate designated by the state, which, of course, conducted an exhaustive search for just the right spot to spur, well, you know, entertainment.
In about 860 hours of negotiations between not-very-entertaining bureaucrats from the state and city, it was determined that this particular entertainment district would be used to entice “new media” businesses to locate there. Get it? Eventually, the geeks, subsidized and coddled sufficiently to move to New Haven, would create digital content for all manner of fun computer stuff, which is, of course, very, very entertaining.
Come to New Haven and convince the bureaucrats that you’re a geeky, entertaining kind of entrepreneur and you can get tax breaks and the adoration of economic development drones.
You can’t be a sheet-metal shop. You can’t be a tool-and-die kind of guy. You can’t be an ice cream parlor. You can’t run a strip club, as the Gods of Entertainment actually intended.
No, you must fit the 8.000-page state and local requirements necessary to be entertaining, in a digital kind of a way, because if you’re digital in an entertaining kind of way, New Haven and, to some extent, Connecticut, will be perceived to be very, very cool. And, somewhat entertaining.
New Haven, which has a long, glorious history as one of the nation’s premier urban planning tinkerers, is also poised and ready to coddle and subsidize artsy-craftsy types who promise to take over abandoned storefronts in just the right places — and be very, very artsy-craftsy. No cigar stores. No Subway franchises. No, the really, really smart, insightful urban planners have decided that only very cool people will be allowed to take over stores that no one seems to want.
The best that can be said for this kind of micro-tinkering is that “everyone is doing it” — or, at least, many are doing it. The nation is littered with “industrial parks” that have no industry; sports stadiums that have no fans, and “mixed-use” conglomerations filled with condos in which no one wants to live.
The kind of spontaneous, profit-seeking, market-driven activity that actually works in the real world is being stifled by the urban planning/economic development conspiracy that thinks only it knows best.
There is research-based hyperbole from some in the academic world, suggesting that most “cool” cities and cool neighborhoods and even cool buildings are products of spontaneous accident and creativity on the part of crafty entrepreneurs. The advice: lower taxes, get out of their way — and no special favors for those arbitrarily predetermined to be winners.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
